Big Energy-Little Learners...Can I do it all?

Baby is growing fast and learning new things everyday. I combined weeks 6-10 because each baby reaches each stage at different weeks. Therefore all of the tips can be used anytime through these weeks and continuing forward and still be beneficial to your baby. Here are some things you can do to help your learning baby get the most out of each experience. 10 Week Infant Holding things Grasping things is something baby learns to do almost out of the womb but actually reaching for and grabbing things may start happening around this time.  To help baby with this skill always have easy to grab toys near by. To help my daughter I will put a toy in her hand.  She will hold it for awhile then drop, but when it drops she will follow it with here eyes.  This makes her more likely to reach for the toy again.  Practice sitting up Just as I wrote in my last post I put my little lady in her saucer early to help develop those sitting muscles.  This is

Man has time flied.  I started this blog when my dragons were both home doing preschool with me.  Now both of them are in school the first half of the day.  I am excited about what this means for my future days but I miss them both now.  My house is still clean from this morning.  My house is so quiet that the tv cracking makes me jump.  Now that things are so different I am debating where to go from here. I want to still engage my children in learning but I also want them to play.  Both of my kids love when we do activities and games it also makes the after school chaos settle a bit.  I can forgo the planning and just let the kids play.  Have kid time.  Or I can plan things for us to do together or for them to do with their friends when they get home.  I am not sure what the future looks like right now. Decisions need to be made on my part.   Decision post to come later...

This entry goes along with our shape unit.   Art Journal I recently found out about art journals and thought it would be a wonderful experience with the kids for preschool.  There are so many possibilities with art journals and it is a nice way to express yourself with another person through art.  This activity can look many different ways for many different people.  Art is open, as is journaling. We will be adding 1 entry a week to our art journal.  The themes, topics, or prompts may be random or may go along with a theme we are learning about for the week. For this art journal we used Ruler Pencils Crayons Erasers Before we got started journaling we took some time to get to know our rulers.  Little Dragon had not used a ruler before so we went over the basics. He was excited to use this new tool.  I told him we were going to make a city. There are many shapes in a city. You can focus on one shape or make your city full of shapes.  He was ex

As much as I love science I am bad at remembering to do science projects. Lucky my dragons love science and are always asking questions, so when the opportunity presented itself Little Dragon asked if we could do a science experiment on evaporation. He had been learning about the water cycle in preschool which is what brought this on.  We were outside doing our shape science when he asked if we could do another experiment.   He had it all planned out.  He wanted to fill up a container with dirt add water and watch it evaporate.  For some reason Little Dragon thought you had to have dirt for water to evaporate.  I explained that water needs nothing but heat to evaporate and demonstrated this by showing him the cement drying in the heat of the sun from our earlier experiment.  He seemed to understand and gave me a few examples of water evaporating without dirt.  Such as:  after it rains rivers puddles Although he now understood dirt was not necessary for water to

We spent a week on shapes to make sure Little Dragon had them all down, a review for kindergarten so I knew what he needed to work on. To start the week I asked him to name some shapes and give me an example of an object that was that shape. For example our front door is a rectangle. This gave me a good idea of which shapes, if any needed some extra practice.  Little Dragon knew the names of all the shapes so this week was mostly a review which made the activities more fun I think. We played some shape games  Shape soup Shape shop Little Dragon worked on a shape book   He had to figure out the riddle and draw the correct shape.  I thought we would do one a day but he loved solving the riddles so much he finished in two days.  We also practiced reading with Bob Books, my favorite beginners books And Little Dragon worked in his red binder In the red binder we go over what day it is the number of the day (the date) before and after  clo

We did this activity during our Shape theme week This was a game I made up on the fly that Little Dragon really enjoyed.  I  have shape buttons and I wasn't sure what I was going to use them for aside from standard sorting.   We started there.  After all the shapes were sorted by shape I asked Little Dragon to name all of the shapes.  There were a couple of more complex shapes such as hexagons and octagons.  These needed a bit of practice.  To get the practice in I made up this game.   I told Little Dragon that he was a shop owner.  I asked what kind of shop he wanted to run.  He picked car shop.  I said all of the shapes were different car parts and I was going to come in as different customers to buy the parts I needed to fix my car.  He agreed, of course.  I would use a different voice for each costumer and ask for mix matched things like 3 octagons and 5 yellow triangles.  This incorporated color, numbers, and shapes.   Little Dragon got a kick out of the