As promised, we're here again to share some more of our adventures at home and show you what other fun we've been able to have with some of the random cardboard in this place!
One thing I just love about early childhood learning is the ability on the adult (or teacher) to help extend a child's learning, building off of what they're really interested in or already know to build more concepts, knowledge, vocabulary, and imagination. Silly Bean has been really into tea parties lately. We have been making up all these teas (blueberry, raspberry, apple, maple syrup...) even though he has really only had hot water with honey and lemon, which I refer to as "honey with lemon tea." We have all this birthday party stuff shoved in a box in the utility closet that we only pull out 3x a year for our birthdays, and I had a half-carton of eggs box that I thought would be PERFECT to be a pretend birthday cake, and voila! The "birthday box" came into being, and we have been celebrating birthdays every day since then. In quarantine, all of Silly Bean's "friends" have been able to attend the party, but he still does miss his real friends.
Of course then we had to explain to Silly Bean that it wasn't actually his real birthday, it's just pretend, and that led into a discussion of looking at our calendar, learning his own birthday date and learning other people's birthdates...
This second idea for a while now and was happy to finally be able to make it! In my mind, family board game time seemed like a good idea to bond with kids but being 2 1/2, there aren't many board games out there that are appropriate for a toddler attention span. So I knew I wanted to create my own!
It's very simple--you roll the dice (in our case, it's a soft number cube that was from one of those blocks that you put by baby to take pictures to count the months of baby's life-- happy to reuse that as well since I have no idea what to do it with now!) and move that many pieces, going from "start" to "end," which Silly Bean was happily able to decipher. I was also excited to be able to personalize it for Silly Bean's interests. The two Bullseye dogs I bought on a whim from Target in the dollar section one day that are intended as garden pot pieces, but I thought might be useful someday (which, as you know, Target is one of our favorite places to shop!). Silly Bean has been very interested in drawing houses lately, and really into tea parties (see above), so the start is home and the end point is a picnic in the park under the trees! I basically explained a picnic as having a tea party or lunch outside together 😄
Silly Bean loved the game and we played it about 3 or 4 times! He learned about turn taking--he was very excited to have his turn out of turn--counting, and representation of self symbolically with a playing piece (surprisingly, Silly Bean did not confuse the two dogs even though they look so similar), saying, "This is me!" Silly Bean has been continually asking us to play the game, which we have unofficially called, "Going on a Picnic game," but with the weather so nice our after dinner plans have consisted of taking walks around the neighborhood, and collecting flowers for our flower press.
Remember, just because we have to stay home doesn't mean we can't have adventures ;P We'd love to hear what fun or creative things you guys have been up to as well--I just love seeing all the fun ideas with kids popping up all over Facebook! Really brightens my feed in the midst of all of the other news. Until next time!
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