Food dye, Bingo and my little drummer boy

Here are some of the things we've been up to recently :)


 Learning about what colours do when mixed with each other. We half-filled two glasses with water and added red & yellow food dye. We used kitchen roll as a wick to draw the water into the third, middle, glass. Water (slowly!!) collected in the middle glass, and it was orange!

We played flash card bingo to practice writing her letters. She has been good at writing her name and a few other select letters for several weeks, but I'm wanting her to gradually expand her little repertoire! A good teacher friend of mine, Katie, suggested in her Toddler Preschool blog providing a spoken description of letters when teaching a child to write. (By the way, if you're interested in preschool ideas at home, I'd highly recommend checking out her blog!) For example, 'B' is a letter she has trouble with, but wanted it on her bingo card. Rather than holding her hand while she wrote it, I said "down, back up, around in a semi-circle, and around again to the bottom." She wrote the first and third rows of her bingo card herself.  It was pretty time-consuming, so I did alternate rows to prevent her from losing interest :) I pulled out our (neglected!) flashcards and started calling out letters, and she coloured each letter I called out as she found it on her card. It was a much funner way to use flashcards, in our opinion. When she got every letter on her card, she got a little chocolate treat as a prize :)

Levi provided musical accompaniment for our game of bingo by going to town on his little Leapfrog drum! Cutie patootie.

"Mama, can you tell me about the world?"

*gulp* -- the whole world...? Right now??

Turned out she actually only wanted me to tell her about how the world spins - that seemed a little more manageable! She had asked me earlier in the day where the sun went when it went down. So I had explained that actually, the sun wasn't going anywhere - the earth was spinning around so it just looked like the sun was going somewhere when really our part of the world was just turning away from it.

 I don't think she quite got it the first time, so I used a little visual to help her.  We talked about how it's very dark in space, but the sun makes the things that are close to it, bright. I drew a (not quite to scale!) picture of her two familiar countries on a balloon that happened to float past us, got out our little in-case-of-a-storm lantern, turned off all the lights ... and voila! We took turns spinning our little world around and looking at what was going on in different part of the world depending on whether it was facing the bright sun or dark space.

So there you have it, Anna. I have told you all about the world :)