Well, it is FINALLY happening! I am finished with my training and just about done with setting up our new day care / pre-school room. This has been such an exciting adventure so far! I have learned so much and I cannot wait to start taking on some wonderful little learners. I think one of the things I am so thankful for is all of the wonderful resources I get from Mother Goose Time with our monthly subscription! Not only do I still get to utilize the ease of the curriculum set up, but there are tons of great resources on the website to help facilitators set up there environment and useful tools advertise my set up, AND to provide parents with GREAT information about the program they'll be enrolling their child in. Here are a few of my favorites! Bulletin Board Ideas- I have NEVER had to set up my own bulletin board. So it was nice that Mother Goose Time has some attractive posters, information fliers and even an activity idea for the kids so that I can create a full and informative bulletin board. Cute mini posters like these bring some color and theme into my bulletin board. I'm the type of person that likes things to flow together. The monthly theme web is perfect to hang up because it helps to remind parents what were are learning about so that they can incorporate into their home lives by asking questions about the lessons and activities we've been working on and maybe planning a few of their own to do at home. The schedule is an awesome flyer to have hanging for parents to see what our daily plan is AND it will be very helpful to me in the beginning to get a rhythm going! And lastly there is a great Bulletin Board Idea to do with the kids and incorporate their work into the bulletin board that their parents see everyday at drop off and pick up! Accreditations- Another great tool that I found on the MGT website is a list of programs and state alignments! Have this information helps me to show parents that the curriculum I'll be using meets and in many cases exceeded the standards of many programs and states! I plan to add the CA, Head Start, NAEYC and Common Core Alignment information into the back of my parent info binder that I'll be sharing with parents during interviews and orientations. Portfolio's and Progress Tracking- While I do have the large Developmental Continuum Poster that came in our annual set up box, it was nice to find this simpler version on the website to show a quick and simple break down of the specific areas and skills we focus on. To go along with the skills we focus on I love the awesome tips that are provided on how to assess the children's learning AND the ideas for creating children portfolios to store their work as you go along tracking their progress throughout the year. This gives me as the teacher a great view of what is working for each child and for the parents to visually see their child's growth! Another great tool I stumbled upon are the Progress Monitoring Reports that I can put into each child's profile to help me keep the theme running smoothly throughout all of my documents and to make the tracking that much simpler! There were also great Daily Notes Pads that can be purchased to give parents an overall idea of what happened that day while their child was in care. All of those amazing things help me to create a Child Care Environment that promotes unity throughout my theme AND allows the parents to easily follow along with our monthly lesson themes and be a part of tracking their child's development. Member Resources/Downloadable Goodies- There are an extensive library of downloadable monthly resources that I can use to enhance different aspects of my lessons! I think my favorite is the Book List! This allows me to add stories from the library that correlate with our lessons and help to expand on different ideas! Marketing Toolkit- Finally the last thing I came across recently was this wonderful Marketing Toolkit that was recently put together! It is a handful of items to be utilized on social media and even in a home office where parents go to find information about the available child care/pre-school's to enroll their children in. It's awesome that they provide this because as I've said I like unity! I could have easily created my own little handout and picture, but these provide me with the theme too :) All of these extra nuggets have been here, but until I was ready to move from homeschool mommy to a child care facilitator I never went looking! I'm VERY excited that Mother Goose Time has thought to provide so many useful tools for me to enhance the program I will be offering :)
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Math is probably on of the easiest lessons to do when you are busy but trying to keep up on school activities! Kids love counting and manipulatives make the task easier and more fun. Here we are using our Mother Goose Time Math Cards. L-Bug cant read year so I read the problem to her. This set comes with four cards that get increasingly more difficult with addition and subtraction being added in. We always start with the easiest card and work our way up. Here is one of the easier examples of addition! L-Bug counted out the two elephants and the added in the four giraffes. The.ln she counted all of the animals together! L-Bug is usually up for a challenge so we do some of the more difficult ones too. For these I typically read and re-read the card for each step. If the card has actually numerals I have her find them on the card before we start counting. I've found since doing this her number recognition is really improving! Then we read the dorections line by line as we go (after I've already read the entire card once through). Finally we have each step done and I ask the question at the end. For this How many total animals L-Bug starts at the top and counts all the way to the end to find the total!
More and more L-Bug has grown to enjoy counting games especially since she can count to 12 go hide-n-go-seek! She feels like such a big girl when it's her turn to count!! L-Bug really enjoyed using our safari post cards to write draw a picture for her childcare provider for the week. I've been going through my training and classes for two weeks so getting time to do some school with L-Bug has been hard. But she has been diligent! Thankfully we had a simple project to use and L-Bug drew a picture and then told me some of the fun things she's been doing with her "teacher" during the days she goes to childcare! After I finished writing the letter part L-Bug signed her name at the bottom, by tracing her dots ;) She also got to draw a picture to send on a postcard to our friends from Germany. She is hoping to get a letter back! I think she wants a pen pal. I love that these come in our monthly Mother Goose Time curriculum box because being a military family our friends and family are spread out literally all over the world! L-Bug get's to think about the people she loves and send them something.
