Round Two with the Senses

Remember this chart?

Click the chart photo for a reminder

We re-visited it today...just flipped it over and traced the lines...this time charting how we use our senses in nature.

 

Of the items in nature Beck chose (trees, mountains, dirt, deer, rain, & tarantulas) we decided that the only one you can taste is rain.  I decided to keep my mouth closed and not put any ideas in his head that you could probably eat dirt or give him a lesson on where meat comes from...

No School On the Weekends-Family Play Time

Finally, the last Teaching Your Children Joy activity focusing on the body and it's a fun one!

Family Play Time and Recreation

Come up with a way for everyone in your family to have input and initiative on family activities.

Maybe it's slips of paper in a jar.

Or a poster on the wall.

Or dry-erase markers on the refrigerator.

Or a rotating schedule every Monday evening.

Whatever it is, make sure everybody's involved and no idea is too outrageous.

Have fun together, run around together, lose your breath, and laugh together.

Now tell me, how are you going to start doing this today?

Finishing Up The Joy of the Body

I'm really eager to get on to the next chapter in Teaching Your Children Joy, but today we're looking at second to last activity focusing on the body...making good food choices.

I'm lucky that both my boys love fruits and vegetables.  Beck's friends look at him so strange when he shows up for a playdate with a stalk of broccoli as his chosen snack, and last week he and Peyton got in a knock-down, drag-out fight in the front yard over an entire crown of the hearty green vegetable.  They definitely like their cookies and candy, but are just as content nibbling on bell peppers, an apple, or fresh berries.

Here are some of the ways I've helped them learn about healthy foods and "special snack" foods:

• As I'm preparing dinner I have no problem letting them eat the vegetables as I cut them up.  I used to get upset thinking they would ruin their appetites, but then decided the important part was that they were eating the good stuff.  It doesn't matter to me anymore if they're eating it at the table or while we're cooking.
• Awhile back Target had cute divided lunch trays in the $1 sections.  This tip is more helpful for me than for them, but having four different sections I have to fill at lunchtime has done wonders in getting them a well-rounded meal.  The portion sizes are right and it's fun for them to eat their way around the plate. (Check out these cute trays at Target and Amazon)
• Grocery Shopping is a great time to teach about different types of food.  I like to cut images out of the weekly flyers and then give a few to Beck that he can "shop" for at the grocery store.  He's getting good at exploring the produce section!  

A fun activity:  

Gather the weekly grocery flyers, a brown paper bag, some scissors and glue. 

 Let your little ones cut out their favorite foods and glue them onto the bag. 

 Great opportunity for recycling, 

and now they'll have their very own shopping bag to fill on your next grocery run!

Learning Through Games

I discovered the PERC (Parents Education Resource Center) at my local library yesterday.  It's a small room in the basement of the library crammed FULL of toys, games, and educational materials.  I really mean crammed and I really mean full.  It was overwhelming.  I'm quite certain they've saved decades of educational materials and I'm extremely excited to dig around for flannel boards and file folder games to fit my lessons perfectly (and those just to get started...).

Today we played one of our newly borrowed games. It was educational for both Beck and me.  Here's how:

The Dice: My instinct was to shout out the number immediately after Beck rolled.  I started thinking about how I look at the dots and automatically recognize the number by their alignment, but he hasn't learned that yet.  I started making a conscious effort to stay quiet and let him count each dot individually to determine how many spaces he could go.  As we neared the end of our second round I noticed that there were numbers he was starting to recognize by shape without needing to count.

The Spaces: My husband and I have never been too strict about how Beck moves spaces when we're playing games, but today it felt right to let him know there are actual rules and ways to know how far he's supposed to go.  I guess it was really getting him to understand what "spaces" actually are.  He learned how to start counting at the very next space from where he landed last time and that each box represents one number or "space".  When we started he was scooting his piece random distances, but when we ended he was counting spaces just as well as he was counting dots.

The Creativity:  This is what Beck is continually teaching me.  At the end of our first game he wanted to play again and he wanted us both to have two playing pieces.  I assumed he meant we would each take two turns and move our pieces individually.  But just like when he taught me playing Candy Land, he had his own ideas again today.  Yes, he wanted us to both have two pieces, but he wanted them to travel together.  I got a little more excited to play another drawn-out round when I realized it was going to take us twice as long!

Also on my mind while we played was last night's episode of NBC's Parenthood.  (If you've never watched it, you definitely need to catch up on the back episodes and catch up.  It touches home every single week!)  In the episode one of the family's was confronted with the need to teach their 6-year-old how to lose graciously. I was glad today when I made it to the finish line first both times and Beck took it in stride.  The second time he kept playing and even enforced his own lose-a-turns.  He's pretty amazing.

Today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity:  

Look at photos of people in varying degrees of fitness

 and talk about what things help us to stay healthy and in good shape.

Treat Your Body Like A...Car (Preschool Comparison Activity)

It's our last week of activities for the Joy of the Body chapter in Teaching Your Children Joy.  I have to admit I'm kind of ready for this section to come to an end.  A lot of the activities were things B had done before and we both struggled to be interested with quite a few of them.  Having said that, however, today we had a lot of fun.  I got an unusual burst of motivation and creativity and came up with this...

