1 to 1 correspondence when counting

If you happen to be working on counting and your child is into stickers, then here's a cool activity to practice one to one correspondence.


Materials: number chart and stickers (any type of math counter could replace the stickers)

Use a number chart. (Download here.) Draw the corresponding number of dots to the number that is in each box.If you can, laminate (or use packing tape, which is what I did for the board in the photo.) Have child count while placing stickers on dot. It forces child to slow down as he or she counts. It also prevents them from double counting (pointing to the same dot twice) or missing a dot while counting as omissions will be obvious by lack of sticker. The photo only shows to six, but you could do this for whatever numbers you are working on.You can see the stickers on the number 4 box. My LO isn't really into this yet, even though she loves stickers. I just don't think she is ready for counting yet. But I have a feeling this will come in handy later.

Extension (for numbers 1-6): Roll a die. Match your die to the same number on the chart.

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Tot Food

This past week, Bear ate quiche (with broccoli, spinach, and green beans) and whole wheat toast.
Whole wheat pancakes (with sweet potato), carrots, black beans, chicken pieces, and broccoli.
Chicken pieces, broccoli, split pea soup (with carrot) and cantaloupe.

She has also been eating a lot of avocado with her lunches. She has been more willing to try new things, or to take at least a couple bites of food she doesn't particularly care for.

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Homemade scoops and funnels

I was making the balloon squeeze game from Chasing Cheerios the other day and was in desperate need of a funnel to get the beans, rice, flour, lentils, and oatmeal into the balloons. I had to improvise. Here's what I did.

I took a plastic container like the one in the photo and cut it in half with a kitchen knife. Then I put masking tape along the edge so we wouldn't cut ourselves on it, even though it didn't feel sharp. Not only did this work as a funnel, my LO uses it as a scoop in her rice pit/bowl. If I put the lid back on the scoop, the rice stays in the scoop. Without the lid, it works as a funnel.

This morning, I made her another funnel out of an empty water bottle.

They also work as megaphones.

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Crafts vs Art

Up to now, I haven't done crafts with Bear, though she has painted and drawn almost every day since she turned 12 months. Even now, I am hesitant to do them with her. She much prefers to rub glue stick all over her hands then to put it on the paper. Nevertheless, I decided to do a cotton ball lamb with her as she loves the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a Little Lamb." She loves that little cotton ball lamb so much that I decided to do two more crafts with her this week. A circle-and-oval rabbit (we're working on shapes), and an egg - an oval covered with washed and dried eggshells. I must say that she needs lots of "help" still with sticking the items onto the paper. I suppose as with all things, the more crafts one does with them, the more quickly they start to get it.

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A First Science Experiment - Color Mixing

Although Bear has done color mixing with her paints, I thought this would be a fun way to show her again what happens when blue mixes with red and when blue mixes with yellow. I also wanted to see if she was ready to work with an eye dropper. We were pretty much done with the whole thing when I realized I hadn't taken a picture! Also, I'm sure I got this idea from one of the blogs I read, but I can't remember which one at the moment.

Bear enjoyed doing this, though we need a lot of practice with the dropper - she squeezes it and won't let go to let the liquid draw up.

So we wouldn't waste the colored water in the discs, I had Bear use the dropper to transfer the purple and green to a piece of paper. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a picture.

I saved the rest of the colored water in baby food jars for the next time I might need it.

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Tot School

This week Bear has done quite a few activities. Since Bear is 19 months, we aren't too pressed to teach her the alphabet or numbers. her father and I think it is more important to play and focus on other skills. So Bear and I do a lot of sensory and practical life skills activities, and we also play with her toys. However, I do talk to her about letters and sounds and how the sounds work together to form words. I also talk to her about numbers and I count for her whenever the chance permits.

