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.

every new word

WORDS

Every day M. is saying a new word! It is amazing to hear her pronounce perfectly, sometimes trying to say or say in her own way a word that the previous day she didn't know. She is bla bla speaking with the usual words and suddenly there you have it a brand new word that just fits right in with her sentence and instead of a pointing or a sign there is a very clear well pronounced word!

Also we have already started the phase of "what is this mummy". It happened four days ago, at the tender age of 23 months and it didn't stop, I know it won't for a long time. For now I am very happy with her curiosity, answering to her questions in a polity, calm and motherly way. Of course she is asking me about things that have always been around her and she surely know their use (carpet, umbrella, cream); I think that she just want me to repeat the world for her, so she can learn it.

To improve on her already fab progress we used our flash cards and now she is willing to try and say more words whereas before she wouldn't even attempt to. I noticed that she takes a long time to learn a new world in my mother tongue, but she registers an English word so quickly she can repeat it back the second after it was pronounced! She knows so many English words that I never taught her, she just learnt them because she overheard me talking to someone or from the TV. She would probably speak first in English if i wouldn't put so much effort for her to learn our mother tongue.



EYE-HAND COORDINATION and MANUAL DEXTERITY

M. is having a big fun time with mega blocks recently. She used to build only tall towers made of the single unit blocks, or add to my constructions some single unit blocks here and there. Now her imagination has grown. She is building "aeroplanes" and "houses" and she wants to use all the blocks, adding them on and on until there aren't any left. The way she fits the blocks together as developed a lot in comparisons to few week ago.

Mega blocks are really good to play with in M.'s age because there isn't a real goal to achieve, just put them together and see what will come out, it is an enjoyable toy for all the family, it is probably the activity that will keep a small child interested the longest, and also it helps with eye-hand coordination and manual dexterity.

I love the mega blocks my self!

COLOURS

We done some colour in activities. Sitting with her I let her give me with crayon or felt-tip she wants me to use and then I label the colour (oh M. is giving mummy red), so that she will also learn the names of the colour. Then I ask her which part of the drawing she wants mummy to colour in, and I colour that part that colour until she gives me a new colour. It doesn't matter if a girl's hair will get colour in red rather than in brown or yellow: this is her drawing and she can choose to do it in any colour she likes. This will be more enjoyable for her instead of listening to mummy saying "no, girl's hair aren't red". I believe she likes to say to mummy what to do for a change!

I enjoy seeing how confident she is making choices of colours and what drawing she wants to do the colouring on.

MESSY PLAY

We played with water: I filled up with some water her bath tub and put her dolly, different size containers and her tea set to make a tea for the dolly. Of course she had lots of fun and after 15 minutes I had to stop the activity because she was totally wet!

We also had fun with finger paint where M. splat and splat her hands and then spread the paint all over the paper. It is quite messy but she didn't want to stop splatting.

ROLE PLAY

We usually play with her kitchen and plastic food, but this time I tried to introduce real food like pasta and rice and wasabi nuts (sure enough that she won't eat them). I didn't have anything else suitable but I guess dried lentils, chickpeas and fruit are good too.

I showed her how she should pretend to put water in the pot, add the pasta and then the salt... mix and then put the lid on the pot. When ready the pasta is put on the plates and served...mmmmmm.

She then copied every thing I did, adding the rice and other things to her dish too.

This activity is also good to experience different texture; for this point it may be nice also used cooked pasta for different textures.

caterpillar, caterpillar

THE WORLD AROUND US

M. has taken a deep interest in caterpillars. She already enjoyed reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Carle, and when one day last week I related it to her every day eating habits, that was when everything became real for her. I told her that if she ate too much chocolate she would become fat like the caterpillar and then she would have a big stomachache like it. She opened her eyes wide and she rubbed her belly to say "stomachache", she didn't ask for chocolate that day.

She started taking her caterpillar pull along toy with her every time we went out (in reality it is a snail, put taking the shell off, it may look like a caterpillar and I won't argue with M. on the fact that it is actually a snail if she is happy with it as a caterpillar)

When yesterday I told her we would go to the park to look for caterpillars she was all excited. We found one caterpillar and many worms, which we classified as caterpillars for the day. She explored her surroundings in search for caterpillars, she liked looking at them, how they looked like and moved, she didn't like to touch them, but eventually she held one in her hand for 2 seconds.

Back at home, I drew a caterpillar on an apple and I glued it on our seasons-tree; then we put on it some cotton wool as snow, so we created our winter season tree.

GARDENING

Our gardening experiment is also continuing. M. is in charge of watering our flowers when I remind her to do so. Very often we go and check on the progress, and we are really pleased to see that the giacints should be blooming soon. The tulips are still a bit sleepy but are growing too.

COLOURS

We are continuing our discovery of colours and their names.

I managed to get her focus for 2 other colours: orange and purple/bourdeux.

For this two colours I showed her how mixing 2 different colours together we can obtain a third colour. First I mixed red and yellow to obtain orange. Then I let her experiment the colour orange on a paper. After that I mixed red and blue to obtain pourple (the proportion of red was a bit too high so I rather obtain a colour closer to bourdeux, but this doesn't matter for the porpuse of our learning the colours). M. painted another paper with the pourple colour and after both papers dried I hung them on the wall next to the rest of the colour we learn to recognise.

A bit by bit I will show her most of the colours. Our journey is just at the beggining.

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