What's In Experience Baby?

Experience Baby

August's theme: Colors & Shapes

Today we received our Mother Goose Time Experience Baby curriculum. Mr Z grabbed it off the porch, ran it inside and wanted to open it right away to play with it.

We've been getting this curriculum for Little Miss for a few months. It's been fun. The boys like to be included in "teaching" Little Miss. Opening the box is usually the most fun a little while.
This is what the inside of the box looks like when you first open it up. It doesn't look like much, but there's a lot of goodies in here.

The muslin bag holds lots of fun stuff. This is the Teacher Bundle. There are the activity cards.

The activity cards come in three different categories: Connect & Communicate, Move & Grow and Play & Explore. The sets are each numbered 1-12. You can do all of the same numbered activities in the same day to coordinate your days.

There is a poster to go along with the theme and it may be a song or nursery rhyme. There are cut outs to use for some of the activities during the month and several pictures to use in the foam pocket cube.

An overall Planning Calendar helps keep track of your days easily. Thursday and Friday are left open to review favorite activities that your child liked or needed a little more help on.

A music cd with 12 songs that correlate with the theme comes each month also.

This is the Child Pack. It comes in a plastic folder and is meant for transferring daily notes about the child and the activities done that day between the parent and the caregiver.

Included in the Child Pack are a few different items like this weekly overview of the activities. It is for notes and observances of the child.

Sheets of stickers for each activity with brief descriptions of activities go into the Daily Journal.

The Daily Journal has a page layout for each day. There are notes from the parents and to the parents and includes a daily diapering and feeding schedule. I love that this is an easy way to log what your child is doing. Since I don't leave Little Miss with anyone, I don't really use this much though.

When we first opened the box, Mr A asked why we get a new pocket cube each month. I guess its because little babies and toddlers destroy these cube pretty easily. My Little Miss doesn't play hard with it though and so we have several cubes. The Curriculum Overview also comes every month and is the same each time. But, its a great guide on how to use everything and what it is.

After we were done unpacking the box, Mr A and Mr Z grabbed the tub of our MGT manipulatives from our regular MGT curriculum and the box with the packing paper and have been playing  with them ever since. Sometimes the box something comes in is way more fun for awhile. Little Miss has joined them too. I don't know what they are actually playing at the moment, but I'm glad they found something to do nicely for a few minutes before we get into some other activities.

The Haba Palette of Pegs review

Haba Palette of Pegs

I. Love. This.

Little Miss has claimed it as hers though. She loves playing with it at 10 months old. We received Haba Palette of Pegs from Timberdoodle in exchange for our opinion. I'm so glad we were given this opportunity. It can be purchased in Timberdoodle's Tiny Tots Curriuculum kit and is recommended for ages 2 to 6.

This game encourages color matching, fine motor skills and creativity. It is durable and made of wood, which I love. Little Miss didn't waste any time testing this new activity out.

Little Miss loved grabbing the shapes out of the tray and tasting each one. I think all of the colors were taste tested within the first few minutes. She would grab one and flip it over her shoulder when she was ready for a different one.

Because Little Miss is so little, I definitely do not expect her to color match at this point. She was doing plenty of learning. Fine motor skills of grabbing the shapes out of the tray. Hand and eye coordination as she grabs and shoves it in her mouth. Object permanence as she knocked down towers.

Little Miss also did a lot of feeling with her feet while her hands were busy. She kicked the shapes around and watched what would happen to them. After a few days of making a mess, she realized that it was much faster to just dump the whole tray over at once.

Mr A is almost 7 and helped Little Miss build towers. It became a race to see how high the tower could get before Little Miss destroyed it. Over the past few days she has been trying to stack 2 of the shapes on top of each other to build her own tower, but she doesn't have the balancing down to get them to stay.

They had a great time together making towers and destroying them. If Little Miss sees this game out, she will attack it. So, that made it a little difficult to play with the boys. But, we did find a few ways to play with it without her.

Mr A and I made up our own games to play with the Palette of Pegs. We played tic-tac-toe and a color matching race before Little Miss attacked our games.

Thank you Timberdoodle for Haba Palette of Pegs. Its super fun and we love it here at our house.

Tiny Polka Dot: a math game review

Tiny Polka Dot
A Number-Loving Learning Game from Timberdoodle

I am a stay-at-home mom of three kids. We try to stay productive in a fun way. Sometimes finding things that the kids are interested in besides the tv or the tablet is tricky. We found Timberdoodle awhile back and its been so great. The games and activities it provides has engaged everyone. This game was one we really enjoy having in our home.

Tiny Polka Dot is a game recommended for ages 3 to 7+. It teaches number recognition, matching, sorting, one to one correspondence, counting and basic operations like addition or subtraction. In the box there are 6 colors of number cards and each set numbered 0-10. There are 8 double-sided instruction cards for simple games depending on your child's learning stage. Timberdoodle offers Tiny Polka Dot in its PreK curriculum kit (or a la carte).