It has been so nice out that we do some of our activities outside. Here Bear is building with Duplo. This is great for hand eye coordination and fine motor control.This is a matching game from Childcareland. I am working hard to have Bear recognize colors and shapes. She is getting there. Some days, she is just not interested. We did this activity today and she did half and then left it. That's fine. I can see she's getting the concept. Today I made it more challenging by giving her both boards at the same time (one board has one shape in the middle of the bird and one board has two shapes) and she got it. I wasn't sure that she would.
Here is one of her favorite practical life activity - pouring. We also poured lentils and water this week. Bear pours her own milk and water now with a creamer of mine. I pour the milk into it from the carton and she pours it into her cereal or cup.
She decided to stick her feet in the rice and then sat in the bowl. She really enjoyed it. We also did this with lentils. She likes the rice better. These are important sensory experiences.
Of course we read a lot.
Thanks to Chasing Cheerios, Bear did this transfer activity. I just introduced her to tongs this week. She also transferred cotton balls into this egg carton. She likes the egg transfer so much better and has gone back to it often. We tried the egg matching sounds game from there too, but Bear wasn't too interested in matching the eggs, just in shaking them and hearing the sound. I guess that's fine too. Chasing Cheerios also has a squeeze and match game using balloons that I would like to try to make for Bear.
Here we are "counting." She places the marble (the flat kinds that go into flower arrangements) on the number mat and the number is magnified - this holds her interest - while I count the numbers for her. We only do up to 6.
Threading beads and doing lacing cards are a very popular activity right now.
And we play with her felt board dolls quite a bit as well.
Bear also did lots of puzzles, pushed her foam alphabet letters into the slot of an empty wipes container (while I chat to her about each letter she is holding), and helped a lot with the baking. We also did a few crafts (Bear's firsts) and art, but I will post those separately later as Bear just woke up from her nap.

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Felt Board

I made Bear a felt board a while back before a trip we took. I figured she could play with it on the airplane. I wish I had thought to make one the way Katie at Katie's Nesting Place did, one that rolls up for travel, as my board is a bit big.

I took two pieces of card, left a space between them (to allow for closing), taped them together, then encased them in a turquoise felt. The board folds in two and can be attached closed by a button and a ribbon loop. I then used some ribbon to make her a handle.

I found a paper doll template here and used that for the two dolls, although I could have drawn my own easily. The clothes I made up myself, drawing a paper pattern first on scraps and then cutting it out of the felt.

Bear loves the dolls. At first, I hadn't glued the hair on. But she uses them as actual dolls and carries them around and the hair kept falling off so in the end, I glued the hair on and made her a second doll. They represent her and her friend and she calls them by those respective names. Also, because she wanted to carry them around and not just play with them on the felt board, I decided to glue the doll figures onto stiff cardboard from a box.

I also have cut out shapes in pairs and we do a shape match activity. She doesn't like to do that as much.

Next I am going to cut out shapes so she can "build" things with them on the board, like here at Thrifty Craft Mama.

See ABC and 123
for even more felt board ideas.

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Bear's Play Space

I love seeing how others arrange their kids' playrooms and bedrooms, so I thought I'd share Bear's play space. Our house is getting built right now and we are renting a tiny house in which our furniture hardly fits. I'm forever rearranging in Bear's play spaces to try to make things work better. This is how it turned out today.

I have a lot of plastic file boxes that we use for storage of books (I was a third grade teacher and have TONS of books). I used these to create a reading bench for Bear. The lids hold our weight without a problem. We had the black seat cushion from a bench that was under a window in our previous house. Bear likes to play with the Boppy pillow.
Her two bookshelves house most of my books, though when she's into novels, they'll all become hers. She has the lowest two shelves for picture books and board books. The next shelves up hold a few toys on the left and her play kitchen on the right. That Fisher Price stove top was mine - I got it for my 4th birthday.
Along the wall under the window are more toys - the blocks and Duplo were on the floor, but I decided to raise them off the floor by using a plastic box. You can see the color collages from the previous post on the wall. Also her Cornflakes box baby bed, hehe.
I put away a lot of Bear's toys because the room was overcrowded and we couldn't find any room to play. She wasn't really into them anyway (electronic toys just don't grab her interest, but they seem to be the toys people like to buy for her). Now the room has lots of floor space for playing.

