Fairy Tea Party 2018

Even though I have retired from StrongStart there are some activities that I love and will continue.

One is the Fairy Tea Party.

All set up.

Greeting the little fairies when they arrived.

Fairy Maureen explained how many doors were hidden around the park.

She gave each child a pipe cleaner with a bell tied to it.

When they find a door, beside it is a jar of beads, they take one bead and thread it on their pipe cleaner.

That way they can keep count of how many doors they found.

She also asked them to gently ring the bell beside each door to say thanks to the fairies for the gift.

Off they went running, searching and having fun.

Finding a door, collecting their bead and stringing it on.

Then off again.

After finding all the doors they went to find Fairy Maureen for tea.

Yum, fairy cakes and tea.

It was a wet morning but the fairies and gnomes didn't mind.

A Shopping Experience

A month or so ago my daughter sent me this video.

It was a quiet time in that grocery store so the Little One had time and space to push her shopping cart around to help mom.

I suggested, to my daughter, that the next time they go she create a shopping list for the Little One to follow.

And this is how it went.

At just under the age of 2 she is learning the different departments in a grocery store.

 She is learning how to read a list,

and check it off when she finds an item.

She is learning how to care for each item.  That they can be fragile.

She is increasing her vocabulary, her knowledge and understanding of the world she lives in.

This experience takes just a bit of preparation before hand.  

It also takes patience and a bit longer time shopping for the parent.

But it offers your child so much....

 knowledge (building on what she knows about her food), 

structure (that it takes some planning to shop), 

responsibility (if we want to eat we have to gather our food), and 

understanding of belonging (we each have our roles)

to a family.

The Hungry Caterpillar

I'm late but this is August's Treasure Basket.

Inspired by Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I created some puppets for her.

Oh she loved the look of this big pom pom caterpillar.

She tried to pull the pom poms apart.

I encouraged her to continue to empty the bag and she found the tiny pom pom caterpillar.

Also in the basket were the pictures of the food that are in the story.

Yum the tiny, hungry caterpillar ate it all.

And then it became a great big caterpillar.

That was as far as we got with our puppets and story.

Next year we will have to create a butterfly puppet to add.

My Airplane

This month our Little One has been on an airplane three times.

Late last month I started bringing books about airplanes and airports and reading them with her.

She had her first flight and when it was still fresh in her memory we built a plane of her own to fly.

If you have a little one still in diapers then you probably have a lot of empty diaper boxes just like in this house.  

They are the perfect size for infants and toddlers to play in.

The walls are not too tall so they can climb over them to get in and out, all by themselves.

And they are easy to cut to create anything that our imaginations can design.

Today it's an airplane.

Mom is adding a steering wheel with a cardboard tube and a lid from a yogurt container.

She is pretending how to 'drive' the plane.

A day later she discovers that this steering wheel will slide in and 'out' (as she says).

Watch how she focuses to put the tube back through the hole.

The hole is the natural handle slot in the box.

We added a few props from my airport kit.

A behind the seat pocket that holds emergency instructions and later on a barf bag that they brought home from one of their flights.

We filled a Kleenex box with old plastic grocery bags for a seat and added an old belt for a seat belt.

The seat belt was her favourite thing.

Which was not surprising because she loves to click every belt she sees.

Her high chair, car seat, back pack and stroller.  

That is her job and she won't let you move on until she has done it up.

It's a good skill to know.

I look forward to when she is strong enough to unclip them herself.

Needle Felted Carrots

Last week I attended a needle felting class to learn how to make fruits and vegetables.

The teacher had samples of carrots, beets, pears, and a pumpkin.

We started learning a carrot and I was so excited by how easy it was that I decided to make a little garden of them for my grand daughter.

She loves them.

We found a couple of rabbits for her to feed, instead of herself.

The carrots are different sizes as they do take time to make and I wanted to get 5 done during class time.

So one for her and

one for the rabbit.

She harvested all the carrots with no problem until she reached the last one.

It was stuck in the ground and she pulled and pulled

but it wouldn't come up.

She let go and signed for help.

I showed her how to use two hands.

One to hold the container in place and the other to pull the carrot.

Yay it worked!

When she was finished feeding herself and the rabbit she put all the carrots back into the garden.

Ready for another picking tomorrow.