Can a Preschooler be on the Move and Learn at the Same Time?

Our triangle family (my cute reference to having an only child) is filled with hands-on learners. My husband is what I call a collector of hobbies. All of his hobbies have him working with his hands. He builds amplifiers, dabbles in guitar, takes apart vintage British motorcycles and (sort of) puts them back together. Personally, I write. But I love living on the wild side and writing with a pen and paper, I enjoy cooking and sketching. My son loves building things. He will build things out of kinetic sand, Lego and his food (not my favorite building material.)

My son is also a mover and a shaker. He has to take dance breaks when a Mega Blok house is being built. He has to climb on my back when we play board games. He just has to be moving. This has taught me that for him to learn and enjoy what he is doing, he needs to be in motion and using his hands to manipulate something. Even as we read, he needs to point to the characters in books, make excited gestures with his hands and at times stop the book to go grab a Hot Wheel that "seriously looks exactly like the car in the book."

I think this is a big part of why my son gets so much out of our Mother Goose Time curriculum boxes. While I have used their curriculum for several months, Mother Goose Time was kind enough to provide June's box free of charge in exchange for my experience with the materials. This month's theme is Adventure Island, and we have been doing my son's favorite things, which are getting dirty with art projects and dancing to the music that is perfectly themed to go with the project at hand.

This week we made our own head lamps to explore the stalactites and stalagmites in caves and made our own puffy paint to create flowing lava pictures and explore why we use sunscreen. All the while, awesome songs about caves, sunscreen ad more played in the background. This multi-sensory learning experience helped my son retain new vocabulary, introduced him to a new texture and encouraged his imaginary play. Little tip, keep an old cookie sheet to contain projects that involved paint and dreaded glitter!

We also utilized pattern cards and his monthly story book. One thing I love about Mother Goose Time is that they provide several materials printed on card stock every month. I find collecting these items, like the pattern cards, story telling pictures and game pieces and laminating them, helps to lengthen their life. I invested in an inexpensive laminator and have been very happy that I did.  I will occasionally pull out things like the different pattern cards as a refresher for my son and they continue to be relevant months later.
We love the story books as well, because they combine what I call decodable words (consonant, vowel, consonant words) and sight words (and, the) to help reinforce early literacy. My son loves that he gets to color in the books as well.

Overall, we had another great week with Mother Goose Time and I finally know the difference between a stalactite and stalagmite.

A Planner Loving Mom who Needs Help Planning Homeschool

I confess, I own a planner. A Happy Planner, which I find somewhat ironic since my son's doctor has referred to be as "appropriately cynical" in the past. I own planner stickers, different colored pens and highlighters. But much like my three year old's baby book, my planner often finds itself abandoned.

When I began my journey of homeschooling my son last October, I was excited that not only did the Mother Goose Time curriculum that I was using come with a Teacher Guide, but it also included it's own planner. These items, along with a great matrix of skills ranging from social/emotional to fine motor helped get me excited about planning again.

My cheerful box adorned with school buses arrives weeks before the start of a new month and theme. So I am able to break into the new box on a wild Saturday night and pull out my Teacher Guide, Planning Journal and the list of skills we plan to cover in the month. I then glance over the skills sheet and open the Teacher Guide. I check out recommended books that we might have or that I want to make note of in my planner to grab at the library, I jot down the skills and activities that I want to highlight for my son in my planner on the corresponding days. I then consider the daily topics.

During this month's Alphabet Island, I noticed we would be looking at caves and volcanoes. I knew we planned on going to the Field Museum in Chicago, where these topics would be brought to life. So I actually switched topics around to better fit our schedule. That also hits home on a major selling point of homeschool, flexibility. In nine months, I've found that as long as you work within the theme of that month, you can make changes without interrupting the flow of the program.
I then consider if there are any places that we can go locally that will enhance our learning.
A new playground, with a great stream and lots of places to climb, look out and explore opened, so we checked it out and pretended to be the captain of a ship making important navigating decisions. We also talked about waterfalls and visited some locally at the Chicago Botanic Garden. All of these ideas I marked in my planner as ideas to fit into our schedule.

One more thing that I love about these materials is that they offer suggestions of which projects to keep and which to maybe just photograph. I appreciate that they help make this decision for me, so I don't become a closeted art project hoarder!

This June, I received the curriculum free of charge in exchange for my thoughts and experiences. I'm happy to be back to planning our summer learning and adventures with the help of Mother Goose Time.

