I try my best to purpose our “upcoming” days at night before I go to bed. Even if I just spend 15-30 minutes making a little “agenda” and some goals for the day. My goals might include some age-appropriate social studies skills like 1) caring for our pet 2) talking about our environment (signs, water, animals, places, workers) and some days I might focus on his social-emotional skills like self-control, communication, calming techniques, etc. But I mainly try to have a balanced day…which as a stay-at-home mom means a BALANCING ACT of mommy teaching, cleaning, feeding, changing, playing, managing, ETC.
Today I wanted to share some of my anti-whining techniques in a video and then share a printable I made for my little man since we are working on using our words and a big boy voice.
Telling him over and over “STOP WHINING” does not work for many reasons I could list, but these tricks and a few other positive reinforcement cues really help.
I made “raffle tickets” for Sean Patrick to receive to place into a jar each time he SELF-CORRECTS himself or CHOOSES to use his words/big boy voice or does something else that I notably want to reward him for. When it is filled I plan to take him to the New Orleans Zoo or somewhere that we rarely get to go. I plan to fill out the left side of the ticket (talking out loud for extra positive reinforcement) and then tear the ticket. He can place the right side in the jar and I will save the left side to share with daddy, MeMe, or family friends each chance I get so that he will be excited about his good choices. I hope this is helpful to you as well!
This past weekend our little family took a day trip to the zoo, and when I got home I thought…Why didn’t I pack the clipboard? In my classroom I always allowed the kids to “document” the nature walks or other outdoor events for several reasons:
1) Kids love to feel “professional.”
2) Kids like to have a (fun) job/task.
3) Kids need a great age-appropriate recording sheet to “write about” or “draw” what they see.
I made the grocery checklist because if I keep a stack of them on the clipboard in my bag then grocery trips can go smoothly. The picture to the left shows the calm before the craziness. This is when the clipboard comes in handy! Your child can either check or “x” what he sees or doesn’t see. OR check off items as you place them in the cart.
Kids love this kind of thing!
Need a clipboard?
This gave me ideas for more clipboard checklist fun so I’ll be posting two more checklist printables THIS WEEK! Stay TUNED 🙂
Is anyone else forgetful when it comes to encouraging your child to brush their teeth? Or did I just shame myself?
Well, I found a way to help you and your child remember and even have some motivation for brushing teeth.
After you type in your child’s name, and print out the chart, stick this cool. personalized printable on the door of your child’s room or bathroom and tape a ziploc bag with a crayon or two inside of it.
This chart is a great way for your child to learn (or be exposed to) organizational skills, graphing, calendar skills, and responsibility.
When helping Sean Patrick brush his teeth I always sing a transitional song, “brush your teeth, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch!” I’ll spare you the sound bite!
Found this in my files…yes, I take a picture of EVERY moment in my child’s life.
And, I encourage SP to “get all the germies out.”
Naturally, we talk about positional words like top, bottom, under, sides, inside, outside, etc.
So yeah! Let me know how it goes…I want feedback people! You love it? You hate it? You would never do this? Try it for a week and once you get in the habit you will quit the coloring business? What of it?
But yeah, the chart is pretty cool. I would color it for my toddler but older children should be able to color it themselves after you model it a bit.
Hi! It’s Casey, stopping by from Kidspired Creations once again! My husband and I have recently discovered the game Bananagrams and it has instantly become a family favorite! Even my boys (5 and 2) love to play as well… they just play with a different set of rules… Mommy Teacher rules!
If you are not familiar with Bananagrams, it’s a banana-shaped bag filled with Scrabble tiles and, like Scrabble, there are tons of the most frequently used letters in the alphabet (i.e. vowels) and several of the less frequent ones. This makes building words easier than when you just buy a single pack of 26 letters from the kid’s section at a store because you are able to make words that have double letters, or several words that use the same letters at once. As you can probably imagine, there are endless ways you can use these tiles to work on basic reading and spelling skills.
