Month: October 2020

A splash of color and a few dabs on the paper and you have an easy and gorgeous Bat Silhouette Halloween Art.

What you need:

• white card stock
• black cardstock
• scissors
• marker
• sponge brush or use finger tip
• paints
• optional – tape

Directions:

1. Fold a sheet of white paper in half.
2. Draw two bat “halves”.
3. Cut out along the drawn lines to get the bat silhouettes.
4. Prepare your paints – we used white, yellow and orange in our project.
5. Place the bat silhouette on the black paper. If working with younger kids, secure the bats by making a roll of  tape and sticking it on the bat – press the bat on the black paper – the tape will hold it in place and it will be easy to remove afterwards.
6. Dab the sponge brush (or your finger tip) in colors and start dabbing all around the bat cutouts. Add more paint, until you are happy with the intensity and spread of the paint.
7. Remove the bath silhouettes. All done, this simple Halloween art project is complete.

Check out the video of this art project here.

Try this art project with different silhouettes and background colours, like pumpkins, ghosts or black cat.

Children seek dress-up out naturally.

Here are the benefits of playing with costumes.

1. Dress up play fosters the imagination

Children have vast, open imaginations. When children play dress up, they root their imaginative stories in reality for a short while, giving them a chance to explore it more thoroughly.

For example, if your child dons a fireman’s hat, he practices helping people, community service and bravery.

2. Dress up play lets them explore themselves

By pretending to be other people, children experiment with new ideas and behaviors. They can decide what they like and what they don’t.

3. Dress up play strengthens relationships

Playing with costumes is a strong lesson in empathy. By “living” the life of someone else, your child has to put themselves in that person’s shoes. How do they feel? What are their motivations? How would they behave in certain situations?

4. Dress up play improves communication

Dress up forces children to experiment with new language. They have to anticipate what, for example, a ballerina would say, or how a space explorer would speak. This gives them chance to practice with words and phrases they wouldn’t normally use.

Halloween is a good time to let children play dress-up games.

Keep a variety of dress-up items on hand. Garage sales and thrift stores are great, often inexpensive sources. Unlike an expensive ready made costume that a child uses to be a single specific character it is preferable to have “open ended”  non gender specific dress up ideas that can be used by a child in a multitude of different ways.

Stock a dress-up box or trunk with these essentials to encourage creative storytelling play.

1. Scarves or play silks are the most versatile, and therefore most essential item for storytelling play. They can be worn as a head covering, a scarf, a skirt, a dress. They can become water or grass in the setting or used as a bag to carry items. The options are limitless — just like kids’ imaginations!
2. Toss hats, purses and bags, glasses, jewelry or other accessories into the dress-up box for kids to incorporate into their characters’ ensembles.
3. The right prop can inspire a story and make excellent gifts for kids to include in their creative play. Ex. Swords and shields; Wings and cape
4. Recyclables: Even better than specific props, “trash” can be a real treasure in imaginative play. Like with scarves, kids can use their imaginations to turn boxes and bags into costumes or props. Ex. Boxes and paper bags; Paper-towel and toilet-paper rolls; Old socks or scraps of fabric

Happy dress-up! Happy Halloween!

• Halloween is a holiday celebrated annually on 31 October.
• It is the evening just before the two Christian holy days called the All Hallows’ Day:
  • All Saints’ or Hallowmas on 1 November
  • All Souls’ Day on 2 November
• Halloween is like a community based festival and is mostly celebrated in Western countries.
• Kids and adults wear different costumes of their choice and attend costume parties.
• Big pumpkins are carved into lanterns and put off for display by people in their houses.
• Some people like to visit haunted locations on Halloween where they share scary stories with each other.
• People also play pranks tricks to scare each other.
• Superstitious people light bonfires in their court yards to keep their house safe from ghosts and evil spirits.

Come and join me for Halloween Songs and Rhymes.

Visit the BC Centre for Disease Control  site for tips on how to celebrate Halloween safely this year.

Happy Halloween!

Thanksgiving Day is an annual Canadian holiday, occurring on the second Monday in October, which celebrates the harvest and other blessings of the past year. A celebration of being thankful for what one has and the bounty of the previous year.

Please join me for some Thanksgiving Songs and Rhymes .

You can listen to 10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston and Illustrated by Rich Deas here.

Mindfulness For Children – THE GRATITUDE TREE

Purpose: Gratitude, Positivity, Connection

Best for ages: 3+

What you need:

Colored paper to cut out leaves (double sided is nice for colorful leaves)

String or ribbon to hang the leaves on the tree branches

Scissors

Twigs or tree branches

Rocks to add stability to the tree

Vase

Grateful hearts

Directions

1. Make a leaf cutout (or a few for variety) to use as your template. Here’s a PDF template from Jennifer Cooper at Classic Play. Trace the rest of the leaves on a bigger sheet and cut them out.
2. Punch a hole at the top of each leaf and loop a piece of string through each.
3. Put stones in a vase and stick the tree branch there.
4. Have your child draw or write about things he is grateful for on the leaves. If they are too young, you can write for them. You could also find some old photos and make a visual tree instead of writing things down.
5. You can make a few leaves of your own to model the concept for your child.
6. Hang the leaves from the branches

Have fun counting your blessings as a family!

