Extra Large Family Photo Album

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As your child becomes more familiar with faces, not just in the immediate family but of relatives as well, pictures are a big help. That way, family and friends whom baby sees often – but not every day – will become even more recognizable. This can also ease separation anxiety, if he or she is ever left alone with these friends and relatives.

To help, we made an extra big photo album today! This project isn’t fancy; I put the pics in a single=subject spiral notebook like you used to use in school.

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Note: I would have made the pictures even bigger, except that printing costs go up as photo size goes up. But 5×7 prints seemed to work well, fitting nicely onto the pages of an 8×11 notebook.

I made a quick cover from construction paper, positioning the album in landscape mode.

On each page, affix a picture. I used tape so that no edges would curl up, which I feared would happen over time if I used glue.

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You can add a caption under each picture, which means this album will do double-duty as your child ages, and wants to go through early memories!

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Make sure to include lots of familiar faces, family friends, and big moments.

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And of course, pictures of baby too! Infants love looking at themselves.

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Veronika seemed fascinated when we flipped through. She wanted to reach out and turn the pages.

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And seemed very clued in to the faces she was looking at.

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Travis loved flipping through the album, too. Despite its very unprofessional appearance, we plan to add pictures as the months move forward, and we’re hoping this is an album we’ll treasure for years to come.

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Magnetic Fishing Game

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Travis and I played a game like this quite some time ago, but with a focus on numbers and letters more than the fish. Today, we just needed some silly fishy fun, and it turned out to be an interesting lesson in magnetism, too!

First, I cut out a fish template. Travis helped trace these onto construction paper and cut out.

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Instead of hammering home preschool skills with letters and numbers this time, I invited him to draw on the fish. Silly smiles and scales soon turned into him being a fish doctor.

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Oh no, some fish had polka dot flu! Or squiggle-itis!

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For the fishing rods, tie yarn around one end of a dowel, and secure with masking tape. I tied a small magnet onto the other end of the yarn.

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We set up our fish in the ocean, and raced to rescue them as fish doctors. I loved that he came up with this imaginative element to the game all on his own.

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When he tried to rescue more than one fish at a time, he was disappointed the second one fell off from the small magnets we were using.

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Hmm, would one of the bigger magnets we had around the house rescue more fish faster? Whoa, look how many we could pick up with this magnet!

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Pretty soon, we were testing relative magnet strength in all kinds of ways, so all-in-all I’d say this was a great activity to help pass a rainy morning!