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.