My last week of training is finally here! I'm hoping to get my inspections finished up so I can open my in-home preschool sometime in March :) Luckily for me L-Bug still has some school projects I can do easily with her in the short amount of time I have after classes and before dinner/ night routine. Thank you Mother Goose Time for making life easy for me in the busy moments! One of her favorites from this week was an art and science combo project about beetles. Here you can see L-Bug checking out this beetle poster with several kids of beetles on it. We observed the poster and she described the things she saw on the beetles! We talked about their antennas, legs, wings, colors, eyes, pinchers, etc. We picked out our favorite battles and tried to color ones like them. L-Bug's favorite beetle was the colorful one in the middle! Her observations were that it had colorful stripes, so she tried to recreate it and she did a great job. Later we took the beetles to daddy for him to put in his locker at work and L-Bug told him what she learned about beetles. She told him that beetles smell with their antennas and they use their wings to fly! It's incredible what children can learn from an easy 30 minute lesson!
My Little Journal! For the past few months we have been using our Mother Goose Time Little Journals to practice and review letter, number, shape and color concepts! L-Bug loves working in her journal because it's for "big girls". She works hard and is always excited to show her work to mommy! The little journal cover page is one of her favorite parts of course! For this cover I asked her to draw a safari habitat for her animals to live in. Before we started she looked at the safari poster we have for the month and she talked about some of the things she saw in the habitat: trees, bushes, dead grass, a pond (watering hole) all the animals and a safari car! Then she got to work drawing her own! She told me about the trees she was drawing, a pond for the animals to drink from, and her imagination just went on and on! Even though it just looks like scribbles to me, to her its a masterpiece safari :) Each month the Little Journal focuses on our concepts for the month: a set of letters, numbers, a color and a shape. I call these our brain building blocks :) We learn to identify and write three new letters each month. L-Bug is still very new at writing so a majority of the time I use a highlighter to write the letters and have her trace them. Since we started working with our Little Journal L-Bug has gotten so much better at tracing! Each month we learn about and review one new shape and one new color as well! For L-Bug a majority of the shapes and colors we come to are a review for her because she already knows them. But she doesn't know how to draw the shapes so that is our next step of practice! I drew two ovals with pencil and had L-Bug trace them, then I asked her to draw one of her own (the blue outline was her attempt). One thing we have been practicing while doing little journal and work book activities is being patient and following multi-step directions. For example I told L-Bug to choose two color crayons. Then I told her to trace all of the ovals with pink and to color them in with the blue. This page was pretty funny.... So I told L-Bug to think about some things that are yellow and draw them. I went over to my workbox station to finish writing a note about the project we just finished before this and L-Bug started coloring and talking: "bananas are yellow and tasty too", "Mr Sun is yellow, I think... he's to sunny to look at though", "I like leaves that are yellow and red", "I have yellow blocks, a yellow shirt, yellow undies......" The list kept going on and on. I finished my little note (which only took me about three minutes to write) and this was what I turned around too! I guess each things she was naming she was drawing too! HAHAHA And of course we review our number concepts for the month! As you can see the first page was a casualty of the yellow coloring day :) I asked L-Bug if she knew what that number was and she didn't so I had her count and color the ovals at the bottom of the page to find out what number it was! Then she traced my highlighter number and letters and did the smaller ones.
Since we started using Mother Goose Time just about a year ago I wanted to kind of take stock and see what kind of stuff we had accumulated over the past year! I was AMAZED at how much our manipulative collection has grown and these are used daily by my daughter! This picture only shows a handful of the different types of pieces we have and there are a few items that I consider more like sensory materials that I didn't photograph! I started thinking about all the different ways we use our manipulatives. We use them for counting and math of course, but we also use them in language & writing lessons sometimes! We've used them in science, pattern making, fine motor skills, free play... the list goes on and on. These little pieces are so useful because it gives the young mind something to focus and, well, manipulate while you are going through a lesson. In this photo our safari counters are set up to represent the wild animals in the African Safari as we discussed a social environment about where and how the people of the African Safari live. Manipulatives are perfect for imaginative play! L-Bug loves using her transportation and animal manipulatives to create her own games and stories.
Sometimes the manipulatives even come in handy as story props!
