A recent trip to the winter clearance section at Old Navy netted us the following:
That’s 11 items we purchased for a total of about $26! Five shirts are for Erik to wear later this winter (since he has almost outgrown his current crop of long-sleeve shirts), and the other six items are for Madeline. It’s too bad we used up the kids’ patience looking for clothes for them — it would have been fun to find some bargain clothes for us, too!
Having ditched the first curriculum we started, I now had to decide how we should spend our time. Since it was early to mid October when we decided to take a different path, a logical next stop on our journey seemed to be focusing on seasonal and holiday topics like fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We really haven’t been doing anything too fancy with our preschool time — I’ve been finding books at the library most weeks related in some way to one of the timely topics, and we find some time each week to do some related crafts. I unfortunately feel like I have been slighting Christmas. Between the expected activities that take up time during the Christmas season (baking cookies, shopping for gifts, holiday parties, etc) and the unexpected events in our life (like two hours spent waiting for a tow truck after the car died while we were en route to the library or Madeline getting sick or friends dropping in), we’ve barely cracked open the door to the craft cabinet, much less me spending time picking out crafts directly related to Christmas. I guess we have a few more days to do something about that. 
My goal has been to have more of a plan to go with after the first of the year. I do have one piece of that plan — a book called “Teaching a Young Child to Read“. This book is divided into 27 “kits” or segments with ideas to take a child from simple letter recognition to basic phonics and all the way through some fairly complex reading comprehension. I checked out several “how to” books from the library on teaching reading, and this one was my favorite. It uses methods that seem sensible and easy to implement.
I also decided I’d like to experiment with some kind of a literature-based curriculum to see how this works for us. The books “Before Five in A Row” and “Five in a Row” are somewhat-popular options that take this approach. The idea with these curricula is to read the same book for five days in a row, and base a variety of activities from all subject areas around the themes of the book. I checked these books out from the library to evaluate them, but I wasn’t convinced that they were the right fit for us. I found a similar book called “Peak with Books” that I now have checked out from the library. It looks promising. “Peak with Books” covers fewer subject areas than the “five in a row” books, but it’s activities appear to be more creative extensions of the books it covers. I think we might like the books suggested in “Peak with Books” better as well.
I really can’t say right now if these approaches are really going to work for us. But I am looking forward to trying a new plan…maybe by the fall of 2008 we’ll be on to something completely different!
Of course no matter what approaches or curricula we use , I’m sure we’ll still be doing lots of crafts and seasonal activities, and some math and science related stuff here and there in addition to our reading and literature fare.
Two other new developments in our preschool journey are Madeline’s newly-found love for complex, in-depth pretending, and the home preschool co-op we started attending about once a week this fall…but I’ll save those for another post!
We’re only a little over three months in, but I’m finding that my approach doing preschool at home with Madeline has already changed from our initial plan. Â After thinking and planning for over a year, I had chosen a preschool curriculum that I thought was perfect for us — available free on the web, Christian-based, and a good mix of “traditional” preschool activities with fun games and language learning techniques that match up with what some of the latest research says is the best way for kids to learn to read.
When theory met reality, the results were not what I had hoped for. The curriculum did have tons of fun educational games to play…but they took a lot of time to prepare. Cutting and pasting is not something I have an abundance of time for, especially as Erik gets more and more active and curious. Even when I did finish my prep work for Madeline to play some of the games, sometimes her attention span for the game was less than the time it took to prepare it. This didn’t really strike me as the best use of my time.
After a particularly frustrating week where Madeline starting telling me she didn’t like home preschool anymore, I decided this curriculum had to go. The nice thing about home preschool (in comparison to “real” homeschooling) is that there is nothing you “have” to do. Kids at this age learn a lot just through play and listening to stories and parents taking advantage of little lessons that are a part of everyday life. One of the main reasons I started a curriculum in the first place was I thought Madeline wanted or needed more structure. She seemed to want to learn more and was looking for new ways to do it.
Tony and I decided we had three simple goals for our “home preschooling” with Madeline at this time:
1. She would be learning about God and His character and how He worked through history in various Bible stories
2. She would be progressing toward learning to read. (We know she doesn’t need to learn to read now, as a three-year-old, but she is very interested in letters and letter sounds, so we want to take advantage of this interest. )
3. She would be learning perseverance — sticking with a task even when she doesn’t like it. Obviously she will be growing in this character area for years to come, but we thought that it would be good for her upcoming years of schooling if she could learn to sit through a story with a positive attitude even if it isn’t one she selected, or finish a game or activity that she is less than interested in. The first curriculum we tried I think required too much of her in this area– there were just too many things that didn’t interest her and it made her want to give up.