One of the building blocks to learning to read is being able to break words into syllables. As expert readers, we do this au.to.ma.tic.al.ly when we come to a long word, but we are able to do this because we were taught this skill. I notice myself doing this when I am typing out a long word in an e-mail quite fre.quent.ly.
Refresher course: what is a syllable? A syllable is recognized by the presence of a VOWEL SOUND in a word. For instance, the word “baby” has two syllables (ba.by) because of the presence of the long “A” and long “E” sound in the word. Be careful, some vowel sounds are hard to hear, like the “schwa” sound in the word “table”/ˈtābəl/. <-That upside down e is called a “schwa.” It sounds like “uh” and YES it’s a vowel sound. But, I digress…
My oldest son, James, has already mastered sounding out/reading simple CVC (consonant/vowel/consonant) words like “cat,” and bigger compound words like “bedroom” (Jess teaches about compound words here), so now I am moving on to larger polysyllabic words (words with more than one syllable). These words will be easier for him to read if he separates them into different syllables and reads them individually, but first, I need to teach him how to count syllables.
Clapping out syllables is a great way for kids to be able to HEAR the number of syllables in a word: BED (clap) ROOM (clap). I suggest starting off with simple compound words (cupcake, doghouse, rainbow) because they are made up of two monosyllabic (containing 1 syllable) words, thus it is easier to hear the separate syllables.
Another great way to count syllables is to use objects such as pennies to represent each different syllable. This helps kids to be able to SEE the number of syllables in a word: cup.cake = 2 pennies. Point to each penny as you say each syllable separately.
James found objects around the house
that only have 1 syllable:
car, ball, shoe (though it’s really a slipper),
cap, rock, dice, car (again)
You can also teach your child to FEEL syllables by having him place his hand under his chin as he says the word slowly. With each syllable that he says out loud, his chin will make his hand move down. The only problem with this is that some sounds (like the schwa) do not make your chin move, so when I say “table” while teaching this technique it sounds more like “tay-ball”… I over-exaggerate each word and make funny faces when I say it.
When your child has begun to understand the concept of syllables, you can start visually breaking down words into syllables by using the Bananagrams tiles. Start with words that have short vowel sounds like “exact” (ex.act) or words that are monosyllabic that become polysyllabic when you make it past tense such as “started” (start.ed).
Just for fun, I broke down the word “hippopotamus” because our dog’s name is Hippo. Notice how James sounded it out “hippo.pot.[long A].mus” and I did not correct him. Once he put the word together he automatically fixed the “long A” to the schwa sound. Give your kids a chance; they might surprise you with the things they can figure out without Mommy’s help!
Thanks, Jess, for letting me hop onto your blog! Please visit my Kidspired Creations blog for affordable, customizable and kidspirational art! I also frequently post DIY projects and party ideas! Also, please stop by my personal blog about My Kidspiration and all the hilariousness that comes with raising two boys and a baby girl!
My son has been using the phrase “I can’t” a lot lately because he is so catious, but lately I have noticed that he is using it as a crutch. We went swimming in the lake on the fourth of July and when asked to go into the lake he cried out “I can’t” because he was scared. I don’t want to ignore his fears so we are going to be swimming in pools more often until he is comfortable. But, I also want to implement the “I can” mentality into his vocabulary as much as I have the influence to do so.
So, here are a few things that I have casually introduced to Sean Patrick and spent time encouraging him with in the past week.
1) We started off coloring an “I Can” book that I could read to him and encourage him to “read” to daddy and others as well.
2) We made a homemade video of him on my iphone acting out all of the “I CAN” actions from the book (I would’ve shared this, but he didn’t feel like putting clothes on for the video haha).
3) I started a little personalized “I can” book for him in a Word document:
And 4) I stumbled upon a Barney (yes the big purple dinosaur) video called “I Can Do That” featuring a group of friends playing “I Can _____” and then putting on a skit about it.
These tips are NOT a short-term “cure” for the I can’ts! All of these ideas are things I am currently teaching toward a GOAL that we can replace “I can’t” with “I can.” I’m sure there will be plenty of reminders 🙂
