These easy grits make a nice alternative for a hot breakfast if your kids are sick of oatmeal!
Ingredients:
Toddlers love learning to pour and there’s no better place for it than in the bathtub. That way, you literally have no spills to clean up!
I decided to make it extra fun for Veronika by turning a pouring lesson into a tea party game. A low stool made a perfect table, and I filled the tub with a little warm water and got her in her bathing suit.
Set the table with a tea set of course! We added a pot, plates, and two cups, along with a few toy “cookies”.
She was so happy to be a guest! First I filled our cups with the “tea” and pretended to take a sip, which just made her grin.
Then it was her turn! She loved being in charge of the tea pot…
…and also loved using one of the cups to scoop up hot water and fill the other cup.
We got silly and filled the “cookies” with water two, and experimented with taking the lid on and off the pot.
She probably could have stayed in here playing this game for hours, but the water got cold!
After hitting the ground running yesterday, today felt a little more like a walk. Maybe because I only got 4 hours sleep, maybe because Tuesdays are only a half day in our town, so we didn’t pack in as much. But without further ado, here’s what we joyfully tackled!
6.30-8.30: Breakfast, get dressed, free play.
9-10: Circle time, ELA. After a quick moment to check in by our calendar, we jumped into ELA for the day. Travis’s class has been working on writing a story with two parts, and his centered around Anakin Skywalker of course.
We reviewed the sight words his class has learned (to the tune of “B-I-N-G-O”), then practiced writing them in shaving cream! Travis didn’t want to get his fingers messy, but a wooden skewer worked perfectly. Where was my toddler, meanwhile? Busy getting dressed.
10-10.30: Snack/recess. It was a snowy raw day, so we only briefly ventured outside before “indoor recess” and a quick bite.
10.30-11: Travis listened to two stories from Storyline Online (a great resource!), then we took some time to compare the two and discuss their differences and similarities. He finished off the half hour with about 15 minutes on Lexia.
11-11.30: Math. We played Go Fish using number cards, which is great for reading pips and numerals. To make it physical we turned it into Go Fitness Fish. Each match was assigned an activity, like yoga tree pose for matching 2s, or jumping jacks for matching 3s.
This had us laughing and super active! (It helped that my toddler was napping). We finished off with a page of How High Can a Dinosaur Count.
11.30-12.30: He was hungry early! We watched yesterday’s episode of Lunch Doodles with Mo Williams since we were too early for today’s 1 p.m. showing. Travis was so proud of his many -legged creature!
12.30-1: In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we listened to Irish music provided by the school’s Music teacher. This had both kiddos doing reels and jigs!
1-1.30: We finished with a quick lesson on American Sign Language, and a quick “science” book about the human body, but then called it quits.
Normally, he has a Tuesday acting class. To ease his disappointment that the final performance is now cancelled, we staged it at home, obligatory costume for little sister included of course.
This had him laughing and so happy, and was the highlight of the day. A round of Kids Charades kept up the acting play to round out his afternoon.
See you for another full day tomorrow!
Travis and I did a brief lesson on American Sign Language during homeschool today, a lesson plan provided by Raddish Kids (which, by the way, has dozens of homeschool units even if you don’t subscribe to their recipe kits).
The lesson was a great way to talk about embracing and accepting difference, starting by asking Travis if he knew what it meant to be deaf. Once I explained the concept to him, it immediately became familiar since he remembers some of the Sign he used as a baby, and we use it now with little sister Veronika. A video link had neat biology about the ear.
Raddish provided lots of links which could make this a very detailed homeschool unit for older kids. We kept things simple and jumped ahead to learning a few songs in ASL, including Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Veronika was grinning when we checked out a video for 16 animals in ASL, since she already knows most of these. She looked thrilled we were speaking “her” language.
It was fun to go through the alphabet and Sign the kids’ names, too!
You can add to the lesson by cooking a love-ly recipe or curling up with books on the topic. We read I Have a Sister, My Sister is Deaf by Jeanne Whitehouse, Hands & Hearts by Donna Jo Napoli, which had us learning a few new Signs, and The Deaf Musicians, a great book for onomatopoeia by Pete Seeger.
Extend the unit with older kids by doing a biography of a famous deaf person. Fun suggestions include Beethoven or Helen Keller.
This soup cooks up in a slow-cooker, a life-saving device whether you’re working out of the home or suddenly busy homeschooling kids all day long. When dinnertime rolls around, it’s ready and waiting for you.
Ingredients:
This cute activity is a hands-on way to build your toddler’s clothing vocabulary. Veronika’s earliest words were clothing items (“socks!”), and whenever we come in from outside, she runs through the litany of things to remove: “Coat, hat, mittens…” So I knew she would love this interactive version of getting dressed.
First, I laid her down on a big sheet of craft paper and traced her outline (which turned out a bit wiggly; she’s a toddler after all!).
Then I filled in the basic outline of a person.
I had brought down several articles of her clothing and took turns lying these near the person we’d drawn. “What are these called?” I asked. “Pants!” she responded. Then I positioned the item where they should go on the body.
Shirt, hat, socks, and mittens soon followed.
Of course your toddler won’t always leave things in the “right” place, but Veronika sure loved playing with all the clothing.
A great way to keep a little sibling busy!
Friends! I have always considered myself a hands-on mom and a crafty mom, but to all you home school moms out there: RESPECT. I find myself now in this position due to COVID-19, so… here goes nothing!
What were the biggest challenges I discovered in Day 1? Simultaneously caring for a 16 month old, and keeping Travis focused. To that end, I sprinkled in a few projects to keep Veronika busy, and used her nap strategically for when Travis needed me by his side the most.