• Collect a few, clear plastic jars with easy to remove lids.
• Place a different nature element, that you collected last week, inside each jar and close the lid.
• Ask your child to take off the lid and pull out the item. (you might need to start this activity with loose lids so his small fingers can remove the object more easily).
• Your young child will be eager to remove the items from the jars again and again. (make sure the objects are big enough, so they won’t be a choking hazard).
• For additional challenge for your preschooler provide jars and boxes that have different types of lids.

Learning to remove a lid, even if it’s already unscrewed, helps your toddler develop eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills. And just attempting to unscrew a lid enhances these same skills as well. In this activity, success is immediately rewarded, ensuring that your toddler and preschooler will want to try removing the lid again and again.

It is not unusual to find that the play of young children can be very repetitive.

It can be pretty hard to read exactly the same story, to repeat the same nursery rhyme over and over and over again. To do the same activity you did last week, and the week before, and the week before that.

But there is a reason why children in the early years love repetition so much. It is more than just doing the same thing twice. What seems to you like a dry, repetitive activity is a world of new learning and the comforting embrace of something familiar to a child faced with a world that is anything but.

Young children are surrounded by things they don’t understand.

That means their daily lives can be a melting pot of confusion and uncertainty.

So while older children may search for novelty, it makes sense that children in their early years search for understanding and predictability.

Repetition is valuable because each time they experience something the knowledge becomes more secure and their feeling of self-worth increases.

Remember that repetition is not a repeated experience but something that gives them a new level of understanding each and every time.

Think back to when you learned to ride a bike, drive a car or play a new sport. First, you needed to learn the essential skills. Then it was all about practice and more practice until you increased your confidence, improved your speed and became skilled.

The next time your little one asks you to read a book yet again, watch the same circle time on the Strongstart blog or wants to play the same game over and over, remind yourself that it’s a good thing! It’s good because repetition provides the practice that children need to master new skills. Repetition helps to improve speed, increases confidence, and strengthens the connections in the brain that help children learn.

Repetition is not just the same thing twice.

Infants

You can foster repetition for your infant by making everyday activities “teachable moments.” Babies learn so much during daily routines like diapering, feeding and bath time. These are great times to talk with your little one, sing songs and play games.

Try new activities from the blog or adapt the ones that are favorites of your baby. For example, you might give your baby some everyday items instead of toys. A wooden spoon, a set of plastic bowls or a cardboard paper towel tube can entertain your little one and give her repeated practice in holding, nesting, stacking and many other skills that can only be perfected through repeated practice.

Toddlers

Toddlers really love to repeat actions over and over again. If you begin to get impatient, try to remember that your toddler’s brain connections are being strengthened through this repetition!

When you find an activity that your toddler really loves, follow your little one’s lead and let him do it over and over again. You might offer suggestions to add a new twist to the activity.

Preschoolers

Preschoolers are ready for more advanced skills and can benefit from some added challenge. If your child really enjoys an activity, let him repeat it multiple times. Repetition is the key to learning.  Mastering a new skill gives them a lot of confidence and even motivates them for future challenges.

Play. Learn. Repeat. That’s what it’s all about.

Now let’s repeat some of our favorite Nursery Rhymes and Songs with teacher Maria.

Children love the outdoors, love to collect things, and love arts. We can  nurture all three of these passions by helping children create a collage of natural element.

• Take your child on a walk in your backyard, a park, or the woods and collect small leaves, flowers, grass, sticks, feathers, and whatever else she can finds and appeals to her.
•  While taking a relaxed walk you can talk to your child about changes that happen every day. Share observations about the weather, blossoming flowers, falling leaves, as well as children’s own growing bodies.
• Use the outing as a time to expose your child to some new words and concepts by talking about what you find. ” See this leaf? It’s from a maple tree.” How many different coloured leaves did you find?”
• Once you are home, place a piece of clear contact paper, sticky side up, on top of a tray or on your window. Tape each corner of the contact paper to the tray or window to keep the paper from sticking to your hands.
• Help your child to arrange her outdoors treasure on the contact paper.
• Place another piece of transparent contact paper, sticky side down, over the first one to help preserve your child’s work of art.
• Hang the collage in a window, or your child’s room… anywhere she can proudly showcase her creation.

Letting your child choose her nature elements , and arrange them herself helps her identify and express her personal preferences. Talking to her about nature as you explore the outdoors encourages her to notice and describe the world. And the task of applying objects to sticky contact paper helps enhance her fine motor skills.