Baby Movement Poem

The following is a classic children's poem that lends itself to great fun adding movements that correspond to the words. Consider making a poster or sign with the words and adding this to your daily routine with Baby....read poem and do the actions with baby in your arms!

You might also make a little card with a picture of a baby on one side and the words on the other. Baby can then hold the card and look at it while you read the poem!

The Baby's Dance
~Ann Taylor
Dance, little baby, dance up high,

Never mind baby, mother is by;

Crow and caper, caper and crow,

There little baby, there you go:

Up to the ceiling, down to the ground,

Backwards and forwards, round and round.

Then dance, little baby, and mother shall sing,

With the merry happy coral, ding, ding, a-ding, ding!

*toddlers and preschoolers might enjoy learning this poem to say to their baby dolls as they act out the corresponding movements!

a spiritual one....

Yesterday I was stressing over something having to do with my kiddo. During my quiet time with God I was reading through a packet from a recent conference and came across the following excerpt from the book Jesus Calling, by Sarah Young.

Entrust your Loved Ones to ME; release them into My protective care. They are much safer with Me than in your clinging hands. If you let a loved one become an idol in your heart, you endanger that one--as well as yourself. Remember the extreme measures I used with Abraham and Isaac. I took Isaac to the very point of death to free Abraham from son-worship. Both Abraham and Isaac suffered terribly because of the father's undisciplined emotions. I detest idolatry, even in the form of parental love.

When you release loved ones to Me, you are free to cling to My hand. As you entrust others into My care, I am free to shower blessings on them. My Presence will go with them wherever they go, and I will give them rest. This same Presence stays with you, as you relax and place your trust in me. Watch to see what I will do.

Genesis 2: 9-12, Eph 3:20, Ex 33:14

This surely spoke to me. I bolded/italicized the portions I underlined on my paper as I read the passage....
I don't think there is a whole lot more to say....the passage pretty well covers this topic, but I wanted to post this because I think at this season of life I (and many of my friends) are in, it's very easy to forget God calls us to discipline our emotions and love Him most of all, and that ANYTHING we put before Him in our hearts is an idol--and I know I've put my child in front of Him when I let worry regarding that child overtake my trust in God.

Toilet paper flower stamping

To go along with our flower study, we decided to stamp some flowers today using toilet paper tubes.

1) cut a toilet paper tube in half
2) set out two colors of paint
3) dip tube in one color of paint and stamp center of flower
4) dip tube in other color and stamp circles around the center to form petals
5) tear a strip of green paper for a stem
6) cut or tear leaves to glue onto stem

We made flowers together, then we each made our own. Hers looked nothing like a flower, but I had to remind myself....PROCESS over PRODUCT. She loved pressing the tube down to make circles and it was great wrist control practice, as you have to hold your wrist just right to get the tube flat enough to print the whole circle. FABULOUS practice for soon-to-be writers!

This activity could have so many different applications....it would be adorable to do a big sheet of tissue or craft paper to turn into wrapping paper!!

We taped our finished flowers (after I cut them out) onto the playroom wall to make a pretty garden!!

Infants--you could hold their hand and help them make the prints.
Preschoolers--what else can they create with their circles? Caterpillars? Cats? Houses? Spaceships?

Stamping Work

Stamping work is a wonderful fine motor skill that promotes wrist strength.

Q has a set of large foam shapes (practices shape vocabulary), and at a recent trip to Lakeshore I bought her a large stamp pad. She has really been enjoying stamping on paper!

Stamping also promotes responsibility, because I talk to Q about the need to put the lid on her stamp pad because if it dries out, she won't be able to use it anymore. She understands what this means because we had to (sadly to her) throw away some playdough because the lid didn't get put on all the way and it dried out. So Q is getting some practice in responsibility with taking care of her supplies!

Different sizes of stamps and stamp pads are available for different ages.

Infants enjoy using objects as stamps to stamp paint onto paper. Ie: dipping a toilet paper tube in paint and then pressing it onto paper.

Preschoolers can even make their own stamps by cutting foam shapes and gluing them onto large pieces of dowel rods (tutorial to come).

Silly version of Itsy Bitsy Spider

Q has been enjoying changing the words of her favorite songs lately to say silly things...that may or may not make sense. This is her beginning to explore the relationships between words, word meanings, beginning sounds of words, and her ability as a writer to manipulate the order of words. All wonderful emergent literacy skills that show up in the preschool years.
We were singing silly made-up versions of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" in the car yesterday, so while she napped I decided to "record" our song using the flannelboard.


First I used felt to make the traditional pieces--water spout, rain, sun, spider.

Then the silly items:
Milk, juice, shampoo, soup

Click to see large sizes.
To make the pieces I just cut felt scraps and hot glued the pieces together.
The feltboard was one from my 1st grade classroom. You can easily make a feltboard by using spray adhesive, a sheet of felt and cardboard. Or you can just lay out a big piece of felt and that works fine, too!

"The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.
Down came the MILK and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the MILK
and the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again."

I used a textile marker to write the words on each item as Q is beginning to pay attention to print and the starting letters of words.

This activity can be adapted for all ages--babies would enjoy listening to the singing and watching you manipulate the felt pieces (and very soon begin to "help" you move the pieces)

Preschoolers can actually cut the flt and help make their own pieces for songs they want to write new verses for. For preschoolers you might consider writing out a large copy of the song they wrote to post next to the flannelboard--they can sing it and point to the words.

Teddy Bear Patterning

Our neighbors gave us a set of teddy bear counters that their kiddos had outgrown about a year ago. I have put them out at different times for Q to play with, to sort by color and to "count." I decided this week she is ready for some simple patterning (the roots of algebra, did ya know!!). I made some cards that have patterns on them--I just made circles in Word and filled them with different colors. You could do the same thing with a marker or crayon or dot sticker. Then I laminated them.
You can buy the actual teddy bear cards that have pics of the teddies in the different colors, but I didn't want to spend any money, and using plain circles means you can use the same cards for any type of manipulative.

Q's task is to match the bears to the colors. She will eventually begin to notice she is repeating a pattern! For now I just have her set the bears on and when she's finished we "read" the bears--"red, green, red, green...." This teaches her to read a pattern from left to right while pointing at each bear.

Later I may ask her to:
-keep on extending the pattern onto the carpet (past the card).....
-name the pattern using letters "A, B, A, B, A, B..."
-make her own pattern

Patterning is suck a vital early mathmatical skill and a fun one for kids to learn through play!

If you don't have bears use flat marbles, bread ties, colored pastas, buttons, spray-painted baby food caps, bottle caps (from milk, juices, etc.), or even cardstock cut into circles.

Flower Shared Writing

Last week, to start our flower unit, Q and I completed a shared writing activity--a diagram of a flower. We each got a big piece of white paper and some markers. First I put a title on my paper. I read it to her and talked about the letters I was writing as I worked. "P is Papa's letter and it is also the letter for "parts."

Then we started drawing a flower. I had her watch me and then asked her to do it on her own paper. We drew petals, seeds, stem, flowers, and roots. She loved this activity and was very engaged!

We posted both up on the cabinet in the learning room. She loves using the froggy pointer (aka flyswatter) to point to the words in the title (she can point to each word as she says it) and also the parts of the flower. Sometimes I quiz her-- "Where are the roots?" or "What's this?" and sometimes she quizzes me!

This is a wonderful emergent reading and writing activity and is something that can be done on a very frequent basis with older toddlers and preschoolers!