Your child can learn: Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful. Today many people celebrate it by eating a big dinner with friends and family. Many families eat turkey, vegetables, and pumpkin pie. Many years ago, the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indians celebrated a thanksgiving feast together. The pilgrims were thankful for the help of the Wampanoag, and their good friend Squanto, a Patuxet Indian, who gave them seeds and taught them how to plant them.

If you are traveling, you may not be able to do all the activities, but print them off and bring them with you, along with some materials for the craft projects. Your child, and any nieces and nephews at the family gathering, may enjoy the activities. Be flexible, but at the same time, try to stick as closely to your child’s routine as possible. If you don’t, temper tantrums and tears may be the only thing anyone remembers.

Be careful not to perpetuate misleading stereotypes. Not all Indians lived in wigwams, wore buckskin, or carried their babies in cradleboards. If you wish to teach your child about American Indians, it is better to teach about several different tribes and how their customs varied, than to teach “All American Indians are “this”.

One thing I discovered during my research before writing this lesson or this blog, is that the term “Native American” is no longer considered politically correct. It isn’t exactly “wrong” but it is considered insulting by many of the American Indian peoples. Native American is a generic term that encompasses not only all of the North American tribes, but also the people of the American Samoas, the original Hawaiians, the Inuits, the Aleuts, and those incorrectly labeled “Eskimos” -the Upiks and Inupiats. I read that the North American Indians prefer to be called “American Indian”.

I also learned that Columbus did not label them “Indian” because he thought he’d reached India! That was a myth perpetuated by our public schools. Europe didn’t call India “India” until several hundred years AFTER Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Columbus would have called India “Hindustan”. He knew he was in a new land, and he called the native peoples he met “En Dios” – which translates as “In with God”.

For more information, visit
American Indian Culture
Teaching young children about Native Americans

If you are new to this website, you may wish to read:
Working with the Lesson Plans
Play Areas for Encouraging Creativity
Calendar Activities

Thanks for visiting, and I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving!

Lesson Plans: Thanksgiving!

All of the books recomended in this week’s lessons can be found at your library, or in my store.

Photo Credits:
Top: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clairity/ / CC BY 2.0
Bottom:http://www.flickr.com/photos/seattlemunicipalarchives/ / CC BY 2.0

If your town doesn’t have a bus, talk to the school about riding the school bus into town and have a friend pick you up to bring you back. Or check out a tour bus, if there is an affordable trip you’d be interested in. Contact your Chamber of Commerce for other transportation ideas – is there a train excursion available? Even a roller-coaster might work, although you won’t find me getting on one!

Some day as you’re leaving the grocery store, point out all the different vehicles in the parking lot. Are there any motorcycles, scooters, delivery trucks, pickup trucks, SUVs, Humvees, Jeeps, Hybrid cars, convertibles, antique cars, or school buses? Point out the license plates (are they on front and back in your state, or only the back?) Are there some of different colors and designs (out of state)? Why are there so many different shapes and sizes? What color does your child like best? What kind of car would he like to be, if he were a car?

You could visit a car dealership, and test drive a new car with your child. Many dealerships are having awesome sales this year, but even if you aren’t in the market, it can be a fun afternoon activity. Bring along your car seat and don’t go too far! Fifteen minutes is a long time for a two year old.

If you have a friend in the fire department, see if you can visit him “on the job” and let him show your child around. Do you have a friend who is a police officer or sheriff? A bus driver? A taxi driver, or a chauffeur in a limousine? There are so many possibilities! If one hundred people do this Transportation Week, they might do it one hundred different ways. Leave a comment, and tell us all about your field trip.

Most of all, have fun!

Lesson Plan for Transportation Week

Some preschoolers may be mature enough to spend the night at grandma’s house.  If so, see if you can arrange an overnighter this week.  I have included an art project the grandparent can do with your child.  If your child is too young for an overnighter, then after the activity, just take your child back home with you.  Grandparents can be a wonderful part of your child’s life, and give you a much-needed break.

Your child will learn another verse of the “Little White Duck” song this week. There’s only two verses left! (we learned the duck verse last week, and the red snake verse during red week, but I mistakenly called it the Lily Pad song.)

I hope you and your child enjoy Families Week together.  Please add a comment on this post to let me know how things are going!  I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Your house should be quite lovely by the end of the week, with all the flowers and butterflies and cloud mobiles your youngster will make for you. My personal favorite activity is on Friday afternoon, when you and your child will build monsters out of mud! Mud is a wonderful toy. It is free, plentiful, and will amuse your child for long hours. It makes neat squishy sounds between your toes. It doesn’t hurt (much) when you throw it. It dries out and becomes hard, but all you have to do is add water and it becomes mud again – like magic! Please don’t be the kind of parent who dresses her little child in designer clothes, and then scolds if their clothes get dirty. Children are messy creatures. They spill milk and ketchup. They pull their shoes and socks off and lose them in the middle of the mall when you aren’t looking. They stretch out the necks of their shirts as they learn how to dress themselves. It is much better to buy cheap, used clothing for every-day, and let your child have fun.

You can find some great books, gardening tools, and a child-safe magnifying glass here.

Enjoy your May Flowers!