I think this post will quickly turn into a novel if I share everything I’ve been wanting to share about this, so I’ll make this into a series.  Look for the next installment coming soon…hopefully you won’t have to wait two months for it (I can’t believe I went almost that long between my last post and this one!).
As I browse the web every day while feeding Erik, few things usually really stick out to me. Today, several things did…so, I thought I would share:
On the serious side, I really enjoyed J.R. Woodward’s blog entry about mentoring.   He shares a list of types of mentoring relationships that I think makes for a helpful paradigm. It looks like this will be the first in a series of entries on the topic of mentoring, and I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the series.
On to the ridiculous…
Can you imagine making a sign like this and doing such a good job that it totally blends in with other signs. This would make an awesome prank!
If you are looking for Halloween costume ideas, here’s one that really made me laugh.Â
And finally, if you haven’t found them already…the lolcats are one of my favorite late night/early morning reading-the-web-while-feeding-Erik timewasters.
Happy Web Browsing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
Here’s the paper, if you’re interested. Â http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
Scene #1: At the dinner table. Erik is being rather discontent, and we are trying to amuse him.
Tony says jokingly to Erik, “Are you lonely? Do you need a girlfriend?” Madeline replies, “Yes! He needs a girlfriend named Goldilocks! A little girl named Goldilocks!”
Scene #2: Later in the evening. Madeline wants to fly like the “Super Readers” in the show “SuperWhy.” She asks us how to fly. We give her several suggestions, such as finding a cape, that might “help” her fly.
Madeline leaves, then returns to the room saying, “I found the magic banana! That will help me fly!”. Later she had a magic apple helping her fly too.
Here’s a quick catch-up on some happenings at the Hill house:
I’ve finally caught up on posting pictures to our photo gallery. I haven’t added captions yet, but I hope to go back and do that soon. Most of it should be pretty self-explanatory, anyway. So, for your viewing pleasure we now have albums for August, Early September (including a trip to the zoo), and Mid-September (including recent trips to an apple orchard and the Children’s Museum).
As Erik nears six months old, he now has one tooth on the way in! He has been gnawing away at anything he can get his hands on for several weeks, and finally the sharp little point of a tooth appeared on his lower gums yesterday! Luckily, he hasn’t been too crabby so far from the teething process.
Madeline has finally entered the dreaded “why” phase. For several weeks she has been asking a lot of other recurring questions including, “What’s ______ for?”, “What kind of _____ ?”, “Where did _____ go?” (asked about anywhere we are going or about any place we have left).  I thought those were slightly annoying at times, but at least there was a bit of variety. Then out of the blue, she started asking “Why?” yesterday. She asked the other questions a couple of times today, but otherwise her response was “Why?” to pretty much anything I had to say. I had no idea how quickly that could really grate on me, and now I know exactly why parents are known for saying “BECAUSE I SAID SO!” I came up with some good coping strategies (like giving overly complex answers) to get her to stop asking some of the other questions when it was getting old, so I am sure I will find some good coping strategies for this phase too. I know it is great that she is curious, but I also know that some of it is just to get on my nerves, because I have already seen the sly little smile as she continually asks the question.
This fall I have started doing some home preschool activities with Madeline. I’m sure she could learn through whatever we did, whether it was something organized or something informal, but having a curriculum to follow and a daily plan of action really helps me from just falling back on the same few activities all the time. I’m just not very creative at thinking on my feet to come up with new games, crafts, and so on for her to do…and she is often asking me for new things to do! We’re using a free curriculum for three-year-olds I found on the web called “Bible and Rhyme“. A lot of the curriculum activities are the general type of thing we’d be doing anyway — reading books, singing songs, playing games, doing art, etc…but the writer of this curriculum has way better ideas and better ways of grouping them together than I would ever come up with!
We’re just finishing our third week, and we’ve had some ups and downs already. The first two weeks Madeline asked to do it every day (even though the curriculum is only planned for 3x per week), and then today she didn’t want to do it at all after getting frustrated with one of the games yesterday. :-(  But it is great to get started after spending nearly a year and a half researching and considering what to do. We haven’t been doing every activity and we may modify it further to suit our needs as I better understand how Madeline likes to learn. But I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to work with a preschooler at home. I’m sure I’ll have more blog posts in the future about our preschool activities.
