Hollis recently had a birthday party with a farm theme. I chose this theme because i find it relevant in the world of toddlers and preschoolers...also i kind of have an obsession with farms. He got farm books and farm toys, farm balloons and farm clothes. We've been working on animal sounds by playing Zoo world and he learned to roar when he sees lions and tigers (and any cat in general) and says ah ah when he sees a primate monkey type of animal, so i know he can pick up on animal sounds (they are a little more basic than actual words). At the doctor's office on tuesday I showed him a book with a kitty on it - he roared, and i said no meow. he wasn't interested so i turned the page to a duck and said quack quack. that time, he echoed me and said dah dah. fast forward to this a.m. when i picked up his see n say and showed him the duck and said quack quack. ehhhh he didn't echo me that time, so i just started spinning the see n say around and it went to the cow, so i told him the cow said moooooo. he roared. not quite. so i repeated it over and over until he said ooooooo, and i made a big huge happy deal about it. then i showed him anything and everything i could find - a bouncy vibrating cow, a little people cow, a milk n cookies cow, the cow mylar balloon, the cows in his books - to all of which, we mooed together. cows come in lots of varieties so i want him to know what to expect when it comes to what sort of creatures say moo. we looked at different pictures of cows online - some were jerseys, some were holsteins, some were cartoons, but i encouraged him to say moo for each one. he has this neat milk n cookies toy that looks like a pitcher of milk and came with 5 different colored cookies to put in it. when you turn it upside down, it has one of those noisemakers in it that makes a moo-sound. after spending all day mooing at various things, i showed him this toy and he really thought it was the coolest thing. for weeks now he has been carrying it around collecting different toys in it, but when i showed him that it had a cow on it, and i mooed at the cow, then i turned it upside down and it made a mooo sound itself....well that was just the bees knees! he did it several times, fascinated. he finally understood why it made that silly noise!!
i showed him the sheep and said baaa, but somehow in babyese that translated to rawr. so i gave up on that and decided it was just going to be cow day. we ate some blue bell ice cream and i showed him the cows on the container and we mooed. then i popped in Babe, because that's a farmeyish movie.
its a study of
biology and
linguistics. maybe we'll stay on the farm theme long enough to go visit Dominion Farms and see some real farm animals. hmmm i think the children's museum has some farm/ranch/cowboy themed exhibit stuff too. and of course there's the obligatory trips to the library, singing farm songs (Old Macdonald) and watching movies like Babe and Milo and Otis. wonder what other Farm movies we have?
we've also been looking at other animals (we're working on the duck, the snake, the frog, and the sheep - roar! - lol), and he has known how to do puppy panting since he was a newborn i think - we have a very loud-breathing pug that he's in love with. from the puppy pant stemmed a study on the letter H - we go to starfall.com and watch the H clips and he practices his H sound with me. he rocks it man. i even drew the letter H for him and he started saying the H sound.
phonics.
we took him to the dentist, which was....an adventure. now we brush teeth every night with non-fluoridated toothpaste, and we happened to show up at story time on dentist day, so that was a happy accident. the Kool Smiles representative was very impressed by his enthusiasm for dental hygiene (little does she know i have to hold him down to get him to let me brush his teeth for him). he ran straight over to the stuffed animal with a toothy grin, picked up the demonstration toothbrush, gave the faux teeth a quick swipe then tried to brush his own teeth. oh dear.
health.
this week we are planning on going to the rec center for preschooler open play. i've also been taking him out to the hot tub, which he is LOVING. he's such a water baby. with the weather getting nice, i am letting him play in the yard. he does all sorts of gymnastics while nursing, and he's recently learned how to climb to the top of the stack of beds in his playroom that are waiting to be disbursed (the queen pillow top and box springs are going to my mother in law, the full bed into storage, and the toddler bed into our room once we get things set up) yep all the way to the top and back down on his own.
P.E.tomorrow I'm starting a new curriculum with my sunday school class, and the first lesson is a discussion on how Jesus is always there with us, with a story about him calming a storm. we will be playing in water tubs with toy boats and paper fans, then i'm going to employ the bigger kids to build a boat out of the blocks for us to all go in and use blue streamers to represent the waves, wind and rain. Hollis should get a kick out of that; he LOVES the big kids. that's our
chapel - and that's all i got for now!
