advent drawing, thinking cap thursday

We made an advent picture this week, We sat down at the table, grandma, myself, Flynn and Eli and we coloured pasted things, put stickers on. We talked about Christmas and the things we were sticking down. We cut up a colouring in Christmas book from last year, some left over stickers and some wrapping paper from Flynn's birthday. It was a really nice family time exercise, and part of the discussion was about what Christmas is like here in cairns for us. Note our picture has Santa in his wintry outfit and then tropical fish swimming around the top. Well that's Christmas in a nut shell for us, its weird being surrounded by images of wintry things when for us its the hottest time of year, we have thunderstorms and rain instead. Some years we even have cyclones for Christmas. Its good to have that conversation with my kids so they understand that whilst they are going to see a lot of images of Christmas for us that's disjointed and really for us Christmas is about summer and heat lots of water play and cranking the airconditioning till it feels like snow.

Once the kids were in bed i put number cards over the picture with blu tac and they can slowly pull them off as December counts down, and we can talk more about our Christmas. Great for learning numbers, concept of days in the month and a great way to learn about there own world.

also its nice to build the excitement towards Christmas

love sassy

chatterbox learning - thinking cap thursday

Chatterbox's make great play things, i remember my mum spelling out words with them and then she would write funny things on the inside. They make a great medium for learning.

I have made a few for Flynn, the first has got our names on the outside then numbers on the inside, then shapes under the lift up bit. The second has colours on the outside, sight words on the inside and then positive sentences under the lift up triangle along the lines of "your a star" and "my little champion". I think this helps to boost his confidence ans i hope it will reinforce that learning is a positive experience. The green one is all about the alphabet, i worked through the letters on the outer, inner and the under layers. The bottom layer also has some words begining with that letter.

So how do you use them? i hope this makes sense, you pop your fingers into the bottom triangle and move the chatterbox as if it is a mouth. You spell out the word your child has chosen, or run through the alphabet until you hit that letter. Then you let them choose from the inner part, and you spell count or run through alphabet, when you finish this time you lift the little triangle flap and read whats underneath.

So how do you make one? im hooking you up on ehow and a video on metacafe

ok have fun learning, sassy x  linked on playtime