The beading portion was a GREAT fine-motor activity for her little fingers. The pipe cleaner provides more stability than a piece of yarn making it a little easier for younger toddlers to thread on the beads. Yes that is marker all over her little fingers from coloring in the “My Little Journal”…. she’s got artist hands! Our concept number this month is eight so first we counted out 8 beads and then we counted as she threaded the beads onto the pipe cleaner. We talked about oysters and how they closed their mouths on a piece of sand and that is where pearls come from! She liked opening and closing her oysters mouth. After we were done with our crafts we went upstairs and played with some dress up clothes and L-Bug and I played with our pretend pearls necklaces!
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Here are some of our favorite crafts I was able to round up from this month! We've had a blast learning about places from all over the world. Learning about different cultures was fun and L-Bug enjoyed seeing all the pictures of our family's travel over the years. One thing that I've been doing instead of just tossing out her craft projects is I sort them into groups where they can be used for free play or in another project or lesson later! The passport scrapbook will go on the bookshelf the same as her Dino field journal did in January! The mask and suitcase will go in her dramatic play bin where we have head bands, fairy wings, dinosaur masks and anything dress up! The drum will go in our music bin where we can pull it out during music time and use as we sing our songs. Of course the puppet will join our theater friends and the dino puppet we made a while back! The loom will be one of those projects I put aside for later when I want L-Bug to practice a fine motor skill! I'll likely toss the lantern and the waterfall ring... you can't keep everything!
Overtime, yes the crafts will get damaged and tossed, but L-Bug loves finding the things she has created! She pulls them out and plays with them, constantly telling me "I did it, Mommy" or "Mine making". She loves showing off her creations to her daddy, friends and anyone who happens to skype or facetime while we are in the school room! I want her to be proud of the things she makes! I'm so excited to jump into the Ocean Commotion Theme next month and I can't wait to see what fun things come out of it! Over the last two weeks we've been learning about the wonders of the world! We've learned about beautiful places ALL over the world. Our family is full of people with wanderlust! We LOVE to travel, we are the crazy road trip people and we even have a family competition to see who can visit the most countries.... it's sort of an obsession. So I decided to take our passport from the Mother Goose Time materials and turn it into a scrap book! I included several places that our family has gone to, used pictures from our trips and as we went over our lesson plans we talked about our different family members that went to those places (or talked about the trips that we went on)! While learning about Victoria Falls L-Bug and I talked about places that were similar. I showed her pictures of her Grammy at Niagra Falls and pictures from our trip to Plivice National Park in Croatia. We did a fun waterfall craft with tissue paper and celophane and we had a BLAST playing at our water table making our own waterfalls. Everyday after we finished our lessons we would take our passport scrapbook over to our world map and L-Bug and I talk about where that place is at in the world! This was a fun day! We built our own towers out of blocks and L-Bug loved it, especially the part where we tried to twist the blocks a little sidewise to see how close we could get them to tilt before they would fall! I think the Great Wall of China was one of L-Bugs favorite days! We built block built block walls, we talked about Grampy's trip to China and L-Bug decided that today was another day to pack our suitcases... we talked about some of the things Grampy had in this picture and some other things that you may need. Then I pulled out our carryon suitcase and let L-Bug help me pack it up again!
Nothing puts a damper on school work more than a sick uncooperative toddler... well other than a sick mama who doesn't even feel like pushing to get some done! With both L-Bug and I fighting off a cold motivation to do school the last half of this week has been pretty low. Even when we have mustered up the energy to do some school I've forgotten the camera! Besides that we've managed to get a majority of the weeks lesson done towards the beginning of the week mainly because these ideas and activites are a little more advanced for a two year old. So to fill in our days I had combined a few days and activities. Of course the Little Goose Supplement does have some great ideas on how to change up the curriculum to fit the age, but since were sick I've decided that we are going to do the things Lily LOVES and that take the least amount of coercion. I printed off a bunch of the coloring sheets from the Mother Goose Time online resource library and brought them home for coloring this week. L-Bug's favorite activity has to be coloring! I hit the library every week and gather up some books that go with our month theme! Of course MGT provides a list of books for each day and it's REALLY helpful, when my library doesn't have a book on the list I improvise with something they do have. Here are L-Bug's favorite books from this week.
Other than reading and coloring today has been about napping, resting and a little dramatic play with baby dolls and some kitchen toys ;) We also watched one of L-Bug's favorite Easter movies Veggie Tales: Twas the Night Before Easter. We love Veggie Tales!
