Doctors & Nurses

Wow, it's been longer than I realised since my last post!

Here's a little of what we've been up to in the last 6 weeks or so...

On our trip to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, we bought some Heirloom Purple Broccoli seeds. We planted these in an egg carton, using proper seed raising mix, sat them on the warm sunny living-room windowsill and watered them constantly (they seemed to dry out very quickly). After nearly 2 weeks we still didn't have anything starting to shoot... and the I accidentally knocked them off onto the ground! Oh... so we will have to try this one again another time soon. Though perhaps we may wait for spring time which is about 3 months away.

We've spent time learning about what Doctors and Nurses do, for humans and animals too.

I found a Doctors play set at the cheap shop for only 95c and Little Mister has been 'checking' hubby and I LOTS to see if we are OK :) I added a plastic syringe, a small glass medicine bottle, a screw-top plastic medicine bottle and a scrap of fabric for Little Mister to use as a bandage. There were also band-aids for a while, until I had to clean Dolly from head to toe... multiple times!!!

We used some of the worksheets and ideas from Homeschool Creations Doctor preschool pack...

Shadow Matching

 Size Comparison/Sequencing

Simple Puzzles

Learning what the tools and instruments actually look like and how they work

(I dug around and found the real-life version of most items shown on naming cards)

We also practiced fine motor skills using the line tracing sheets, and I guided his hand to write his name on the Name tag strips.

I found a YouTube video of the Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed... after which we had to add an old mobile phone to the Doctor's kit!

Finding simple children's books at the library on Doctors, Nurses Hospitals etc was quite a challenge! Here's what I came up with:

We read/repeated the quote (from Homeschool Creations pack) each day a couple of times "A cheerful heart is good medicine" Proverbs 17v22. This quote also worked really well to tie in with the Emotions/Feelings and Facial Expressions from a few weeks before, to help Little Mister understand how someone might be feeling when they are sick or hurt, and then how they feel when they are all better. Here's 2 more books I found on the subject at the library:

This is just a snippet of what we get up to... there's so much I could add; but it all takes time and we would rather be 'doing' than 'blogging' :)

Thanks so much for stopping by...

Emotions/Feelings & Facial Expressions (Little Mister is 28.5 months)

Since our last post we have continued to work on visual & verbal recognition of Shapes and Colours, and the verbal order of Numbers (no visual recognition of numbers at this stage). We think Little Mister may have finally sorted out Triangle and Rectangle in his mind, and thanks to his own thinking, he's remembered the Pentagon because it looks like a house (and he loves building houses with blocks, or anything else that will stack)!

Aside from the above, we've focused on emotions/feelings and the different facial expressions that people show when they feel these emotions.

Firstly we used part of the Tot Pack from 1+1+1=1.

Little Mister loved looking at all the different expressions and trying to copy them.

I printed and laminated them to help them last.

Have you ever considered that Thomas the Tank Engine and his Friends, show emotions!! Yes, they have happy sad, surprised, angry (etc) faces. So I went searching the net to see if anyone has created activities/games to use as a tool for teaching emotions/feelings.

Here's what we found and used:

1. Thomas and Friends official website has many interactive games to play online. Yes, there's one for emotions too :)
2. Also this page of Thomas showing different emotions. (It was in an article about using Thomas with autistic children.) I copied the pics to a word document (and made each picture larger, so there's 4 to an A4 page), printed them out, covered them in clear contact... then we used them to talk about emotions and ask Little Mister to pick out certain ones "Can you find a happy Thomas?" etc.

One afternoon, we sat down with a couple of old catalogues and Little Mister picked out the happy faces (it's probably a good thing, but there are nothing BUT happy faces in catalogues!) on people and also toys. Then we cut them out together (just started teaching him how to hold and use scissors) and he stuck them onto a piece of coloured card. As with most titles on pages, he held the texta and I guided his hand to write "Happy" on a left-over space on the page.

We had one VERY wet day also, and I copied an idea seen in other places (one of which is Modern Parents Messy Kids) and used sticky tape to create a series of roads on the study floor. Little Mister had lots of fun driving all his small vehicles around and setting up road signs (etc) for the afternoon.

Finally, here's some of the books we read, with the focus on Feeling/Emotion & facial expression.

Photo 1 (L-R) The Unhappy Goldfish by Paul Dallimore

                          Mr Grumpy by Roger Hargreaves

                          The Very Cranky Bear by Nick Bland

                          The Grumpy Goat by Heather Amery & Stephen Cartwright

                          Mr Happy by Roger Hargreaves

                          How Do You Feel by Anthony Browne

Photo 2            It's Lovely When You Smile by Sam McBratney & Charles Fuge

                          and, of course, lots of Thomas and Friends books

                         

My favourite book was It's Lovely When You Smile because of the lessons to be learnt by the story line. A baby Roo wakes up grumpy, and his mum spends time trying to make him smile and be happy. I really loved to watch Little Misters face as I read this to him, again and again :)