Holiday Baking!

Looking back to my younger days, I fondly remember the time I spent with my aunt making cookies on Sunday afternoons. Baking is an excellent activity you can do with your child to help them prepare to learn to read, among other things.

For younger children, pouring ingredients into bowls and mixing help them understand the concept of cause and effect. They learn to understand the concept of "hot" when something hot comes out of the oven.

Baking helps children learn new vocabulary. Your child can try new foods to expand their palate. Also, baking serves as a fun way to explore mathematical concepts like quantity through measuring and counting. Your child will learn about the concepts "more" and "less". They can learn to read print by matching words in recipes to words on store containers like "eggs", "baking powder", "suagr", and so on.

Bake something special with your child today. The recipe can be as simple as rice krispy squares. Spending time with your child doing something they will enjoy is something that they will remember for the rest of their lives.


Do you have a simple recipe you can share?

Hello, Fall!

Red leaves, yellow leaves,
Brown leaves, orange leaves,
See them fall, One and all.

Bare trees gently swaying,
Everybody’s saying.
Hello, fall! Hello, fall!

Today, September 23, 2010 is the first day of fall or autumn. It is also the fall equinox! Many farmers call this time of year harvest. Wow, today really lends itself naturally to teaching new vocabulary!

Take time out of your busy day to day routine to go for a walk with your child. Look for and talk about signs of fall together. You'll be surprised at the richness of language you can use with your child when observing the natural world. You can talk about leaves (colours, textures, sizes, the trees they come from), animals, temperature, clothes we wear, and so on. Also, these types of activites encourage healthy lifestyles that are good to start practicing early in your child's life.

When you get home from your walk, stretch the activity further and read a great fall book. Compare what you saw outside to what is going on in the book. This will help your child make a connection between books and the world that they live in. If you can find a book with real pictures it will help them to bridge the gap even moreso than a book with illustrations.

As an aside, if you are wondering...we say fall equinox because it is around this time of year, as well as in the spring, that the day and night are approximately equally long.

Scientific Inquiry in Preschool

Early science exploration is a wonderful opportunity to develop vocabulary in the preschool years. Simple experiments like the one shown above can help children develop their vocabulary and general knowledge in a playful setting.

Let me explain how we got to what you see in the picture above...

At circle time, I created an environment to help children become excited about science and the scientific method (ask question, create hypothesis, test, draw conclusions). First, I put on a pair of goggles to hook the children into the topic.

I wanted to see how well children in the group understood colours. To do this, I froze ice cubes in the primary colours - I think I made about one icecube tray of each colour. Then, I asked children to name the colours. After, I asked if they could guess what would happen if we mix certain colours together. With help from the audience, we had several bags of mixed ice cubes together. Once I collected their guesses (the hypotheses can be graphed!), we put the bags on display for the children to monitor. When the icecubes melted, they became a secondary colour (so cool!)

Once the bags finished melting, we checked on the results and I asked the children to write about what happened using pictures and or words. See what rich vocabulary you can use to describe what happened.