I'm so excited to be joining up with the other Mother Goose Time Bloggers to take part in a fun Blog Hop Book Giveaway sponsored by Mother Goose Time. Each of us were given the task to share some great books with our readers for a fun giveaway! All of these books are published by Experience Early Learning exclusively for Mother Goose Time and until recently they were only available with the purchase of the monthly curriculum.
The first book I've chosen for the raffle is one of L-Bug's favorites and the first book we got with our curriculum. Jurassic Jam is a paperback that starts off in a Jurassic jungle where dinosaurs are getting ready for a night of music and fun! It gets your kids up and moving as they sing dance and swing along with the different dinosaurs musicians and their instruments! We would pull out the music toy box and let her make some noise while I read the book, she'd try to imitate instrument I said.
This next book is a fun book about different animals and the different ways they move! A great way to get your little ones moving. Join these cuddly babies in Baby Animals Learn and Play! Watch the turtle crawl, hide with the fox and climb with the bears. See how many of these different movements your young toddler knows how to do on their own.
The last book for the giveaway is called Waiter! Waiter! A fun book filled with all kinds of learning experiences for toddlers. Teaching kids manners can be a feat for any parent, but the more fun it is the happier they'll be to do it!
Going out to dinner with family or friends? Bring the book along for your little one as a fun reminder about the manners they are learning and how to use them! Now that you've checked out the books don't forget to submit your entries! Thanks for reading and good luck ;)Be sure to HOP on on over to these other bloggers giveaways for some books to check out some other book options and to maximize your chances of winning.
The giveaway will be open from 23 March to 30 March. Prizes will be fulfilled by Mother Goose Time, NOT by this blog owner. You must be 18 years or older to participate and a resident of the USA or Canada. Void where prohibited by law.
**UPDATE! Now that the giveaway is over if you didn't win but you still would like to purchase these books to have at home follow these links to purchase them on Amazon.
L-Bug had so much fun with this craft project! She's never played with glitter before so she was so excited when we started sprinkling (then pouring and dumping) onto the glue. I let her go crazy with the glue and this is the first time she wasn't totally grossed out by touching the glue, so we're making some progress!
L-Bug and I had a BLAST so far this week making all kinds of fun things! First we made these cute carnival masks. Lily had so much fun playing with the feathers, throwing them up into the air, blowing on them and of course tickling with them. Then for the first time she used liquid glue, NOW THAT was interesting. The only thing she's ever used like this are those fruit pouches and I am always telling her DON'T squeeze and DON'T tip it upside down! So the look on her face when I told her to turn it over and squeeze was priceless <3 She did great dotting the glue and then adding the sequins. She really dislikes sticky, messy things on her fingers so every time she would put a sequin in the glue dot she would hold her finger out and say "Icky mommy!"....
Later we pulled out or Carnivale masks from Venice and put them on and danced around to "carnival mask" and some of the other songs from the Mother Goose Time CD It's a small world. Next we worked on shapes, sorting and matching. I truly am amazed at how well she's been catching on to these different activities! I used the mask pop out that came in the kit and I laminated it. Then I took a dry erase marker and outlined a few different shapes. Then I mixed up the shape cut-outs and had her match them into the outlines. She enjoyed it a lot! This is another one of those activities I need to package to take on trips with us. It would be easy and fun to take on the plane or to put on her lapboard for the car! We switched it up a few times with different shapes and once she was "done" I erased the outlines and left it out. Later she came back to it and just started putting the pieces on in different ways... sometimes they would turn out looking like a face and other times it well pretty much looked like a jumbled mess (LOL) but at least she tried!
