As Asher and I have gotten into more of a routine these past 6 months or so since I decided to stay home, one thing we are beginning to incorporate more regularly now is a learning theme for our week. It may be tied to something in which he is showing interest, the season, foundational skills, etc. I am kind of playing it by ear as we go at the moment! Either way, he is really starting to demonstrate a desire to know more about his world around him, using more vocabulary everyday and starting to comprehend texts, feelings, new concepts, etc., and it is so enjoyable to be along for the ride.
That being said, now each morning after we eat our breakfast together, we spend time reading a book related to our theme for the week and then doing a corresponding learning activity together. All of these activities are pretty quick to put together and require very few supplies – as this mama is on a time and monetary budget these days. So far though, we have both been absolutely loving having this additional bit of structured time to our morning, and I am seeing my little man truly pick up these concepts that we practice for just these small tidbits of time each day right before my eyes. Not to mention, he is connecting his new knowledge to all of the learning and exploring that takes place throughout his day. Win, win!
One of the things we have loved doing for quite some time now is venturing to our local library. While we still certainly pick out books that Asher has selected, I also take this time to collect books to support our theme for that week to keep on hand. You may have noticed that half of the books above are in Spanish and that is because we do all of our learning here in Spanish each day. Lucky for me – the English ones are still fairly simple at his age – so I just translate them for the most part on the spot.
We started out this week by just reading some general shape books and then doing some puzzles and a shape sort with items around our house. To create the puzzles I simply snagged some computer paper from our home printer, folder it in half, cut, and then folded and cut again to create a variety of basic shapes. For the sort, I snagged two baking sheets from our cupboard and a variety of smaller items representing squares and circles from around our home for Asher to classify. I definitely modeled a good number of examples for him first, but after that he was off!
After we did some “big picture” activities, we started to do more activities to focus on individual shapes. We started with circles. After reading our book for the day, I snagged some brown washable paint and a toilet paper roll and let Asher dip and dab until his heart was content, creating his own circle art. For squares, I cut out several construction paper squares, and then we worked our find motor skills by practicing gluing them on to the page (this one is definitely still a work in progress.)
If you haven’t read any books in the “Baa” series before, you should! Asher loves them, so I was beyond thrilled when I found out there was one tied to shapes for our review. In this little board book, Baa starts with a square of grass and continues eating the edges to form a variety of different shapes. I cut one large green sponge to match the shapes in the book and then Asher got to create his own “grass” with green washable paint and his sponges as we read through the story together again. Now, he loves just reading the story and matching the shapes to the images he sees.
To culminate our week, we went around our house together, and I snapped photos of examples of items in our home representing the shapes we had discussed throughout the week. That night, I printed out the images and Mod Podged them into a blank board book for us to read together the next day. You can find a variety of shapes and sizes of these books on Amazon by simply searching “blank board book”. I love to keep one or two on hand – as there is nothing quite like creating these personalized little gems for your little.
So whats on the agenda for this week? We’ve got an over abundance of snow on the ground here – so we are taking advantage of it to talk about all that winter has to offer. Stay tuned!
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