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.

Duckling Chain: an Exp Baby activity

Experience Baby curriculum from Mother Goose Time

Birds & Eggs

So, as a Blog Ambassador for MGT, I received some happy news... that because I have a little one that fits the age range of their new Experience Baby curriculum, we would receive a few boxes to test out. I am so excited for it to be here. I did have some pictures taken of what all comes in the box, and have a separate post planned for that, but I just haven't gotten around to actually doing it, plus the pictures aren't very good. So anyway ...

May was our first month, Birds & Eggs. 

From one of the activity cards that is included, we found one to do with Little Miss called Duckling Chain. I figured it was one that the boys could help participate in. They were pretty excited that Little Miss had her very own Mother Goose Time activities.

On each activity card there are three levels or versions of the activity.. young infant, older infant and young toddler. These are geared for ages 3 months to 18 months.

I found some rubber ducks for her to explore. And also some links to make a chain. Luckily the duck head fit perfectly through the link.

She liked investigating the duck and the links. We eventually did get her to scoot around after the duck while it was hooked around the links. A few times of cat and mouse after them was enough for her. The boys were pulling the duck too quickly and she would get frustrated.

Little Miss did not like the duck being taken away to hide it under the blanket. She was not ready for the hide and seek game... even when she saw one of us put the duck under the blanket.

She also did not so much interference from her brothers. They were trying to helpful and place things in her hand, take it out of her hand, set things in front of her. It was rather stressful. I was going a little crazy too.

We do like the Experience Baby activity cards for the new ways to play with Little Miss. Even when you have older kids, sometimes you just forget how to really interact with an infant.

PS sorry these pictures are terrible. I wasn't having much luck with taking photos and keeping the boys from getting in the way and helping Little Miss.
In other news, Little Miss loves the manipulatives. Especially when they are in bins. Anything in a bin really because dumping them all out is so much fun.

I found a few bears for her to play with since they are the biggest and won't get stuck in her mouth. She loves chomping them and banging them on the floor.

Experience Baby & a Little Set-up

Experience Baby by Mother Goose Time

Experience Baby is a new program from Mother Goose Time designed for ages 3 months to toddler. We received our first box a few weeks ago which coordinates with September's unit: Me and My Family. My oldest was super excited about it and said "Wow, the baby will have her own Mother Goose Time!" He couldn't wait to see what was in the box... but first he had to take a few selfies with the unopened box.

This is a fun little logo on the side of the box.

Here's what the box looks like first opened. Now, I only ordered the teacher bundle of the kit. I feel like I didn't really need to get the child pack with it since it will be for my own baby. I don't need to have tracking sheets. But, its funny because I won't even be able to use this kit fully for a few months since baby girl isn't even here yet. I just had to have this new curriculum. I also figured it might be good for the soon-to-be middle child to help with the baby and connect with her, hopefully making the transition easier.

Mr A was digging into everything before I could get pictures. He's impatient like me and can't handle surprises very well. We have to know what's inside a box/package.

The overview booklet goes over all of the materials that are included in the curriculum... What the materials are and a little bit on how to use them in your routine.

A music cd and daily activity cards or Shared Experience Cards. These little things are neat and a mini lesson on this entire curriculum can be found at the site (here). There are ways listed on the back of each card to accommodate different age levels: young infant, older infant or young toddler. So, these can actually be used for several months as your baby grows.

We got a cube to insert photo cards for games and activities. (We actually received one in our regular MGT curriculum, so we have two of these now and I am so happy about that.) The cards are inserted into the pockets of the cube and is ready for interactive games, tossing, squishing and learning.

A sheet of characters and sticks to make puppets for a few activities on the Experience Cards.

A rhyme time poster.

A poster to track learning benchmarks according to age.

Card with different types of learning activities.

I am looking forward to this baby curriculum. As soon as I can work it into the schedule after baby is here, I hope it will be great for all of us.

My September Set-Up

Of course I started with laminating all of the new display pieces and the things I get done for the month. I like the whole laminating process; from going to the store and laying out all the pieces in the laminator to cutting it all apart.

I have been using the plain wall to house all of the display items for quite some time. Last year we tried the poster board and it got destroyed within two months since it was mobile. My husband has gotten used to me taking over the house with our 'school stuff', but I figured I would try to accommodate him a little this time around. I got another poster board to layout most of the circle time materials. Here was my first attempt.

My board ended up like this, below. I have a spot for the Experience Baby cards, the visual schedule cards and the verse card from the Experience God add-on. I also used felt/flannel as the pond for the number fish. This way, the little fishies can be removed easily and played with.

The poster board fit perfectly on the backside of the counter/cabinets in the kitchen. So, I decided to make that the new home for our MGT lessons and display.

 The adjacent wall is used for additional posters from the curriculum.

The boys have their desks near the MGT corner and we have a cubby (on the right of the picture) that holds bins of the MGT manipulatives, cd player and bin of extra craft materials.

This is our new set-up. We will see how it works and if we like this new location. But, I'm proud that I was able to get it off of the wall and into one corner for my husband. =)