This project was so simple but one of my favorites from this past week. We modified it a little bit from what the Little Goose supplement wanted. We were supposed to ask who the child loves and then write their name on it and give it to them. But I decided that I was going ask L-Bug "who do you love" and then write her answers all over the heart ;) Every time I pull out a Mother Goose Time activity to do with L-Bug I find myself so impressed with how well she understands the things I ask her to do! Of course there are the times where she squeezes the glue bottle a little too hard or starts pulling off all the little pieces we just glued down, or just decides to do the opposite of what I'm asking to test my patience but hey… she’s 2! L-Bug has never really done well with “circle time” I think because it’s just her and I she doesn’t really get as into as she does when we are at playgroup. I think if it were a regular thing at a day care she would have a blast because she’d have friends to feed off of, but it’s just her and mom. So all that to say I was very happy this week when she eagerly put the date on the calendar and grabbed one of the sight letters and let me sing her the ABC’s while she tapped the alphabet line! I was surprised at how excited she got about this activity! I reused our giant dino foot from January because I hadn’t tossed it yet. I took 9 different sized blocks and traced them in different squares. Then L-Bug took each piece and tried to find the outline for it. It was a little harder for her to grasp this concept because most of them were the same size or shape. She hasn’t quite grasped the big and small concept yet… we’re working on it! I think if I had done different shapes she would have gotten it a lot better. Still, she was able to get five without any help! For another three she put it in the wrong spot and I would say “nope try again” and she got it right the next time. For some reason one of them completely eluded her and I had to point it out. I still had her attention so I decided to try something else and pulled out 9 more pieces that were exactly the same as the ones already laid out. She knew exactly what to do and started stacking the items that matched. The only one she had a problem with was the long skinny ones. One is 3 spaces and the other is five… again she doesn’t grasp the big and small concept so she misplaced it I had to tell her to try again. I think this is one of the activities that I want to try again at the end of the month and see if she understands it any better <3 After we were done finding the pieces that went in each outline and stacking our new pieces, L-Bug and I talked about cities and maps (which was that day's theme)! I told her that the blocks that we set up were our buildings and then I poured out some toy cars and we drove through the city. She also has one of those rugs that is a city with roads and later in the week Lily was acting like she was driving her cars on it.... that's a first for her so I think somehow she correlated this game with that rug! She was so cute! She came up with so many people and things on her own just by me asking the question “who do you love” or “what do you love” or “who else”…. she just kept rolling out the answers! Only about 3 times on this WHOLE heart did I prompt her by saying “do you love ____” and then she’d say yes and I would say “ok, who else do you love”. Then she would find five or six more answers related to that person or thing! T finished product makes me so happy, just knowing she has so many people in her life that make her fell loved and that she thought of them all on her own. Once we were all done coloring I took L-Bug over to our Mother Goose Time map on the wall and I talked to her about where we lived and I pointed out Italy. Then I told her that a lot of the people she loved lived really far away. I showed her where the USA was. I was surprised that she stayed and let me keep talking so we talked about how we've been on lots of trips and I showed her different countries that we've been to on the map. Still surprised that I had kept her attention this long while we just sat and talked and looked at the map I told her about how she was born in Germany and we moved to Italy. Then I explained about how we were going to be moving again and going back to the states. I told her we would be closer to a lot of the people she loved, but that also meant that we were going to be moving away from some of the other people that we loved. "Go away mommy?" was her response. I nearly cried! I told her we will get to visit our friends all over the world and hopefully they will visit us too. Maybe she understands and maybe she doesn't but I enjoyed talking about all the fun things we've done and all the adventures that we have coming! Sorry about how difficult these next photos are, L-Bug decided she was gonna sit in my lap for story time and mama is all about cuddles :D Our book this month is “Wonder Around the World” I enjoyed it! But I think it was a little too old for L-Bug. There were tons of great facts about all kinds of places all over the world, but she wasn’t too into it. At least she stayed sitting in my lap as we read all the way through! Before we started reading I gave her this little world key chain that I found for her. She thought it was pretty cool! This last set of photos was one of L-Bug's favorites this week! She asked for the "hearts toy" two more times through the week. Basically I put a bunch of different sized foam heart cutouts that were red and pink into a bowl. In the first picture you can see it in the distance and I have no idea why my site won't let me rotate the picture... sorry. Then I set out a pink piece of construction paper and a red on. I told L-Bug "go to the bowl and pick one" she brought it to me and I asked her what shape it was, this one she has down and immediately said HEART! For the first five or so I told her the color as she brought it down and I told her to match it. Then I would say “your heart is pink, this is the pink paper. Let's put all the pink hearts here” and the same for the red. After a few I asked “L-Bug what color is that heart?” She wasn't guessing them correctly even half of the time. BUT she was putting them on the right color paper. I'd say “that's a red heart, can you say red” then she would repeat the color. At first she started out bringing one at a time then she started bringing two at a time and after about 15 trips back and forth I could tell she was done with making trips... Now don't get me wrong I LOVE my daughter BUT for such a tiny little thing she's got quite the attitude. Now I say she "tests my patience" often... here is just one example. After putting about 15 hearts down and getting everyone on the right paper you know she understands what she is doing. Well once she got bored she would come over and purposely put the heart on the wrong color page and look up at me and say “hmm nope”, grin big and then move it over. Oye, I mean what a turkey! So before she decided to be totally done I figured maybe if we took out the walking back and forth aspect she'll do better? I told her to bring the whole bowl down. We set it in between the two pages and I let her pull one heart out at a time and sort them. With the rest of them she only put one on the wrong color page and picked it right up and moved it over. She liked the sorting game so much that she's asked for the bowl again twice already!
