Water Play

It was such a beautiful day the other day, we decided to take our play learning outside. Come on, could you resist this? We love the way our "front yard" looks this time of year. The best part of it is that we don't have to worry about the maintenance. 

While it looks gorgeous, it was still quite warm outside so I thought playing in water might be just the thing. I stripped Erik down to his diaper (because I'm lazy and didn't want any extra laundry), then we took a large pitcher of water outside, along with lots of bowls and cups and other fun things that would work to play with water. The idea was to just let Erik play around with the water, see if he would pour it out of the containers, etc. He mostly just wanted to splash. He hasn't really grasped the concept that the water reacts to his actions yet. Thus this activity! In hind sight, I should have started more simply with one big bowl of water and one cup or bowl for him to play with. I showed him how to scoop up the water and pour it back out, but he was too excited by all the fun stuff to really care about what I was doing. This is definitely one we will be revisiting, probably often, at least until the weather gets too cool. 

This activity is a great one for several reasons. It helps with hand-eye coordination, as well as understanding spacial relations. It's a great sensory activity to feel the wet and cold water and builds vocabulary when you talk about what it feels like and what the water's doing when he's splashing and pouring. And it gets you out of the house!
The idea for this activity came from here, where you'll find many more fun things like this.


Maybe the biggest problem with this activity was that Erik was way too excited about being outside to want to sit still. He was way more interested in dragging his little naked knees across the rough sidewalk to go exploring. I guess we need to make a point of getting outside more often.

Playing to Learn

Several different factors have influenced me to focus a little more on making sure Erik is surrounded by opportunities to learn and grow. This has prompted me to make some changes in our daily life, which will also be reflected in my blog.

The aftermath of edible finger painting in the bathtub.

     I recently started babysitting a young infant for a friend who has to go back to her full time job. This means that from the time Erik wakes up in the morning until the middle of the afternoon, he has to share me with our new little friend, PJ. He's not used to not being the center of my attention, and it has been a bit of an adjustment for everyone. I try really hard to make sure that he gets plenty of attention during the day, but I also decided that I was going to make the few hours we have alone in the afternoon into something special. I've been trying really hard to make sure we have good quality one on one time every afternoon. Some days this means doing something new that we've never tried before, and other days it means I just make sure that we spend a few extra minutes playing with his cars, or blocks, or whatever he's interested in.
    Like many of us, I like to look around on pinterest, and often come across cute little ideas for teaching kids their letters, or numbers, or reading, or whatever. I was thinking to myself the other day that I was so excited for some day when Erik's big enough to do those things, and then it hit me; I have a college degree in early childhood education. I went to school to learn how to teach infants and toddlers. Why do I have to wait until he's big enough to learn his ABC's, I know there is so much more that has to come before he can do that, so why am I not doing it! Maybe I could actually apply all that I learned, and make a difference in my child's life. DUH! Wow, I'm really bright, huh? So, I decided then and there to put my college degree to use. I've been reading my old textbooks again, and scouring the internet and the library for ideas, and have a good little list of things I want to try with Erik. I'm also going to be working on new activities for PJ, but for now she's pretty small, and her activities include things like tracking an object back and forth as it moves, not exactly something that needs a whole blog post to itself. As she gets bigger and I come up with things for her that some one else might enjoying reading about, those may get posted on here too.
    I'm going to start doing regular posts about the things I do with Erik and PJ, hopefully once a week, but we'll see. I will post links to these activities on my new Playing to Learn page, so you they can always be found easily. I also plan to have a list of links to different websites that I have found useful in planning things to do with little kids, so anyone who's interested can look for more ideas to try. Hope you enjoy our learning activities play time. The first Playing to Learn activity is scheduled to be posted tomorrow morning, so come back and check it out!