The audiobook currently on repeat in our house is E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children.
Can you guess the children’s names from this post-it I found in the living room?
Everyday Life
In Age Order
Tirzah Mae and Louis are playing that they are Ella and Rally ‘Round Campbell. They are two of many siblings, all of whom have elaborate back stories.
Ella is carefully skirting the edges of rooms to make sure she’s socially distancing from those Garcia-folk, who are NOT in her household.
Louis (er, Rally ‘Round) is currently listing the order each child came out of the uterus.
It’s election season
I’m less than thrilled at the political mailers constantly inundating our home.
Shiloh, though, is eating them up.
Normal and not
Daniel has a lamp on his nightstand. He turns it on each night as we make our way to bed. We dress and read and, all too often, poke at our phones in the light of that little lamp.
I have two lamps on my nightstand. One is on a timer. It turns on at 0545 and off at 0730, its bright full-spectrum light intended to tell my body that it needn’t hibernate for winter. My other lamp is for finishing a chapter after Daniel goes to sleep, or putting the final touches on my plan for the next day. I use it rarely.
On nights like tonight, when Daniel is traveling for work, I turn on Daniel’s lamp when I come in to get ready for bed. I sit in bed and read or poke at my phone or finish up my plan for the next day. And then I reach over the empty space where my husband ought to lie and turn off his lamp. My lamps remain unused.
Life is so very normal and so very abnormal when he is gone.
Labor Day Fun for Mama and Papa
What’s the most popular starting letter for American state names?
One could ask the internet.
Or one could grab an atlas or similar list of state names.
Or one could write down the names of all 50 states from memory, recording each first letter on a different piece of scratch paper before counting them up and organizing them most popular to least.
I’m sure you couldn’t guess which one we did.
A Very Simple Exploration of Magnetism
Experiments in early childhood needn’t be complicated.
We read about magnetism during reading time yesterday, so our activity time was a very simple exploration of magnetism.
I gathered up a magnet for each child (the magnetic “keys” for our magnetic child locks are great because they have “handles”) and a selection of everyday items I have from around the house (Q-tips, pens, bobby pins, paper clips, barrettes, earrings, steel wool, etc.)
Each child got a piece of paper that had been divided in two and labeled “Y” for yes and “N” for no (with different colors for all the pre-readers). Their challenge was to guess which items the magnet would pick up and to put those on the “Y”. If they guessed that the magnet wouldn’t pick something up, they could put it on the “N”.
I explained that their guess was a hypothesis and that now they could test their hypothesis using the magnets.
While testing their hypotheses, they moved their objects from the paper to different cups.
Once they’d divided all their objects and tested all their hypotheses, they could get down and explore the house, making hypotheses about the objects they found around the house and testing their hypotheses.
That’s it. A very simple exploration of magnetism – and one that helped the children also understand a bit about the process of science.
You can help your child become a scientific thinker this same way.
Ask, “What do you think will happen if…”
Explain that what your child just guessed is their hypothesis.
Now ask the child if they’d like to test their hypothesis. Is their hypothesis true or false? Test it several times just to make sure.
Familiarizing your early learners with the scientific process is that easy.
You can do this!
Little Language Lessons
We like precise language here in the Garcia household, so I got a kick out of this little exchange between the two-year-olds:
Two-year-old number one: “Mama, I need out!”
Two-year-old number two: “You want out, not need out.”
Then louder, “Mama, we want out!”
The Value of Undirected Play
I could have called the kids in for a sensory bin for activity time this morning, but they were busy squishing mud into a muffin tin to make cupcakes.
So I let them learn.
I could have called the kids in for a STEM activity for activity time this morning, but they were building an oven to bake their cupcakes in.
So I let them learn.
I could have called the kids in for an art project for activity time this morning, but they were decorating their cupcakes with sunflower petals.
So I let them learn.
And then I posted it to bekahcubed to remind myself that, especially in early childhood, undirected play is the best way to learn.
Tirzah Mae writes
Tirzah Mae loves to write.
Her little notes are strewn about the house and on every available surface (I haven’t had the time or energy to repaint basically the whole basement after last year’s great graffiti-ing. Sigh.)
Anyway, now that she’s doing phonics, her invented spellings are improving. She doesn’t always sound them back out when she’s reading them back to me, though – so I had to laugh when she read this:
“Tirzah Mae
Beth-Ellen
Wrecking truck”
I had to tell her that I didn’t think her memory served her correctly, since that last line clearly says wrecking BACKHOE!
Color Kits, LEGO dolls, and grasping babies
The LEGO set Tirzah Mae and Louis got a few months ago didn’t have people in it – so they made some of their own.
Also, no longer contented using MagnaTiles to build structures, Tirzah Mae has turned them into “color kits” that she uses to decorate her own hair and my hair.
Shiloh is going through a leap, which means rather less sleep for mama – but it also means she’s intentionally grasping at toys hanging from her play gym and moving them about while talking excitedly.
Louis continues to delight in knights and swords, and has added a tin can rerebrace to his armor.
Beth-Ellen is determined to prove my earlier lament about timing wrong by potty training diligently.
Life is good in these parts.