Storytime Sunday: Parts of the Body

This week, since I am returning from being on "blog leave" LOL, I am going to talk about a few things my son has been really into recently. He loves the book "From Head To Toe" by Eric Carle, and of course, I am a huge fan of Eric Carle. Since I realize I haven't even mentioned his name on this blog for a while, I decided to go ahead and go with it. He loves more than anything I think, watching mommy and daddy be silly and do all the animal movements. Some of which he will imitate, but mostly he would rather laugh at us. 

Also, though the doctor recommends no screen time under the age of 2, and we were pretty much following this rule up until a couple months ago if for no other reason than he wouldn't even look at the TV when we turned it on. But now, he is obsessed with Baby Einstein. He will even go to the TV stand, open the drawer and take out a video and bring it to one of us. Also, we have a long drive to and from his school/my work, so I have installed the portable DVD player in my car as well for him to watch.

Made out of an old pair of jeans :)

Anyways, one of the videos is Baby Da Vinci. It shows a hand drawing different body parts, kids displaying said body parts and them performing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes." My son has recently taken to doing it as well. It is so funny to watch him try and do it by himself.  So in short, I highly recommend these 2 items for any baby/toddler!

Here he is totally fascinated by the baby on the screen!

Happy Reading/Watching ;)

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Wishlist Wednesday: Alina's Adventures in Homemaking

This week's guest blogger is Alina from Adventures in Homemaking. I love all the adventures she and her son embark on. But the best is how she describes in such detail all the things they learned including exactly what questions were asked and the process of finding the answers. It is truly inspirational. I highly recommend checking out her blog!

The Littman Classic II SE Stethoscope

Learning Resources Simple Stopwatch

The first time I heard my heart beat through a stethoscope brought an awareness of my own body and life to me. Suddenly, the fact that the heart pumps blood throughout my body turned from an abstract idea to a real, live whooshing and sucking sound. When learning with my kids, I scour my memory for those little ah-ha moments in the child in me learned something profound.

Cachey Mama's invitation to her Wishlist Wednesday gave me the perfect excuse to daydream about two items I've wanted for a long, long time. Since some of our learning goals for the year require meausurement and experimentation, I dream of a stopwatch and a stethoscope. There are so many ways to use these two tools, together and individually, to make comparisons and study relationships. These comparisons are best illustrated on paper by charts and graphs, one of Max's favorite hobbies.

Max can use the stopwatch to compare his pulse to that of his sisters. Or that of his friends and neighbors. He can keep an ongoing chart measuring his heartbeat after eating, after bathing, after playing, after dancing, and even after getting upset. He can find an average for his resting heart-rate. He can explore averages across the spectrum of activities. What is the recovery period (the time it takes the heart to get back to resting beat after exercise)?

We could explore frequency in other creatures by using the stopwatch and picking a given amount of time to observe the dog and see how often he scratches, growls, barks, or sits in a 7 minute period. Then we could graph this. We could try again at a different time of day and see if our results differed. If they did, then we would try the entire experiment again the next day to see if we could discover any peristent patterns that might suggest relationships between time of day and frequency of particular behaviors.

What better way to spend time waiting in grocery lines or at large events than asking people nearby to be part of an ongoing average resting heartrate experiment? There are so many ways and so many contexts in which these two tools could help us learn about our world and how it works.

Other experiments and explorations might include:

• Relationship between grooming and horse's heart rate
• Fitness tests and challenges
• Relationship between perceived color and heart rate
• How fast food travels from mouth to stomach
• A day in the life of your heart
• Sound ranging
• Effects of various exercises on the cardiovascular system
• Relationship between caffeine and typing speed (with me as guinea pig, of course)

There's no way to predict the relationships and comparisons Max and Micah would discover with two simple tools.

Storytime Sunday: Fingers and Toes

This week's book is:

If you missed the 20% off sale at Half Price Books, I'm sorry. But I didn't :) And I managed to pick up some books for my son as well as for the classroom. I found this list of must have books for your baby's first library conveniently just as we were driving to HPB and decided to see if they had any of the ones I don't already have. Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes is one of them.

Our class is so diverse that we are going to be starting a whole unit on cultures and countries around the world when we return from break. This book could be a great introduction to the unit. I am so excited and I think the kids will really get into it and begin to embrace their own various cultures and traditions. Hopefully it will last a while!

Anyways, I got this book for my baby's collection. It talks about different babies being born at the same time in lots of different places, but as everyone know, they all have 10 little fingers and 10 little toes. From the baby who was born in the town to the baby born in the hills and even the baby born on the ice, there is something for every child to relate to. I especially love the pictures of the babies which I know kids will love as well.

For an extension of this book, you could do any of the many many hand print and foot print activities found on Pinterest. Here is an example that my son made at school although it's a little late for this:

Also, it is a great way to talk about geography and the types of houses people live in in other parts of the world.

So if you haven't read this book, please add it to your collection ASAP!

Happy Reading!