A BIT OF PLANNING

VALUES

Yesterday we finished off M. photo album. I printed some more pictures of other friends and family members to complete the album...still someone missing but we will sort this out next time we fly back home!


As last time she added some stickers and she tried to remember episodes to connect to each person...funny what she remembers!

SCIENCE

Today, during my 30 minutes workout on the stepper (!), I was thinking about a project I could do with M. about animals. Yesterday evening we caught the last part of "Life" on BBC FOUR. She was enjoying it very much and she stayed focus till the end. She was particularly impressed by the scene where an ostrich is put down by three cheetahs, she was especially curious about the ostrich. This morning she brought me her animals book where she had found a picture of an ostrich. She didn't really care about that animal before, but now she was quite keen on showing it to me and tell me all about what happened on TV.

I took the laptop and started searching for some videos on ostrich and I found a couple which she enjoyed watching.

So I thought that it would be nice to make her colour in a print out for each animal she is curious about, and also find something else to colour in about the animal, for example a huge egg for the ostrich and a butterfly for the caterpillar. I searched a bit on the Internet and I found this very helpful site http://www.first-school.ws/ where there are lots of educational resources for toddlers, and many colour in sheets of basically anything.
Tomorrow will be the first day of our animal project, which will be dictated by M.'s interests of the moment. I will anyway start from her previous curiosities which her bees,caterpillars, dinosaurs and now ostriches and chitahas.

Something that she definitely fancies is playing with her tea set and water. She is drink so much of her "tea" that I have to change her nappy so much often and sometimes I have to change her trousers and top too....
To give it an additional educational edge, today I introduced a real tea bag to her water, and then we observed how the water changes colour. This made me think that it would be a good idea to show her how water changes colour when we add some food colouring to it, I may even try to put a sugar cube in the water and show her how this also take up the colour.


COLOURS

I have also thought that I must re-enforce her colours knowledge a bit more. For now all the colours are named "blue"!

This afternoon I set out an activity in which she should have painted some pasta of the colours we have experimented before, so that, once dry, she could play with her pots and pans and her colourful pasta, this will help her see the colours during her playtime and hopefully learn the names. In reality she didn't find the business of paint the pasta something that she fancied. She just painted 2 or 3 shapes and left the table. I then finished the job to ensure the good outcome of my experiment. Will keep updating on the progress.

5 SENSES

I also elaborated something that it was in my mind for a long time but that I didn't have the time to think it through. I would like to make a kind of "5 senses laboratory", something I remember from my montessori nursery days. For the time being I will work on the sense of touch and smell. I thought to find something smooth, rough, spiny and soft and try to encase it or frame it. Then I need herbs and spices to work with for the sense of smell; probably put them in separated boxes and make holes in their lids. All of this will then be put in a big storage container that she can access whenever she likes.

I will to start the laboratory next week.

MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS

M. likes to look at photos on the laptop or on my mobile. I thought it would be nice to have a photo album all for herself that she can look at whenever she wants without depending on me.

Also in continuation with teaching fundamental values, I selected some pictures to print for her photo album that capture M. with her family and friends, so to stress the importance of family relations and friendship.

During this week I also want to print some pictures of when she was a baby and make a chronology of her growth so that she can see herself through time. This will help her understand that she is changing and that she used to be a baby too.

ART AND CRAFT

I could have bought an album and put our photos in it, but I preferred create our own so that we could personalize it and M. could help making it too.

TO MAKE THE ALBUM YOU NEED:

As many colour paper sheets as the number of photos you want to put in the album

ruler

pencil

a cutter

cutting board

glue (Pritt)

puncher

a string

stickers, glitter, anything to personalize the album

Fold your paper sheet in half.

Measure your picture and draw its shape with a pencil and a ruler on one half of the paper. Then measure 0.5 cm from each side of the photo shape and draw another smaller shape. Put the sheet on a cutting board and cut this smaller shape out with a cutter.

On the other half of the sheet glue your photo making sure that it fits nicely on the shape you have cut out. Glue the rest of the sheet around your photo and carefully fold the cut out sheet on top.

Then I let M. chose which sticker she wanted to put on each photo and I let her stick it whenever she liked it apart from on the faces.

Then I used a puncher to make two holes where I passed through a string.

later I hang the album where she can easily reach.

M. likes the album very much and she is always looking at it, commenting on what she and other people are doing in the photos. It is especially nice for her to always be able to see family members that she can't see very often.

Later in the evening she wanted to do some sticking with the paper that I cut out to make the album. So I let her glue and stick pieces of paper freely on a sheet and she enjoyed this activity very much.

