Posts
What a sun shiny day today!
Hope you all had a fantastic long weekend, filled with fun and relaxation.
Today we started our day with story time. We read a few books about nature, geography, and ABC's.
We also showed the children our new Story Tent, which has illustrations of Caillou on it. Caillou loves to read, so we've made this our story tent.
Children may go into the pop up tent in the living room with a book to look at or share with another child. They really like this idea! They've been choosing story books from our book shelf to bring in with them, and this is a great pre-literacy activity. Studies have shown that children who 'pretend' read actually learn reading patterns through turning the pages and scrolling their fingers across the words from left to right, even if they are making up their own summary of the story's plot. The other thing I like about this theme is this; I can see what books the children consistently pick as their favourites, and if their choices change. This helps me know what sort of books to purchase for our next scholastic book order, or for our trip to the library. Of course, we never have problems choosing books at the library - they have such a wonderful display of books that we often come home with 20 - 30 books to read! It's as many as we can carry, or fit into our two canvas library bags.
For our indoor activity this morning, we coloured ABC hearts to cut out (this will be for another activity that we will be playing tomorrow), as well as drawing pictures on our cut-out fish for our game; Fishing For Sounds. We put paper clips on the fish, then turn a chop stick into a fishing rod by tying rainbow string on it with a magnet on the bottom. This is a very easy game for anyone to make at home. We draw shapes, colours, numbers, or ABC items to match on the fish. For example, there may be a picture of a sun on one side, and when we put an 'S' on the other side. When we catch the sun, we guess what sound it starts with and then turn it over to see if we were right. This is a great way to learn or practice our ABC's! The children also like to draw random things on the fish to play fishing for fun without a theme, and that's great too, because it still reinforces fine motor movement for the colouring and cutting out, as well as taking turns for the fishing rods.
Outdoor time: today we saw lots of garbage truck action on the way to the park. A couple of times we got to see the recycling truck lift it's load to spill into the top. This is so fun for the kids, partly because the truck shakes back and forth so much... not something you get to see on other trucks. We met another child caregiver on the way to the park, and the children enjoyed walking there together. When there, we shared our snacks (popcorn and teddy grahams today- I know, a little on the sweet side?). What a beautiful day for the park! We got back just in time to have an unsolicited lawn aerator knock on our door. I said ok, thinking the kids would love to watch his machine through the back window... but they were more interested in playing in the reading tent!
During freeplay, he children selected the car garage, castle building, and play foam as their preferred activities.
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")