I have been working to get my home set up as a part-day preschool. A few more classes and inspections and we will be ready to go! While I've been doing that I have also been looking into different studies and research & taking college classes to get my degree in Early Childhood Development. One thing that is reassuring: the curriculum I'll be providing for my students is setting them up for strong foundations in the various skills they'll need to be ready for school and life! Now, let's be honest... the fact that the lessons are preplanned and all of the materials are provided makes it an ideal resource for a busy wife, mom, student and childcare provider! But I enjoy knowing that Mother Goose Time has created quality curriculum and lessons for me to use! Counting, recognizing the written number, creating patterns, sorting, comparing, measuring, etc are all ways preschoolers practice math skills. So let's take a look at a few quick examples from January that focus on how Mother Goose Time creates lessons focused on math and reasoning as the primary skill being taught AND includes some fun for the young preschool minds :) Counting! There is always something fun to count :) At just under 30 months my daughter was able to count to ten. We are up to 12 now and the teens seem to trip her up because if we are counting over twenty she gets the 21-29, 31-39, etc easily enough because it's basically 1-9! But it's because of fun games like this that she is even interested in counting. I mean if I have her sit at the table and ask her to count to ten she usually gets bored by 4 and starts goofing off. But if I put an activity in front of her she's ready to go! In this project she not only had to count the spots on the lady bugs or the giraffes but she had to find the matching number card. For a few she knew the written number and was able to line the card up that way, but others she had to count along the "number line" to find where it would go. Measuring! Bigger or smaller, shorter or taller.... these are math ideas! This activity started as a simple science project about birds and other animals that come from eggs. But while I was reading through the lesson plan in my Teacher's Guide I decided we were going to add in a little math game too. I gathered a few different items of various sizes for L-Bug to measure. Which book is bigger? Is the crayon longer or shorter than the marker? Which links have more? Which block is smaller? All of these are math reasoning questions where a child has to visually measure an item and determine the difference in size compared to the other item! Simple, but you'd be surprised at how fun it is. Creating Patterns! This is an activity that happens almost daily in our lessons. Every morning we do calendar time and Mother Goose Time has incorporated a pattern on our calendar with the date cards. L-Bug loves this and usually points at a few days on the calendar repeating the pattern she sees! Other actives like this are a great way for patterns to be observed and created! I love all of the manipulatives we get each month! They are perfect for math time.. generally we use them for counting or sorting but I really enjoyed this activity with pattern cards where L-Bug got to use a tangible object instead of paper to create a pattern. There were four different pattern cards so she was able to go from ABAB to AABB to ABC and ABCD pattern! Speaking of Manipulatives.... this is just a quick glimpse at a few of the wonderful pieces we have collected over the past year of lessons with Mother Goose Time! These are perfect for counting, sorting, pattern making, shape recognition, and even imaginative play. Sorting! Sorting objects by different characteristics is another great math skill. In this game L-Bug sorted the elephants by the less obvious characteristic... their facial expressions then by their color! And one last example of our Math lessons from January.... The written number! It's important for children to be able to recognize the numeral 9 as well as write it. Now L-Bug is quite some way off from writing it on her own, but she does have her tracing skills down (that's more for a post about Language and Writing though)! These little Journals are very helpful in teaching L-Bug how to do workbook or work sheet pages much like ones she will do in school. And it is helping her to build her writing foundations. On the math side this particular page helps her to count the number, learn to recognize the numeral 9 and the written word nine. And these are just a few of our monthly lessons that focus on math!
I have to give a big thank you and shout out to Mother Goose Time! Before we started using this curriculum I used to let L-Bug "help" in the kitchen on very rare occasions! And when I say help it was: let her stand on a step ladder with a spoon and occasionally let her pour some pre-measured ingredients into the bowl. But L-Bug LOVES being in the kitchen. She loves baking cookies with her Daddy, Grammy and Auntie and she loves when we have a snack lesson because she gets to help cook it! I've also learned that if we are going to be trying something new L-Bug is more apt to trying it without such a big protest if she has gotten to help cook it! I've started teacher her how to read a recipe card and the Mother Goose Time instruction cards make it easy for her to follow along. First we wash up and then we gather all of our ingredients. And instead of her just standing at the counter while I get everything I have her help me get the things she can reach! This has actually made other meal times easier too because she knows where her plates, bowls and cups are. And it gives her a little more independence to help! I have her point to the different steps as we go. "So we just washed our hands, right? What's the next step?" Sometimes she can tell me by looking at the picture and other times she isn't quite sure what's next. When things are difficult (like cutting a tortilla with a butter knife) I let her have a good try or two and then I help her out! She's always very proud of whatever she has made in the end! Letting your kids help in the kitchen may be a little scary to you at first. But start with simple things like making a fun and easy snack!
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Proud supporter of Mother Goose Time curriculum!All the posts in this blog are from real life experiences. We've taken the activities and materials provided in the Mother Goose Time curriculum and modified it in different ways to fit our lifestyle. Enjoy the read!
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