With our coming move I've been thinking a lot about how I'm going to incorporate our Mother Goose Time curriculum into our travels. I mean we are going to be moving from Italy back to the US, visiting family, moving into a new home and then visiting family again for around 2 months before we will completely be settled down and getting into a new "normal"... Since we are home a majority of the week I really haven't had to worry about this. BUT I don't want L-Bug to go through a standstill during our move, I want to continue doing school with her even if it means a little extra work to do it on the go. This week I decided to incorporate our school day with a few activities while we were out and about. The day that I decided to take with us and do while we were running errands was all about money and different currency. L-Bug loves money... she's had a piggy bank for quite some time now and every once in a while we go to the thrift store with $0.50 from her piggy bank and she gets to pick out one book. I always give her the money and have her pay for it on her own. I've also let her pay for lunch and other things when I've got cash on me. She LOVES putting it in her purse and giving it to people when it's time to pay. So today I decided to make sure I was going to have enough cash for just about everything we would be doing. She REALLY had fun paying for stuff and kept insisting on keeping the change for her purse ;) Weekly we get to go to play group with all of L-Bugs tot friends and they have a ton of different stations set up for the kids to run around and meander through while playing! I know playgroup won't be something that will be happening often while we are traveling we will be visiting grandmas, and aunties, and on the plane and plenty of other places I can pull out some paper, crayons and change! Or other similar items for different studies and themes. L-Bug sat down at the coloring table and I decided this would be a good time to get her to draw some money! I grabbed some change and I traced a few pieces onto her paper. I had her look at the coins and I showed her how they had drawings on them. Then I asked her if she could draw pictures on the circles I made on her paper so we could make our own pretty money. She really liked this and even remembered exactly what we had done several hours later when we showed daddy her picture she told him “daddy mine monies!”. After running around other parts of the play room she went to the playdough table and I thought this would be another good time to do some more “money making”. I made some small balls and showed her the coins again. I said “look L-Bug lets make playdough money, can we make pictures on the playdouh with the tools?” she had fun with that! We tried stamping the playdough with the coins but nothing really showed.
We made a stop into the library where I found a few different books from the reading list and we sat and read about money. L-Bugs Favorite was one of the Cat and the Hat books: One Cent, Two Cent, Old Cent, New Cent. While we were getting ready for bed that evening I brought out L-Bugs purse with all of her coins from that day and we put them in her piggy bank.... I know that it'll take a lot more planning and preparation to make the curriculum easier to use while traveling, but this brightened my spirits and at least now I know it won't be impossible! Today we introduced our "friend" the Red Birdie! Then we played a little game: Our friend Red ONLY likes things that are the same color as her. So lets go around the room and find things that are the same color as our friend. Then we can put them in the suitcase to pack them for our trip. L-Bug had a BLAST! She insisted on carrying "Red" with her the whole time she was looking for things to pack, which actually helped because when she picked up an item I would ask her "does that match the same color as our friend Red?" If she said yes then we would say "woo hoo" let's pack it! If she told me nope then we'd put it back and look again. At least we would have a few toys to play with on our trip! L-Bug has loved these fun "themed posters" Mother Goose Time sends the poster along with these magnifying glasses with an image inside. You match the image on the magnifying glass to a part on the poster. I added my own little touch by using Velcro tabs on the poster and the other piece on the back of the magnifying glass. That way once L-Bug matches it up she can stick it to the poster! This one was a little more difficult because the images were very busy! She was more interested in pointing out everything else on the poster than matching the magnifying glasses. One thing I've learned over the last two months is if we do an activity that takes focus then it needs to be followed by an activity that is gross motor to help get that energy out (and sometimes it's even best to do a fast moving activity before too)! One of the new toys I got L-Bug for this lesson plan was a blow up earth ball. Oh she was EXCITED with this one. We threw, kicked and rolled the ball to each other and got our wiggles out. Our final project today was decorating our own suitcase, which L-Bug keeps calling a purse.... were working on that ;) It wasa fun, easy project and her first time using the glue stick properly! SUCCESS for mom. I guess she hadn't gotten enough coloring in because she really wanted to color again... This is a print out of a suitcase!
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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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December 2023
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