April Literacy Activity Calendar

Please find attached the Literacy Activity Calendar for April.

Happy Easter! Wishing everyone a safe & happy long weekend.

March 2018 Literacy Activity Calendar

The Literacy Activity Calendar for March 2018 is here along with the anticipated arrival of Spring! For those of us who are happy to see the snow at Christmas but are counting down the days until winter is officially behind us, we only have 20 more days. Spring is the season of new beginnings.  I encourage to take some time to get outside with your child and explore the changes that come with a new season.

If you don’t currently visit the EarlyON Child and Family centres located across Oxford County, I would encourage you to begin doing that as well. It offers a safe, welcoming, and warm environment open to all families FREE of cost. It’s a place for parents and children to explore, learn, play and connect with other families. For more information you can check out the website at http://www.earlyonoxford.ca

February Literacy Activity Calendar & Play dough

Sensory Play is essential for development and necessary for learning. Play dough is one of my favourite sensory activities. It can be squishy or crumbly. It can be messy and can stick to stuff and you might ask if it’s worth the mess. I say yes because not only is it fun, it is a great tool for building life-long skills. Listed below are the benefits I find from having play dough as part of a child’s play.

• Builds fine motor skills, exercising muscles in the hands that will later hold pencils, scissors, do up zippers and tie shoe laces.
• Exercises the imagination. Play dough can become a snowman, a snake, letters of the alphabet or a garden. (I’m sure there must a famous baker out there that first found their passion for baking while making play dough cookies)
• Awakens the senses, by how is feels, smells and looks. You can add items to it that will change the experience. It can be bumpy or smooth. One colour or several. It may be scented as well.
• Builds language skills. When making play dough together you can talk about the ingredients. When else would your child hear the words cream of tartar? You can talk about textures and scents and about what they are creating while they play with the play dough.

Play dough is also inexpensive,  and can be made with ingredients that you probably already have in your kitchen (ok, you might have to buy cream of tartar). You will find an easy play dough recipe on this months calendar and I would encourage you to make a batch of play dough with your child and see how much fun it can be.

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Literacy Activity Calendar January 2018

I find the older I get the more often I ask myself  “Where has the time gone?”  Here we are once again at the end of a year and looking ahead to a new one. What are your goals for 2018? My wish is that you will all make reading with a child one of your daily goals in the new year ahead. As editor, teacher and award -winning children’s author Emilie Buchwald is quoted as saying  “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”

Wishing you a safe & happy holiday season & wonderful New Year!

Scissor Skills

It takes time and practice to learn how to use scissors. How old should a child be when scissors are introduced? Believe it or not, according to Kimberly Wiggins an Occupational Therapist, a child who is following the appropriate developmental track should start cutting at the age of 2 years old. Using scissors helps in the development of fine motor skills.  Tiny muscles in the palm of their hand develop with the continuous open and close motion. These are the same muscles that are required for writing. Cutting also promotes hand-eye coordination, a skill that is necessary for zipping up a coat, doing up a button, using a fork or throwing/catching a ball.                                                        In my experience children enjoy cutting a variety of items and are motivated to cut things such as playdough, straws (they are fun for the beginner because they are not floppy and kids love that the pieces go flying when snipped) yarn, coloured construction paper and old magazines.                                                                                                              The children in this picture are a preschool group from Tillsonburg Little school and they are using their scissor skills to cut up grocery store flyers. Not all of them wanted to cut out their favourite foods to make a menu, some of them simply wanted to cut up the flyer because they could. Look how focused and engaged they are in this easy activity.      I encourage you to try it with your little ones.

Loose Parts & Play dough

Last Tuesday was Halloween and the Ingersoll Ontario Early Years Centre celebrated with Black & Orange day. On one table the facilitator had put out orange play dough and a variety of loose parts. Loose parts are materials that can be carried, moved, lined up, taken apart, put back together and combined with other materials. Loose parts can be used in any way that a child chooses to use them. The use of loose parts supports the use of a child’s imagination. In the picture below you can see what one 3-year-old created with some of the available loose parts. It was her “Halloween Happy Face”.

Yes, loose parts can be messy. Yes, having them out can create more work for the teacher or parent. Yes they can and should be used with other materials and often do not stay where they started out, making for more work at tidy time.  One little boy took the ping-pong type eye-ball over to the sensory bin, put rice inside one and then closed it up to make a shaker.  No one asked him to make a shaker. That was being creative!

“The wider the range of possibilities we offer children, the more intense will be their motivations and the richer their experiences”  – Loris Malaguzzi

November Literacy Activity Calendar

The November Literacy Activity Calendar is here! I encourage you all to take a few minutes to look at the calendar and commit to doing a few of the suggested activities with your child. If you’ve never read Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, then you should! I haven’t met an adult yet who doesn’t like this book. Sing Happy Birthday to Mickey Mouse on the 18th. Kids love to sing Happy Birthday and it doesn’t matter that it’s not their birthday, it’s just one of those songs that they love to sing. When was the last time you did a puzzle? These are just a few of the suggestions in this months calendar. Have Fun! 

My Menu

What a great visit to the Ontario Early Years program in Tavistock this morning. It was a  PD day, which meant we saw a few older children joining in the fun.

I took grocery store flyers, scissors, glue and crayons and placed it out on the table and invited children to make and share their menus with me when they were done.  Adelia is school age and took to the task of spreading out one of the flyers on the floor and searched for some of her favourite foods. She would tell me about each item as she cut them out and glued them on her sheet. She really likes apples, and yellow is her favourite. She then cut out pumpkins and when I asked her if she liked to eat pumpkins her reply was “no, no, I don’t eat THE PUMPKINS, but I LOVE the seeds”.  I told Adelia that I had  made pumpkin loaf on the weekend and had cooked with real pumpkin by first boiling it and  then mashing it up like potatoes. (At that point I also learned that she likes mashed potatoes). She was quite interested in how I had made this pumpkin loaf and wanted to know what I put it in. We looked for some of the items in the grocery flyer that I had used, flour, sugar, eggs etc. What a rich and interesting conversation I had with this little girl because of some grocery flyers that usually end up being thrown in the recycling bin. I encourage you to let your children cut out their favourite foods from this weeks food flyers. They can create a menu of their favourites or help with making the next grocery shopping list.

You will see in the other picture that Adelia’s little sister wanted to make a menu as well. She had lots of favourites! This was a great opportunity for her to work on her fine motor skills and she was determined to use the scissors and cut her items out of the flyer on her own.

 

Happiness is…

I hope that you are able to get outside & enjoy this wonderful October weather with your children. Look at all the beauty that nature gives us allowing for some great conversations about the changes happening this time of year. The colour changes, the temperature changes, just to name a couple.  However you spend it, have a great weekend!

October Literacy Activity Calendar

Today is the first day that has made me realize that Fall is actually upon us. It is time to pack up the flip-flops & sun hats and start to think about Halloween costumes and light jackets. Please find attached a copy of the Literacy Activity Calendar for October. I have tried to include suggestions for Fall activities that I always enjoyed both as a child and later as a parent. Collecting leaves was always a big hit with my children when they were younger. There is so much that you can do with them (other than continuously rake them). You can  make leaf rubbings, sort them by colour or shape, and of course jump in them.  I hope that however you spend it, you enjoy the Fall season and all the beauty that comes with this time of year!