I really need to blog more about all the funny things Madeline does. Three-year-olds are so hilarious. So for the past couple of weeks our landlord’s handyman has been working to reinforce the mortar around all the bricks on our house. It really needs it — during a recent wind storm, a couple of bricks came flying off the house!
Madeline is fascinated by the handyman. The very first day he was out there working, Madeline asked me who was out there and what he was doing. I was probably in the middle of something when she asked so I tried to see if she would be easily satisfied by saying something like, “I don’t really know. It’s just a man who is fixing our house.”
Ever since then (despite my attempts to the contrary), Madeline has taken to calling him “The Man.” Relatively early in the morning she looks out the windows and listens to see if she can hear him working. She usually shouts out, “Look! I see The Man!” or “That sounds like The Man!”  On the days he is working, she loves looking out our windows and asking him as many times as he will answer, “What are you doing?” And of course when we leave to go somewhere she has to chat it up with him and tell him where we are going or what we are doing that day.
At least he doesn’t seem to mind it too much — he has told us that he has a two-year-old grandson and he seems like the chatty type in general. But I really wonder what he thinks of being called “The Man!” every day.
As many of you may remember, Panda was Madeline’s favorite stuffed animal for a long time (she has a lot of favorites now, and doesn’t usually prefer Panda these days). Now we think Erik may be learning to love Panda too. This video is very characteristic of life at the Hill house — Erik doing something cute with Madeline yelling “look at me” and “that’s silly” in the background.
Is how many wonderful options there are out there for baby carriers. Sure, I had one of those “snuggli”-type carriers with Madeline, but it hurt my back after she weighed about 12 lbs. I had seen ring slings, but mostly only ugly ones!
A couple years ago at Faithwalkers, I met a woman who had a daughter about Madeline’s age (this is when Madeline was 7 months or so old). She was wearing her baby in a wrap (basically, a long piece of fabric) on her back. She told me all about it and gave me a website where I could learn more, but I was really intimidated at the idea of using just a long piece of fabric to wear my already good-sized little girl. But, I made a promise to myself to check into it for my next baby.
Fast forward two years and to make a long story short, I did check into it and discovered that there are a lot of great ways to wear your baby from the time they are born until they are a big toddler! Wearing a baby is a great way to get more done with your hands free, go crowded places without a stroller, comfort a crying baby (that you would be walking around carrying in your arms anyway), keep your little one close while you chase a bigger kid around the park, and more.
The two new kinds of carriers I have tried are pouch-style slings:
And Mei Tais (this is a “BBO”-style Mei Tai I made myself!):
Both of the these kinds of carriers have multiple positions you can use them in (cradle, tummy-to-tummy, hip, and “kangaroo” for the pouch; tummy-to-tummy, forward facing, hip and back for the Mei Tai) — hence the ability to use them for so long.
When it comes to these alternative styles of baby carriers, there’s something to fit every budget — from a do-it-yourself homemade carrier that might cost you a few bucks to make if you get fabric on clearance, to “rare” or trendy imported styles that cost hundreds of dollars.
I think this really must be an up-and-coming trend, because even Target is getting into the act. Many stores now carry “hotslings” in the baby section, which are a popular type of pouch-style sling. If you go to the Target website and search for “sling” in the baby section, you will now find quite a few options, including a couple different brands of pouches and ring slings, as well as one Mei Tai.
Here are a few great websites to check out if you want to learn more:
www.wearyourbaby.com (wearing instructions, do-it-yourself instructions, and more)
crafts.sleepingbaby.net (do-it-yourself instructions for baby carriers and other baby-related items. I used instructions from this site to make my first Mei Tai recently).
www.thebabywearer.com (reviews and info on all kinds of vendors/brands of baby carriers as well as discussion forums — almost more info than you might want to know!)
There are also a lot of local babywearing groups popping up, where you can go and learn first hand about different kinds of carriers, try them on, learn how to use them, and even sometimes borrow a carrier for a month or so. There are groups in the Twin Cities, Des Moines, and Iowa City (just to name a few areas where I know some of our readers live!).
Happy Babywearing!
From PlanetRock