One Plus One Blog

My friend Melissa shared a great preschool/homeschool blog today, and we had a lot of fun checking it out. What great ideas!

We might have to try the week in Instagram idea, along with many others.

The Topic of Giving

Like many parents, we work hard to instill a sense of the world in our children, and to teach them to do what they can to make a difference.

The topic of giving has been coming up with Bria a lot lately.

A cartoon she likes to watch occasionally called "My Big, Big Friend" has an episode where the characters gather up toys for a toy drive, and give them to children who don't have as much. Bria thought this was a great idea, and right away went to her toy box to decide what she could donate to the toy drive.

Another example came when my MOPS group decided to donate shoe boxes filled with gifts to Operation Christmas Child. I brought Bria with me to shop for a few gifts to add to the box, and she was very excited to be in a position to help. "We are giving toys to kids who don't have a Christmas," she told the woman at the register when we went to pay for the bits and pieces we had bought.

I had planned to sit down with Bria and allow her to put together her own box for the project, but time got away from me, and today was the day we were doing them at MOPS. So instead I brought her along to help put together the group boxes. I was so glad I did! She seemed to get a lot more out of discussing the project with the ladies at my table, and she got to help put together not one, but six boxes. She was like our little mascot, sitting in the center of the table and sorting things into boxes.

On the way home she was talking about the program, and then when she saw Daddy, she told him about it again. We are so proud of her!

A few years ago at Christmas, we gave the older children gifts from Heifer International. It was quite a beautiful blessing to watch their reactions and responses ad they learned about the program and asked questions about how their gifts helped. We will likely do the same with Bria in the future.

I wanted to do some research on ways to reinforce giving in our children, and the best ways to teach it. Of course, modeling giving behavior is the best option, but what else was out there? I was excited to find an entire system of lesson plans on teaching philanthropy! (Hello, is the internet awesome, or what?)

We will definitely be checking out Learning to Give more thoroughly - there was a LOT to digest there.

Here are a couple of articles on the topic, too:

9 Expert Tips for Teaching Children About Giving

Mom It Forward: Raising Giving Children

What have you done to help your child learn about giving?

What tests don't measure

I saw this on Facebook today, and thought it was an excellent reminder. The poster said it was on display at their child's pre-school...

John Taylor Gatto Quote

Good quote from John Taylor Gatto: "Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored”

C Collage

This week Bria and I have been learning about the letter C, so I thought we would try making a collage.

I pulled out a stack of magazines, some glue, scissors, and construction paper, and asked her what she would like to cut out.

She surprised me by saying, "Things that start with C!"

That will teach me not to be on my toes, right?

Puzzles

We got out the box of puzzles today because I was thinking of handing down some of her old ones and getting her some new, more age-appropriate and challenging ones. Of course, as is always the way with these things, as soon as I got them down it was as though she had new toys and she had to put each and every one of them together.

She was very speedy at it, though, so I do think new puzzles are still on the agenda.

Crescent Moon

Tonight the three of us stepped out for dinner, then stopped at a local park to "get the wiggles out" before bed. Bria loves the swings, so that is where she spent the majority of her time!

After a few minutes she got off the swing, and she and I were looking at the beautiful pink sky of the North Dakota sunset. She was pointing out the colors and the clouds, then I spotted the moon - but it wasn't moon like she expected it to be. A tiny sliver of crescent moon was just barely visible in the sky above the colorful clouds,  and she couldn't quite see it.

So Daddy drew her a picture in the bark of the playground floor of the moon she expected (a big, full circle), and explained how the moon always looks like that, but some days you can't see all of it because the rest is hiding. Then he scratched out all but the tiny crescent of moon and told her what it looked like tonight.

Bria looked back to the sky and saw it right away. And she was so pleased! I wish I had had a camera with me to see the look on her face as she discovered a phase of the moon she was unfamiliar with. It was a pretty amazing moment.

Then, of course, it was off to the slides.

Squishy Bag

We are big fans of Play At Home Mom, and often experiment with the fun activities they outline there. Yesterday Bria wanted to do a “project,” so we pulled up the website, and did this one...

…or at least our own variation on it. We didn’t have glitter, so we had to forego that piece, but the rest of it was great fun!

It ended up being a two day project for us. On the first day, Bria put the bits together and played happily with the bag, but there wasn’t much “writing” on it. 

Instead, she spent a lot of time squishing it – and loving that! She squished and molded and had all sorts of fun with her Ziploc bag of brightly colored gel.

We left it on the coffee table overnight, though, and the next day she was getting a bit more adventurous with it. 

At one point she decided to open it, which was a crazy mess just waiting to happen! So we took another piece of advice from the post and taped it to cardboard. 

In fact, Dad ended up taping all of the edges down with duct tape and creating a sort of board, which she promptly began practicing letters and shapes on. She loves it!

“This is a B, for me,” she announced, as she made a B in the gel with her finger.

Cooking - Pear Sauce

When the big, big, BIG box of pears arrived from Bountiful Baskets, it was a little bit overwhelming! What to do with it?

Then the ideas started rolling in.

Here is the first one. Thanks to our wonderful friend Erica McCauley and her great idea of making pear sauce, we had a fun afternoon!

We peeled and cut up a big batch of pears, then added honey and cinnamon and cooked them up in the crock pot. Bria had a great time putting all of the ingredients in the pot and mixing them up.