Biggest takeaway from Day 1? Tomorrow we’ll have a firm policy of home toys packed away when school is in “session”, to avoid distraction. Also, it was clear that my kids perform best early in the day. Front-loading activities meant that I could dole out afternoon lessons with a little more space in between, which definitely suited the rhythm of our household.
Without further ado, here’s how our day went!
6.30-8.30: Breakfast, get dressed, free play.
8.30-9: Circle Time and Spanish. Sticking with his normal routine, we sat down and went through the calendar, the weather, and the day of the week. Then we sang along to a Spanish song from his teacher on You Tube, and he worked on a Spanish coloring page. (Lil sis played with big swings!)
9-10: ELA. We “tapped out” his four words of the day on our fingers, then read a story (The Name Jar), focusing on what happened at the beginning, middle, and end. Then he did 20 minutes on the Lexia website (I stole a moment to bake bread!).
10-10.15: Snack time.
10.15-10.45: Recess! Get outside and dig in the dirt.
10.45-12: Math/quiet time. Travis worked on his school’s math website for a dot matching game that emphasized the concepts of “more than”, “less than”, and “equal to”. He loved the game! We also tackled the problems on one page of How High Can a Dinosaur Count, a fantastic book we already have at home. Baby sister now needed me, so it was a good time for quiet activities like drawing a picture of his favorite thing and working on tangram puzzles.
12-1: Lunch/free play. It was nice to give him some downtime!
1-1.30 – PE! This would have been his “special” today, so we juggled with socks, then had a family dance party to Can’t Stop the Feeling. We finished up with a few dances from Go Noodle that really got us moving and had both kids laughing!
1.30-2: Arts and Crafts. We made pompom puppets.
2-2.30: Pulling from books we already have at home, today we read Usborne’s Big Book of Stars and Planets.
2.30-3: Board game. We finished off the day with some group fun, and today Travis selected Animal Bingo. You can see the kids were silly by this point!
Class dismissed! We headed out for a family walk and some fresh air, which turned into fantastic fun with Travis “racing” me and the stroller to each mailbox. We returned full of vigor and ready for an afternoon snack.
Yikes, I am exhausted but ready for tomorrow. How is your family faring under social distancing? Please share in the comments; let’s all unite virtually in this unprecedented time!
Travis needed an art project for the first day of “home school”, so I turned to Highlights magazine for inspiration. It turned out the pompom puppets we tackled were a bit advanced for a kindergartner, but we sure got silly and had fun making them.
The method looked simple enough: Wind colorful yarn around the tines of a fork to make the body of a pompom.
Tie with a small piece of yarn in the center, making sure to tightly double-knot, then slide off the fork and snip the loops on either end so you have the frills of a pompom.
This sounded good in theory! But we quickly found out that the fork resulted in very small pom poms and they unraveled into pieces when we tried to cut the loops. Thinking quickly, we wound around mommy’s fingers instead! This resulted in workable pompoms.
To turn them into puppets, wrap colored felt around your child’s finger until it is the right size, then use glue to secure.
Travis helped pick out decorations for his silly creatures, but once again the project was a bit hard for small hands. I jumped in with a little hot glue to secure pipe cleaner antennae, wiggle eyes, and button decor according to his wishes.
What silly creatures!
Travis loved waving them on his fingers. Soon they even had little space pods to travel around in.
Plus he even had fun playing with the extra yarn from our failed attempts, in what turned into a very creative game. So these turned out to be great for imaginative play, even if the crafting was too advanced for him.
When my eldest was little, the instructor in his baby music class always encouraged the kids to echo syllables into a toy microphone, as in “ba ba ba” or “la la la”. Inevitably it took forever to go around the circle, and inevitably the kids clammed up when it was their turn, rendering the whole thing a big waste of time.
But the activity is not without its merits; the idea is to encourage mimicking, work on learning favorite sounds (like animal noises), and building the muscles needed for language development. I had a hunch that the privacy of the home would be a better spot for this activity, so today, Veronika was the star of the show!
I made a big deal of it to set the scene, of course. “Announcing, today’s performer, Miss Veronika!” She looked so pleased with the microphone in her hand.
I started out with syllables. “Ba ba ba,” I said. She did it right back!
“Ma ma ma.” She echoed me again! I knew she was really in to it when she went three for three, using “la la la” on the third round.
Then we got into animal sounds. Here’s quick clip including a “meow” for one of her favorite animals.
I stepped away for a quick chore, and returned a few minutes later to find her humming into the microphone.
Surely it will be no time at all before she’s belting out tunes into the mic. A little performer indeed!
Veronika got a little indoor batting practice this morning with a toddler version of T-ball!
For set up, you’ll first need to tie a length of ribbon to any child-sized ball. I liked using her sensory balls with holes in them, since the ribbon looped through easily, but you could also just tape ribbon to a solid ball.
Now tape the other end of the ribbon above an open doorway. Make sure to use lots of tape so these are secure. Veronika reached up immediately, quite intrigued.
I handed her a wooden spoon and showed her how to bat at the balls. She was a quick study!
Whether using her hands or the spoon, it delighted her to see the balls make big swings back and forth.
She also loved walking through the dangling balls.
Or holding on to one as she spun and twirled and walked back and forth.
An alternate title for this post could very well have been “How to entertain your toddler while homeschooling a big sibling”, ha. It kept her so busy while big brother tackled his morning Spanish and English Language Arts!
joyful parenting 