While she was napping today, I set up a drawing station behind our computer in the main room. She was really excited to use it after she woke up.


Does anyone else have play space ideas to share? (I'd do a Mr. Linky, but I haven't figured out how yet...)

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Color Collages

Lesson: Color Collages

Learning Objective: To reinforce the names of different colors and the ability to recognize colors.

Materials:

Construction paper of different colors

Scissors

Old magazines or photographs

glue

Procedure:

It is best to focus on one color at a time, perhaps one per week or one per day.

1. Choose the color you will work on. That is the color construction paper you will need.

2. Go through the magazines with your child to find pictures of that color.

3. You or your child (depending on skill level) cut the pictures out of the magazine.

4. Glue the pictures on the construction paper.

5. Write the name of the color on the collage and display.

Extension:
1. Once you have multiple color collages, a physical activity you can do is to hang the collages on the walls around a room in your house, call out a color and have your LO run, skip, walk, twirl, crawl, etc. to the color you called out.

2. Present your LO with paint samples (of a single color - the Mickey Mouse ones from Home Depot would work well, but you can just cut regular ones apart) and ask your LO to sort them, using the color collages as sorting mats. Depending on the level of your LO, you may choose to use only a couple colors at a time. You could actually sort any objects of color onto these "mats."

3. You can use these collages to play "I Spy." (My daughter loves this extension.)

Note: I made these collages for Bear when she was only 10 months old and was not at the point to be able to help me much. I have used them more to do the extension activities and also just to have up on her playroom wall. She likes to point out pictures on the collages.

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Goals for Bear

Reading a couple of blogs, 1+1+1=1 for one, and a few others, I realized that maybe I too should have goals for my LO.

SO here they are, my goals for Bear at 19 months:

1. colors
2. shapes
3. body parts

She knows most of her colors already in English. I have been working hard with her on those (in fun ways). We started working on shapes a couple of weeks ago. She can recognize the circle and the square and sometimes the triangle.

There are some fun shape songs here. Bear especially likes the one to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell. I even made up my own verses for the diamond and oval. She loves the circle song because of the words "round and round," which she says while making her arms roll around each other.

The other day I was asking her to show me different body parts and she knew most of them, but I'd like to reinforce that and also add a few more harder-to-remember body parts such as ankles and wrists.

The challenge with Bear is that we speak three languages with her: English, Spanish, and French. I speak to her in English and French and my husband in Spanish. She understands directions in all three. As I have two languages to teach her, I find it hard to know what is best for her. I have decided for now to focus on speaking English to her as I am keen for her to start talking and feel that if I focus on English, she won't get as confused. As she begins to gain confidence with saying more words, I will switch to speaking more French. That's not to say I don't speak French to her anymore, just less often. We listen mostly to French music in the car and we have a few French books we read (but not many). I was surprised the other day, though, at how many body parts she could point to when I said them in French and my husband in Spanish. Tots truly are sponges just soaking up everything. If anyone has suggestions or is in a similar multilingual household, I'd love to hear from you.

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Tot Tool

This is a tot tool that allows tots to make the association between upper case and lower case.

I first saw these name matching puzzles here at 1+1+1=1. As soon as I saw these I knew I wanted to make one with my daughter's name. I knew if I didn't make it right away, I would lose the idea in my plethora of bookmarks. Since my daughter was napping, I got to work. I didn't have water bottle lids, so I used baby food jar lids instead.

I never use all upper case letters when I write my daughter's name for her, so I made the lids using lower case with only her first initial as an upper case. At 19 months, I didn't even know if she'd be able to do this activity; it just seemed simple enough to make quickly.

What I discovered was that she wasn't familiar enough with certain lower case letters to be able to match them very well. Some of these look very similar. So I realized I should have written them all in upper case, as she recognizes all the upper case letters in her name (she calls all the letters she knows by a word that starts with that letter - D = dada, M= mama, I = mium (her word for icecream),...). I turned the lids upside down and wrote the upper case inside the lids. I also turned the cardstock to the other side and rewrote her name in upper case. Then we put this tool away because she had lost interest.