One Box of Homeschool Supplies can Replace a Playroom of Clutter

This idea goes for anyone with a preschooler, not just a family that considers themselves to be a homeschool family. I'm sure already this summer you have taken your child to a Target or Walmart. I have. My son now sits in the bottom of his red boat and navigates me to the One Spot at Target, because they have water squirters, coloring books and a bit of everything else. I am slightly peeved though, because no longer is this toddler trap an oasis for $1 items, some of the items go up to $10. Not cool.

Don't get me wrong, my family owns a ridiculous Hotwheel Garage and an embarrassing amount of Thomas and Friends Mini characters that I trip on in the night. We are not plastic-free, Zen people. However, I am trying to buy less that lights up and makes noise (doesn't help the sensory processing issues) and do more project-based purchases, or educational items that will grow with my son.

One way I have done this is to have a Mother Goose Time box delivered monthly for my son. I have purchased many in the past, but am currently receiving them in exchange for my thoughts on the products. 

Every single month, I am getting at least 20 days of pre-packaged activities. This includes creative art projects with supplies, books, manipulatives and puzzles. I am the last person you would consider to be a homeschooler, mainly because I used to teach in public school and I am a DIY drop out. I seriously love opening the daily bag and pulling out a craft for my son, reading materials, games and more. We have even had days where we just where out bathing suits and go to town on two or three projects. This allows us to get crazy for an hour or so with paint, sand and all sorts of fun sensory experiences. 

A lot of what we receive from Mother Goose Time is stuff we use over and over. My son has even been investigating with his Mother Goose Time magnifying glass for months. We now have a collection of puzzles, music CDs and books added to our library that my son truly enjoys and they came included in every box.

While I continue to work on asking some of Thomas and his Friends "go back to the island of Sodor," I will continue to supplement my son's learning, crafting and library with Mother Goose Time.

Mixing Amazing Themes and Child-Led Learning for Summer Homeschool Success

Over the last 9 months, my son and I have embarked upon an educational lifestyle experiment by choosing a school and home preschool path over traditional classroom setting. Over this time together we have learned about what makes an insect and insect, different kinds of birds, how pipe organs work and watched so many videos on Venus fly traps, YouTube thinks I'm an Entomologist.

Most of our formulaic day consisted of reading books, following seasonal activities in the Midwest and exploring in nature. Whenever my son happened upon a topic or in some cases a fixation (the fly traps!), I let him delve into the topic further by checking out books at the library, finding snippets of video on the topic and, if possible having hands-on experiences with the interest. This "child-led" learning style has gone relativity well for my son, but we still found ourselves looking for something new, or a new way of learning about a topic. We sometimes struggled to flesh out a topic through skill and subject tie-ins and projects that might peak my son's interest.

After a ton of research, I found a program called Mother Goose Time that provided a theme-based box curriculum. I was excited to check it out as a former teacher. I loved that there was a teacher's guide and planner that showed images of what amazing creations we would make along the way. I loved that the program could be adjusted to my son's comprehension level and I loved that there was a separate bag of materials for every day that we wanted to make a school day. These bags alone included art projects, games and scientific exploration activities. So for several months, I have supplemented our "child-led" learning style with Mother Goose Time's monthly theme boxes. Now am excited to have partnered with Mother Goose Time {in receiving complimentary theme boxes) to share how I have taken the themes, along with my child's current interest and created a great learning experience that hits on tons of important educational building blocks.

Our family is using Mother Goose Time this summer to do a refresh on our basic skills. This month we are visiting Alphabet Island. In a matter of three days, we have made pirate and captain themed art projects, tested the concepts of sinking and floating with our homemade boats and worked on journaling our experience through drawing pictures and coloring in letters. My son loves having his own special name tags journals and manipulatives each month. He is really excited to write his name on his Mother Goose Time projects.

Mother Goose Time's curriculum also gives parents and teachers excellent prompting questions to ask throughout a school day. There are also images to go along with a daily theme, which allow children to point out what they notice or already know about the image. I personally keep all of the daily theme pages accessible, to give my son the opportunity to reference how things, animals or people work together in the bigger picture.

After discussing boats, captains and islands, my son pointed out that captains have a lot of responsibility and choices to make. He also mentioned that our raised garden in the backyard resembled an island. So, that afternoon he watered the garden in his captain's hat and we discussed our responsibilities around that house and what to make for "Captain's Choice" dinner. Captain's Dinner was then promptly followed by creating a cardboard box boat and navigating "Northwest!" using the Mother Goose Time map. We are officially on a compass kick!

Thus far, Mother Goose Time has allowed me to enrich my son's child-led learning with amazing themes that make sure we are addressing important skills, asking new questions and making creative memories.