I went through a phase a few years ago where I read everything Maria Montessori ever wrote and tried to incorporate as much exploratory learning and play in our everyday activities. One of the things that I didn’t do enough of was color games. Mostly, I couldn’t think of what kinds of containers I could use that would be easy for little hands to hold, easy to measure and unbreakable. Well, now that my mind is locked on these stupid plastic bottles, I can’t stop thinking of ideas of how to use them.
Every night after dinner, I try really hard to take an hour away from whatever work I have on the go (and there is always work to be done) and do some sort of non-TV, hands-on activity with Panorama. Tonight, we did two games. Primary color mixing and color grading.
For the first one, I added a blob of red, yellow and blue tempera paint to three bottles, then filled with water. I gave her a spoon and she mixed them together. Here is a youtube video of the process.
I was pleasantly surprised by how fun she thought this game was (she played for about another 30 minutes after this video making colors such as "avocado"). Also note how much LESS whiney-four-year-old she becomes as she starts seeing that I am NOT trying to torture her, and how it is OK to make a mess. She hates mess in general.
For the second game, I made a concentrated batch of purple and a concentrated batch of white. Then I had her mix 1 oz, 3oz, and 5oz of purple with enough white to fill to 6 oz. Then, she lined them up by which one was darker. She liked this game a lot, too.
I can see this becoming extremely popular. We’ll take it outside next time on the little tikes picnic table and try some more variations on the theme- such as making 10 different concentrations instead of 3, etc.
We did American Sign Language with Panorama when she was a baby. Her first sign, “more”, appeared at about 10 months old.
By thirteen months old, she was actively using 26 signs (eat, banana, milk, up, bath and similar), and occasionally used about 17 more (animal nouns like cat, butterfly, bear, pig). Within a few more months, she could identify all of the colors using sign language, outdoor things like grass, tree, river, and bridge, and family members. (I have some video on my other hard drive that I will have to find and post to show you what you might expect. At the time I thought it was very cool, but looking back now, I find it amazing that she could say so much.)
We actively taught her signs until she was about two. Her spoken words came along with the signs, and I believe that the enhanced two way communication through sign language increased her interest in speaking. If you’d like to learn more, check out this pdf with a summary of the latest research.
We tried that book, and it seemed OK for the first few days. The book is laid out so that it tells the parent EXACTLY what to say, and leads the child through some sound exercises. For whatever reason, Panorama just didn’t like it, and a few minutes into the lessons she would start squirming around and every sound was “starfish” instead of “eeeeeeeeeeeee” or “aaaaaaah”. Starfish, eh? Lovely.
But she still wanted to read, and so I dug out some Bob Books that we had piled up in a corner. Bob Books are simple little stories using small words. Each story is about 10 pages long with one simple sentence on each page, such as “The cat had a rag hat.” As you work through the books in order, you build skills. The first books focus on the sounds like: at, ag, as then you move up to uff, ug, etc.
What we’ve been doing is reading the book together, then I write out the words in the book that we “don’t know” and we talk about the sounds. After finishing the book, I’d have her brainstorm words that rhyme with the key sound from the book. Then we read it again- this time, she is the “lead”. Over the course of two or three days, she’s be able to finish the book by herself.
My father began a tradition recently- he sends the kids postcards. This may not seem like a big deal, but it has turned into something pretty neat. Panorama loves getting mail, and she loves hearing from family members that she doesn’t see very often.
Sometimes the postcards are from vacations or exotic locations, but even the seemingly mundane “Greetings from Scranton” type cards that are bought from gas stations for a quarter are extremely popular. He tends to buy three or four cards at a time, then instead of running around and finding a stamp, he’ll just send one or so a week once he gets home.
When one of these notes arrives in the mail, it gives us a chance to sit down on the couch before dinner and talk. We read the message, look at the picture and pull out the map, or open up Google Earth. As they get older, I’d like the kids to have a wall map that we can mark with dots or pins for places we’ve been, and cards we’ve received. (The subject of kids and geography is one I am going to spend more time on later, especially after reading this yesterday.)
Now, I need to laminate them with contact paper (so that both sides are visible) and bind them together into a simple book. I’d really like it if we could continue to flip through them and learn new things, as well as keeping a bit of a memory book of notes from people we love. How many examples of your grandparent’s handwriting do you have?
Other relatives have begun sending postcards, too. In addition to postcards that they buy, they’ve made some with their own photographs using online tools from the post office.
My daughter will be four next month and she is chomping at the bit to read. She is constantly arranging the magnetic alphabet letters on the fridge into nonsense words and asking me “What does this spell?” “Um, scterhhitmsmiff?”
She knows all of her letters, their sounds, and some really simple words like “cat”, “mom”, and “gymboree parisian poodle rainslicker.”
We have gotten into a routine of watching Super WHY! and Word World on PBS and doing the curriculum activities. She also enjoys Leap Frog DVDs and games, and we read all the time together. I was considering investing in one of the Hooked on Phonics programs, but before dropping $50+ dollars, I decided to hit the Mom Forums over at www.babycenter.com and see if anyone had any suggestions or success stories.
This Hemp Diaper does it all and when we designed it we had your baby’s comfort in mind. That is, for example, why we developed a special new hemp/cotton/polyester blend giving you a one of a kind hemp diaper. This fabric is very very soft and ‘comfortable’, super-stretchy and best of all it does not stiffen over time!
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