However, this morning, my husband was playing with her with it and we both noticed that Bear would look at the upper case side, then turn the lid over to the lower case side, then flip it again, match it to the correct upper case and then turn the lid back over to the lower case side on top of the upper case circle. In short, Bear was discovering that there are two representations for the same letter.

Consequently, I wanted to share my version of this great tool.


Materials:

1 piece of cardstock long enough for the word or name you are practicing
jar or bottle lids/caps - enough to spell the word or name
scrap paper the color of your choice
white glue
marker

Directions:

1. Trace the jar lids onto the cardstock. Write the word/name in upper case letters into your circles.

2. Repeat on the other side of the cardstock, but using lower case letters (except if using a name, then keep the first letter upper case).

3. Trace the jar lids on your scrap paper.

4. Write the lower case letters on these circles.
5. Glue the circles on the top of the lids.

6. On the inside of the lids, write the upper case letters - however, make sure that you can flip the lid by turning your wrist and that the upper and lower case letter are both right side up; make sure they are lined up.

Now you are ready for your LO to match the jar lid letters to the letters on the cardstock.

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What's on YOUR tot's plate?

Here are two examples of Bear's lunches. Her nap is tending to fall right at midday so sometimes for lunch she has a snack at 11 and another at 2 and skips lunch altogether. Snacks include fruit smoothies, plain yogurt with fruit, cheese and crackers. On the days she misses "lunch" I pack her plate with vegetables at dinner. Bear isn't keen on veggies right now. She even went on a broccoli strike for a few months (broccoli had been her favorite in the past). I think she doesn't like a lot of textures. I puree her veggies a lot and use them as sauce for noodles - she can't get enough noodles and willingly gobbles up a mix of vegetables this way.

Avocado (she can eat a whole half and still want more!), homemade pancakes (whole wheat flour and pureed veggies and sweet potato are in that pancake), rice with the liquid from black beans (she won't eat the actual beans anymore - texture issue), cantaloupe, and water.

Mango, broccoli, steamed sweet potato fries (she only ate a bit of these), corn, rice with beets (she picked the beets out).

I recently found a great blog Weelicious full of toddler friendly recipes. I have tried her Chicken on a stick (though I didn't bother with the sticks) and her Split Pea Soup (used chicken stock instead of a ham hock) and was happy with both results. Bear loved both. Worth a look.

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ABC and 123...I won a giveaway!

I finally won my first giveaway. Lacing cards for Bear. These came from a great new educational blog called ABC and 123. It has fabulous ideas for parents/educators of all and lots of fun giveaways. Thank you ABC and 123. I love what you are doing!

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Bear's Alphabet Book

Bear has foam letters and numbers that stick to tile walls when wet. We don't use them in the bathtub, but for a different activity that I will have to blog at a later date. Recently, I had the brilliant idea to make an alphabet book and a number book using the letters. We used just food items. Bear couldn't help much because at 19 months she doesn't really know her alphabet, but she watched as I went searching in the kitchen for items to photograph and then she watched as I photographed. I used Picasa and added the names of the food (not on these photos) and then printed the photos on cardstock. I cut the photos (printed at 4x6) and put them in a small photo album. Bear loves to look throught it.

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Planting Beans

Bear and I put some black beans in a moist paper towel and watched them germinate. Then we planted the germinated seeds in some plastic containers. I was astounded by how fast these little beans grew. It made me think of the story Jack and the Beanstalk. We don't own a copy of it, so I looked for an interactive version online. I found one here and Bear likes to watch it over and over again. I don't like the graphics too much, but they don't seem to bother her.

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I Spy Board

After seeing this on The Peterson Party, I decided it would be a good use of all those baby magazines I had stockpiled. I made this double sided I Spy board quite small so it would fit in my toddler bag. It helped keep Bear busy on the airplane and she enjoyed looking for items I asked her to find.

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