Children in Need

It was Children in Need last week and Zoe has loved seeing "Teddy!" all around so I thought we could do some activities involving him. I found some great printables just by googling Children in need, including this cute bear mask on the Scholastic website. Zoe has fun making spots using stamp pads, whilst Aidan chose to colour his. 

Cutting the mask out also provided him with some good fine motor skills too.

Zoe also gave her fine motor skills a work out with these pretty pom poms! 

Aidan stayed up until quite late watching the programmes and some of the videos about the poorly Children reduced him to tears. It may seem harsh to have let him watch upsetting things like this but it I think it was good for him to appreciate that he is lucky, despite his own medical problems (he was recently diagnosed with Hirschsprungs disease)  there are children much worse than him.

Bonfire Night - Remember, Remember the 5th of November!

Happy Bonfire Night!

Today Zo and I have been looking at Fireworks and Bonfire Night based activities.

I printed off some Bonfire night related pictures from Here and we set about colouring them in, as we coloured I told Zo the colour of crayon she was using so she could get used to the words.

Then I gave her a piece of black card and some beautiful, sparkly firework stickers that I got from Baker Ross, at first I didn't remove the backing so she could move them around freely and create as she wanted to, this was also great movement for her little Fingers. After a while I began peeling the labels for her so she could actually stick them and make a permanent picture

 

 

 

We watched a video of the London New Year Fireworks on Youtube and later tonight we will go to an organised Firework display as a Family.

For Older Children there are some great resources over at Activity Village

I hope your Bonfire night goes with a BANG and you all stay safe

Playing with Purpose

Little Zoe is now 2 (when did that happen right?) so I have started to explore "Playing with Purpose" with her. It's not deep thinking or Learning, it's not sitting down for hours teaching her, it's just giving her play a little more thought. For example: Giving play a theme, Halloween, Easter, Bonfire night, this makes the play relevant to the world around her or thinking of Textures, crunchy, soft, noisy, shiny.

I did similar with my oldest child Aidan, you can see lot's of posts on what I did with him if you scroll back through the blog or by clicking on the Label "Learning the Alphabet" to the right of screen (just one example here)  and I REALLY, REALLY think it helped him as now he is at School he is doing Fantastically. His Teachers have all said he has a love of learning and is keen to try things, his reading is excellent and he is reading at a level well above his keystage, as a Mum this of course thrills me.

 

 I am planning on updating this blog as often as I can with the different play ideas I come up with for Little Zo. The ideas won't be difficult, excessively time consuming or expensive, after all I am just an ordinary Mum, but hopefully it might help set her on the road to a life of Leaning as well as give others ideas for playing with their little ones.