We received this game from Timberdoodle in exchange for our opinion. 

Mr Z is 4.5 years old. He's not one to sit around and do anything academic. It's just not in his nature... yet. He's busy and doesn't sit still. Finding 'educational' things that will occupy him is a trick. But this game accomplished the task for a few more minutes than I was expecting.

We played a game from one of the instruction cards called Hungry Numbers. It called for 3 of the colored cards 0-5. We lined up the purple cards and Mr Z picked a card from a pile and matched it to the correct column. He was excited when he realized he was getting faster at recognizing the numbers and placing them properly. I asked Mr Z what he thought of the game and he said with a smile "I love it!"

Little Miss (10 months old) had a great time with Tiny Polka Dot. She practiced pulling them out of the box, tossing them over her shoulder, gumming and tasting the cards and sitting and laying on them. Her favorite thing to do is make a mess. She's good at it too. The Tiny Polka Dot cards are made of a nice durable cardboard. They withstood quite a bit of infant abuse. They didn't get ruined in the first week that we had them... so that's a plus.

Mr A, 6.5 years, liked to play PowerDot. It was a game kind of like War. You dealt all of the cards and each play one at a time. You won the round if you played the higher card until one person had all of the cards. Mr A liked to play with 5 sets of cards 0-10. It took a long time to get through all of the cards. He liked winning the rounds and telling me who had the higher card. He said he likes Tiny Polka Dot because "its fun and you can add the numbers together too."

We've also taken this game with us on-the-go to play at restaurants and waiting rooms for office visits. It fits perfectly in my bag.

Thanks Timberdoodle for providing fun games for the kids that inspire learning without really knowing it. We love our Tiny Polka Dot game.

Treasure Hunts & Maps

Treasure Maps with Mother Goose Time

Treasure maps are always cool around here and the excitement from Mr Z when he found out they were focus for the day, was pretty awesome.
Mother Goose Time provided some brown paper for the Make & Play craft: a treasure map. Some small jewels were also included. Mr Z went to work and made a simple map before we got started on a few other activities.
After making a map in 2 minutes, we played one of the suggested games in the MGT guidebook. There were jewel shape cards to put into the pocket cube and matching shapes to cut out along with a treasure box. I hid the shapes under plates and we took turns rolling the cube. We had one chance to find the matching jewel. If we guessed correctly, the jewel was collected in the treasure box. It was a different way to play the Memory game.

Mr Z had a bit of trouble following directions. He would roll the cube and then look under every plate until he found the matching jewel. Mr Z did not want to only flip one plate for each turn.

For a long time, we played Treasure Hunt... a game we made up. I hid the treasure box in a room and taped the jewels to the walls as a trail leading to the treasure box. We roll-played for a while. Open doors were entry ways to caves. Big talking crabs guarded the path and would not let us by unless we told him the password. Pirates chased us while trying to steal our map. It was a good time.
Then, Mr Z wanted to look at the tiny jewels that came in the daily bag. We sorted them by color onto the jewel shapes and even counted them. Of course Mr Z had to glue them on too. Sometimes spontaneous activities end up a lesson in disguise... Math; sorting, counting, most/least.

After that we continued our treasure hunt with the even more precious jewels because now they were sparkly.

Sunny Tokens Make Everything Better

Alphabet Island with MGT

Like I said before, I am completely behind with all sorts of things. Summer has gotten everything all mixed up so far. We were having a grumpy day... from everyone. But, when I figured I'd better pull out a MGT activity, we found a huge shiny gold token in one of the daily bags.

The boys agreed that would be a fun thing to do... play with a gold token.

This little game cheered us right up... though we had to make a few accommodations.

The cards were pictures of crabs, suns, and fish.  Each category had a few differences like wearing sunglasses or a bow or just regular.

This game was supposed to a guessing game and a sort of process of elimination. The instructions suggested to play on the floor, but we had to use the table since Litttle Miss would have attacked and ruined everything.

The gold coin was supposed to hidden under a card and you guess to find where it is. But we soon noticed that the card with the coin under it was much higher than those without. The boys could spot it right away. So we had to come up with a way to make it a little more difficult.

I found tokens and play coins that were laying around and placed them under each card. This way all of the cards were raised up and the boys couldn't find the big gold token the instant they looked at the cards.

By asking questions like, Is the coin under a red crab? Is the coin under a card with glasses? the boys were able to eliminate the categories of cards that it shouldn't have been under. They were pretty quick at the game. But, they had fun trying to stump me when it was my turn to guess.

After the game we also played another game of Hide n Seek with the gold sun token. We took turns hiding it in the living room and then playing Hot & Cold to search for it. Mr Z always gets too impatient when trying to find something with these games and asks for additional clues.

But, we had a good time with the big gold sun token. It helped brighten our day. (pun intended.)