Today's and tomorrow's activities focus on taking good care of our bodies and today we did that by comparing our bodies to a car.  Rather than just talking about it, I found images for each of the ideas written in the book.

First we looked at a clean car and a dirty car...

  

Then we compared them to a healthy body and an unhealthy body...

  

I used these outlines for the base of the poster...

    

To compare cars and the body, we looked first at what a car needs for each of the categories below, and then figured out what that would be for a human person. I had printed these images for B to glue on the appropriate side of his chart...

Good Food

A car needs gasoline, a person needs fruits and vegetables.

  

Washing the Outside

 

A car goes to a carwash, and a person takes a bath.

Washing the Inside

 

We vacuum to keep the inside of the car clean and brush our teeth to keep our mouths clean.

Keeps Things Running Well

  We take a car to the mechanic for repairs and take ourselves to a doctor when we are sick.

Rest & Sleep

The car rests in the garage at night.  Our bodies rest while we are sleeping.

B cut out the pictures, we talked about what they represented, and then he glued them on his poster (with a lot of being silly and trying to trick me by pretending to put everything on it's opposite side). 

 Most important thing? 
 To both have a fun time learning!

My Kids Think I'm Crazy

There is a scene in the movie About A Boy where Hugh Grant's character is singing onstage in front of an entire grade school, so lost in the moment that he has no idea he's completely making a fool of himself.

Click image to watch this video on YouTube

That happened to me today...

If you'll remember, a couple weeks ago I tried to get my kids and their friends to dance with me for our Teaching Your Children Joy activity and they were not having it.  Today's activity was to create a "body band" by exploring all the ways our bodies can make music.  Listening to our kid music station on Pandora, Beck, Peyton, and I were laughing while we clapped, snapped, clicked our tongues, and stomped our feet along to the beats.

Then, without knowing I was doing it, I got up off the couch and started dancing.  Not just moving my feet and shaking my bum, but full on joyful amateur ballerina dancing.  It was almost the length of an entire song before I realized the boys had become quiet and still.  They were just staring at me...confused and worried looks painted across their faces.

I bowed out quickly.  Because I'm not a dancer, and yet there I'd been lost in the moment and learning my own lesson that we can find joy in the unexpected abilities of our bodies.  

Our Bodies: Big and Small

Yesterday's Teaching Your Children Joy activity taught how our body parts can help us to be big or small.  It was a fun opportunity to get down on the floor with Beck, look him in the eye, and have fun playing together.  Here are a few of the big/small discoveries we made...

Moving our legs, knees, and toes

Using our Arms, Shoulders, Elbows, Hands, & Fingers 

Stretching and Bending our entire bodies

I can't wait for Peyton to wake up so we can play "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes!"

Getting Dad Involved

I nearly fell asleep at the table today while Beck was doing his school artwork.  With a terrible cold dragging me down, I was glad to see my husband get off work early today.

I sent him outside with Beck & Peyton to have fun with today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity:  Playing with balls.  Nothing like a little catching and kicking in the yard to get two little boys and one big one using their bodies.

Charts and Puzzles

First, I want to clarify my opening thought from yesterday.  I realized today that the "rut" stems from my lack of preparing for school beforehand.  It doesn't surprise me-I'm nothing if not a procrastinator. My homework is to make being organized and ready a priority.


We had a lot of fun in school today.  The Teaching Your Children Joy activity today introduced Beck to charting.  I was a little nervous that he wouldn't understand the concept, but he caught on quick and even put his own spin on it.

Back to the senses, the top of the chart is the 5 senses

The side of the chart is 5 random items Beck and I chose

Start the charting, identifying which senses you can use on each item

What made me laugh and smile?  

As I was cleaning up I realized Beck was singing his chart to me. 

 Here's a little snippet:

Instead of a craft today, Beck and I did puzzles together.  I scored huge at our local thrift stores today, finding these great puzzles and the uncut felt games as well as a few other things. 

 We spent an extra half hour doing puzzles than we normally would for school and it was worth every minute!

School Blah Already?

Beck is still loving school, but I'm already in a rut.  Definitely going to have to get over that...

This week for school we're using this preschool pack from 1+1+1=1.  Today Beck LOVED working on the page of patterns.

Here's an update on our Changing Autumn Leaves poster, five weeks into Fall.

And today we had fun painting Halloween Rocks which Beck calls his "Halloween Cars that only come out at Halloween."  (This was our version of the idea we saw at Craft Gossip)

As for today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity, it took a lot of creativity on Mom's part.  Still working on the physical joys, we tried making letters with our bodies.  With just the two of us it took a lot of bending and turning.  It'd be a lot easier if you were able to gather several kids for this activity.  Regardless of how many you have assembled, it makes it fun for the kids to form their letters in front of a mirror (we were mirror-less, but used our reflections in the tv-that was Beck's idea!).  