Feeding the ducks=sense of responsability

At last a sunny day!
We were looking forward to going outside this morning, the sun puts me immediately in a good mood!
It has been a good week since last time we went to visit our friends ducks and squirrels. We try to go regularly especially now that not many people are going out to the park and feed them.
For two weeks the pond has been frozen, and all the ducks were squashed in a small area where the water didn't freeze. They were really starving and the food we brought didn't last long. Even the squirrels came rushing, coming really close to us as if they wanted to snatch the bag with the bread. One of them, thinking that M. had something in her hand, scratched her, but actually M. just wanted to touch it. The scratch was tiny but M. got really scared! In fact this morning she said before leaving the house: "no, no food to squirrel".
M. took her baby, buggy and a pull along toy to the park. She pushed the buggy with the baby and pulled the toy for a little while, stopping hundreds times to make sure that the pull along toy was following.
The pond was still partially frozen and all the ducks were still stuck in the same place.
We got out our bag of goodies and they all came rushing. M. enjoyed throwing the bread crumbs and looking at how the ducks were eating; she also fed the pigeons but when a squirrel came close, she stepped back and left mummy feed him.
We also looked at the leaves on the footpath, which she immediately linked to the trees around us.
Later we went to the play area where she had lots of fun climbing up and down the slide ladder. A bit of swing, a bit of seesaw and off we went back home.

This morning has been about her relation with nature: feeding the ducks teaches her respect and sense of responsibility for the environment and how she plays an important part in taking care of the animals that live in close proximity to us.

one step in the right direction

Today was a really grey and rainy day...it is the third day in a row that me and M are not going outside for some fresh air. It is also saturday and both of us felt like relaxing.

In the morning M. had lots of fun bathing her plastic dolly, while mummy was giving her a bath.
The we watched some Cbeebies and I explained the cartoons in my mother tongue
I use my mother tongue when I speak to her, I am really keen on her learning our mother language, but of course she is picking up lots of English words too from TV and children centres sections. We also jumped and danced to the Cbeebies songs which she enjoys very much.


After lunch we read some of the books in M's home library. She knows all of them by heart and sometimes she even "reads" them by herself. I started reading to her since she was two months
old, I don't know if it because of this early start or because I also enjoy reading so I injected this passion in her, but M. loves books more than TV: she can keep focus on the cartoons for 5 minutes, but she can read with me for 30-40 minutes and more.


M. had 3 hours nap (really unsual mind you), and I had time to exercise on my new mini stepper machine and cook dinner.

In the afternoon we did some activities.


WORDS


We looked at the flash cards. With this activity I show her a picture and I say out loud the word, slowly and divided into phonic sounds (su-n, ho-me) and she will try to repeat the world.
Aworld must be repeated lots and lots of times
before a child can say it, so this activity must be done a number of times before you can see (or better, hear) the results.

What I use are the "Usborne look and say First Words" which are 30 chunky, actractive flash cards. Under and at the back of each picture there is the written world, so that you can use them also when the child is learning to write and read.

Everytime M. try to say the world I give her lots of praises, clap hands, smile, so that she is encouraged to learn the sound of the world.



After this we learnt the names of the colours RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE.







To do this I made her paint a white paper for each of the colours and kept on repeating the sound red, when she was paint the paper in red, yellow and so on. When they are dry these can also be used as flash cards for the child to say the name of the colour.



After this we had a bit of free drawing with all the colours.



NUMBERS:


M. sorted out a wooden peg puzzle that has numbers on it from 1 to 10. She took off all the pieces and I asked her to find the number 1 showing her how it looks like in the puzzle, when she found the piece and put it in the right place, I asked her to find the number 2 and so on.



SCIENCE:


This was not meant as an activity but M. started it by chance and I explained her what was happening.




M. wanted a mandarin to peel, she loves peeling this fruit. I draw a face on it as I always do to make it more fun.


when she finished she started squeezing the juice and making a mess everywhere. I was almost about to tell her off when I stopped and thought that this was a very good idea actually.



I explained to her that the mandarin was made of water, that's why this liquid was coming out, and that it was juice, like the one she loves drinking (and that she actually only sees coming out from a box). She was really excited and she asked for another mandarin to squeeze.





There you go, as I said every experience is learning for little kids: we, as parents, can't waste an apportunity like this one just because it makes a bit of mess and makes our home a little dirty.



















ART and CRAFT and FAMILY VALUE


We played with playdough. I made a small family made out of playdough: a little girl, mummy, daddy and a cat. While I was doing this she was trying to make shapes and tearing the dough to pieces (this help manual dexterity). each time Imade a piece for the body of our figurines I tell
her the name of the body-part (head, leg, arm, hair, tail etc).

We put all the figurines next to each other and we put their hands together: they all love each other like it should be in a family.




















































For dinner we all had chicken cous cous. I posted the recepit.
Good night