Board Games with MGT

Alphabet Island

One of the many things we like about Mother Goose Time are the games that come with the unit. On the day of Sandcastles, one was included that used several components from the curriculum.

This game was called Build a Castle. It came with a board and different colored crabs as the pieces, or markers. The game used the foam pocket cube as a giant die and the building block manipulatives that came with the curriculum.

As you roll the cube you move your crab around the board. Which ever color/number you land on, that's what you add to your "castle". (Land on a red 1 and you add 1 red building block to your castle.)

This was a great little game to learn or reinforce numbers and colors while also accommodating creative/imaginative play. 

As Mr A build his castle throughout the game, he designed his to look like the castle on the gameboard.

Mr Z made his like a sword.

We had a great time with this little game and I appreciated that it incorporated the manipulatives in a fun way. Both boys had fun with this one and it helped Mr Z with his numbers a bit more.

Math with Sea Shells

Alphabet Island with Mother Goose Time

"She sells seashells by the seashore, and the shells she sells are surely seashells."

A tongue twister to start the lesson always get the sillies out.

I have been behind in life lately. What does that mean... the oldest was just out of school for the summer. He finished Kindergarten! Family was in town for over a week so the kids got lots of cousin time. I haven't been blogging our activities when we have squeezed them in. The Little Miss is now sick. We've been adjusting to a non-existent summer schedule.

Anyway...

This month the theme is Alphabet Island. It's reinforcing all the letters of the alphabet in a fun Island/luau kind of way. Its about everything beach related. Lucky for us, we've been to the beach a few times recently too as "field trips" of course. 

We've always liked seashells, so when we found real ones in the daily packet for Seashell day, we were excited. These number cards below were also included. So, I pulled out the kinetic sand, dumped in the shells and the boys picked a number and went digging for that many.

Mr A and Mr Z took turns pulling cards and finding shells. This was great for Mr Z. He was able to practice some one-to-one correspondence with pointing to the shells while counting aloud.

When MrA had a few cards full of shells, I asked him how many he had altogether. He began counting by 2's. (I'm pretty sure I've never taught him that.) But, he figured it out rather quick and was proud to have found the answer without any help.

Mr Z was matching the shells to the Invitation to Create inspiration photo. I always forget that matching is an early form or introduction to math. But, its something the boys tend to do automatically.

They even pressed the different shells into the sand to see what kinds of imprints they made.

Sand, shells and doing math without even realizing it. That equals success in my book. 

More Reading Materials with MGT

Bugs and Crawly Things

Participation Story from Mother Goose Time

A Participation Story from Mother Goose Time is a short story that requires help from the kids, either movement or using props provided. This month the story is called The Little Lost Bugs and was about 6 different bugs that forgot where they lived. The bugs needed help remembering what shapes they were so that they could find their correct home.

The story came with a poster with 6 different shapes.

As we read the story, Mr Z picked up a bug card. I filled in the blank of what he picked up and then the shape bug was placed on its matching shape home. This little story reinforced colors and shapes while following one-step directions and identifying different places that a bug might live (pond, grass, leaf, log, tree, flowers).

On the back of each Participation Story are 3 focus questions to help the child with comprehension. Mr Z struggles a little bit with comprehension still, but with prompting he can figure it out.

... another easy way to incorporate reading into our day with Mother Goose Time... the participation story. It doesn't take long and Mr Z has fun.

Reading Materials with Mother Goose Time

Bugs and Crawly Things

Reading Materials from MGT

Mother Goose Time does a lot of things amazingly well within it's curriculum. Reading is one of them.

My kids aren't particularly fond of the language arts, but they like books and being read too. Some of our favorite stories to read are ones that we've gotten from our MGT curriculum. 

Each month we receive a story book that corresponds with the theme of the month. This month's book is There Are Bugs by Chris Lensch. It is a fun book which combines realistic pictures of insects with cartoonish characters and backgrounds. We love the combination, I think, because it keeps the fantasy and magic of childhood while connecting with the real world.

Mr Z liked to find all the bugs on each page as we read through the story. Life science is one of our favorite subjects. We love to learn about creatures. This book helped the boys know where could live, what they could do and what they look like.

This page we took a moment to reflect upon. We thought about and discussed what would happen if bugs were missing. It would be a different world without them, even if we don't like them all.

We liked this page as well from the storybook... a nice layout of all the bugs featured with their names.

We took a break from reading for a little bit and played with the shape manipulatives. A shape design mat was included in the Caterpillar daily bag with 4 different designs to follow and build. Mr Z figured one was a caterpillar, snail, beetle and ant.

Each month an I Can Read book is also included for each child. This one was called What Am I? Also included with the book are word pointers. There are normally 3 pointers with the sightwords featured for the month. Mr Z matched the word 'am' on each page.

We like the books for the short activities in the back of the reading book. This one had a maze connecting letters to the bug and a space to draw your favorite bug.

 Mr Z drew a caterpillar.

Mr Z's demonstration of how a caterpillar moves.