No School On the Weekends

Hope you're enjoying this crisp fall weekend.  When you have some downtime, check out this great article with activity ideas for focusing on the senses...

Developing Brains: Laying the Pathways to Learning

It's Great To Be Able To Hear

We have cousins at our house today that are almost the exact same ages as Beck and Peyton.  It was fun to have them join us for school (and an eye-opener to the social skills that Beck and I still need to work on).

Today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity focused on the sense of hearing.  I found this website with sound effects and had the kids guess what noises they were hearing.  Check them out here:

http://www.audionetwork.com/sound-effects

For the most part they thought this was a very funny activity; even if it took awhile to understand that they weren't going to see the noise on the computer screen.  Their favorite sounds were definitely under the heading, "Bodily Functions."

And then for fun we made Halloween puffball creatures.  

Isn't It Interesting?

Of all the weird or unusual things I convince my kids to do, wearing a blindfold is where they absolutely draw the line.

Today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity was to identify objects using taste, smell, touch, and hearing.  No seeing. 

It did not go smoothly.  I don't think I'll be blindfolding Beck again anytime soon...

Appreciating What We Have

Yesterday's activity from Teaching Your Children Joy involved trying to do normal things while pretending we were missing certain body parts.  For example:

• Tape your thumb and forefinger together.  Then try to pick up a penny or open a jar of peanut butter.
• Make a fist with your hand and then try to put on your shoe.
• Try to walk up/down stairs without bending your knees.
• Plug your nose and try to smell something fragrant (I used something unrecognizable so Beck wouldn't react before he'd tried to smell it.  Shrimp paste did the trick!)
• Cover your ears and try to hear what's going on around you.

Beck thought most of these activities were hilarious.  He giggled and giggled.  On a serious note, though, it led smoothly into a conversation about people who are different from us and who's body parts don't always work like ours do.  We talked about being blind or deaf, about having arms or legs that don't work or are missing.  It was a nice conversation to help prepare Beck for encountering people different than him and understanding that all people have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Part of the Body is Our Senses

Today we talked about the five senses.  It was a fun review for Beck and it was a great opportunity to teach Peyton parts of the body.  He loves to point at his mouth, nose, ears, eyes, and hands.

After dancing the "Hokey, Pokey" again (it's total chaos, but my kids have been begging for it since we first did it the other day) we decided to take a walk to the park and use our senses along the way.

We saw the leaves were changing colors and heard them rustling in the wind.  

The wind felt chilly on our skin and we could see it blowing the American flag.

This mailbox was our favorite site along the way:

We heard trucks and vans, wind chimes, and the stroller wheels going through water.

We saw the neighbor's horses and then smelled them, too.

We stopped to smell roses and a lot of other flowers.

We felt flower petals, sticks, the cold metal playground equipment, and wood chips in our shoes.

We tasted water in the fountain and our snacks when we got back home.

(We've scheduled the ultimate in sensory activities for tomorrow night when we'll cut open our Halloween pumpkins for carving.  Is there anything more potent than the initial smell of fresh pumpkin?  And what affects our sense of touch more than squishing your fingers through gooey cold pumpkin innards!)

Learning from Skeletons

This post may contain affiliate links.

Halloween is the perfect time to be learning about and celebrating the body!  Today's Teaching Your Children Joy activity is to make a body puzzle that will help your child learn the names and placement of body parts.  A few weeks ago I'd bought a foam skeleton and it worked perfectly to use it today!

We added googly eyes and a bright red heart to make the skeleton a little less creepy.  We identified everything visible from the skull down to the toes first on the skeleton and then on ourselves.  It turned out to be a great lesson as I found out that B was confused about which is the elbow and which is the shoulder.

Once assembled, the real fun began! 

 B was still making his skeleton dance and groove hours later, and when his dad got home from work it was the only thing B wanted to show him.

Check out this educational foam skeleton puzzle for more learning fun!

Great Children's Games

I love that so many activity suggestions in Teaching Your Children Joy are simple and classic.  Yesterday and today's activities were games that everyone knows, yet I have never gotten around to playing them with my boys.  We have now, with mixed reactions.

Yesterday we played Simon Says.  I thought it would be great to teach body parts to my younger one, and directions to my older one.  What really happened is that Peyton walked away immediately and Beck HATED it because he was so bored.  This is definitely a game we're going to have to try again when we have a larger group of people to play.

Today we did the "Hokey Pokey" with much better results.  My boys love music and dancing, and the "Hokey Pokey" lets you be completely goofy.  We LOVED it! 

 Why not crank up your computer volume and dance along!

The Joy of the Body

I'm so excited to be moving into Chapter 2 of Teaching Your Children Joy!  First, it means I actually started something and stuck to it.  Second, because the activities look really fun and a lot of them I think I will be able to do with both Beck (4) and Peyton (19 months).

We'll be back tomorrow with the first activity.  Until then, here's a quote that's feeding my motivation...

"First, we must help them to try physical things...Then, beyond that, we must help them find and concentrate on the particular physical things that they do especially well."