May Flowers Lesson Plans

Photo:
top:http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbybatchelder/ / CC BY 2.0

It was an evening in early winter, 1982. We were renting in Dodgeville, while my husband attended Michigan Technological University in Houghton. I had rocked my son to a near state of semi-conscious, tip-toeing as quietly as I could up the creaking stairs to lay him in his crib. He was nine months old, but still did not like to sleep in his own bed. I was tired of sharing the master bed with two masters. He was going to sleep in the crib that night, if I had to let him howl all night long! But as I laid him down, trying to ease my hands out from under him, there was a scraping sound and the bottom fell out! The springs, the mattress, blankets, crib toys and my son tumbled to the floor.

I scooped Danny into my arms to comfort him, but as I knelt down to investigate the problem, I discovered that all the wing nuts on the crib had been removed. And I knew Danny had done it again. I’d been pulling wing nuts out of his mouth all week. I don’t know why the crib was assembled with wing nuts instead of locking hex nuts, but it did make it easier to take the crib apart on moving day – of which we’d had quite a few. Unfortunately, it also made it easier for my nine-month-old baby to remove them as well.

Whenever I recounted this tale to my friends and relatives, they’d always exclaim how creative my baby was. I thought they had it a little backward. It wasn’t creative, it was destructive! He was taking something apart, not building it! He was awfully cute, though, with his curly red hair and dimples and so I forgave him. I took the crib apart permanently, baby-proofed his bedroom, and laid the mattress directly on the floor. During the day I could stuff the mattress and bedding in the closet, freeing up more of the floor space for play. Then for his first birthday I bought him six large bolts of different sizes and matching nuts. He screwed them together and took them apart, playing with them more than any other toy in the house.

Young children love to build! They have been building hide-aways since the dawn of time. They love to imitate adult behaviors, which is how they learn to be adults. Perhaps the aimless youth today with no dreams or desires did not have enough interaction with adults in their childhood to know how to be adults? My purpose here is not to point fingers, but to encourage parents to become the best parents they can be, to provide a rich environment for their little children and to love them unconditionally.

Any good preschool program worth a grain of salt will have a woodworking center. The very thought of allowing preschoolers access to real tools is terrifying to some people. Insurance companies may try to ban them from the premises, while all the great educators of the past and present have encouraged hands-on learning and woodworking centers for kids of all ages. Assuming that you agree, and would like to encourage woodworking for your preschooler, here are some guidelines to setting up a woodworking area in your home.

This center should ONLY be used under adult supervision. Therefore, you might put it in the basement or garage. If you have an outdoor shed near the playground, you could locate it there, too, and unlock it only when you’re prepared to supervise (at LEAST once a week!). Introduce the tools only one or two at a time, and teach appropriate rules for use and care. Breaking the rule means losing the opportunity to play in the woodworking center for the rest of the day.

For toddlers and young twos, a toy pounding bench may be all that is needed. This common toy is a series of pegs in a board with a hammer. The child pounds the pegs through one side, turns the board over, and pounds them all back again. Look in a good toy catalog for a decent pounding bench. The kind you can buy for a few dollars is not worth it. The pegs fall out too easily, so the child can’t pound them at all.

Next, a two year old might enjoy pounding golf tees into styrofoam. I’ve read about this from other centers, but it was a step I never tried. I don’t like styrofoam, and try not to have any around. Then I read on another blog about pounding nails into raw squash and pumpkins. Could be fun. Another woman said she taped a large sheet of bubble wrap to her wall, and gave the children wooden mallets to pound the bubbles. Besides wood blocks, toddlers will use giant cardboard boxes to build their playspaces. But somewhere around two and a half or three, most children are ready to use a real hammer.

Buy a real hammer, not a toy. Try a lightweight hammer with the curved claw end. Hammers are sold by pounds. I don’t remember if the one I bought for my son was five or seven pounds. Buy nails with large heads, and not too long. Roofing nails work fine. Then you can get a large tree stump, and simply let your youngster pound in nails. At first you may need to start the nail for her. Later, teach her to hold the nail with a plastic comb, so she doesn’t pound her fingers.

Pounding nails can be a great way to release anger and frustration – far more satisfying than kicking feet and throwing a tantrum. Instead of sending a screaming tot to a “cry rug” or “time out”, what about sending him to the pounding table to pound a few nails? That could be a great form of release for him to use for the rest of his life.

The next tool introduced could be sand paper. Pick up a large supply of scrap wood – often for free, if you know who to ask. Do you have a friend in construction? Visit a saw mill or lumber yard. Get wood scraps in a variety of shapes and sizes – small enough for your youngster to use whole, for now. Save bigger scraps for when you introduce a saw. Glue or staple some sand paper around block scrap wood, rough side out, to give your child something to hold on to while sanding, and demonstrate how sanding a project will take away the rough edges.

Your child can then nail and glue wood scraps together, sand them, and paint them to use them in his play. Collect round plastic shapes like milk bottle caps that he might nail onto the wood to use for tires or steering wheels. Metal lids from empty food containers can be used too, like from pickle jars or frozen juice. Nothing with a sharp edge to it.

Eventually your child will want to cut the wood to make it more suitable to his project. You’ll want to get a crosscut saw and a vise. The vise is mounted to a solid table at a good height for your child. That way he can hold the saw with two hands, and keep his hands away from the sharp edge of the blade. Do NOT allow the child to hold his wood project with his other hand. Goggles should be worn. It would be a good idea to wear goggles whenever working with wood. Splinters are nasty, and little children don’t mind wearing the safety gear as much as their fathers. It’s all part of “dressing up”. And if the man in your child’s life doesn’t like to wear goggles, remind him that his child will imitate his actions, not his advice.

As your child grows, so can the woodworking center. You could get a brace and bit or a hand-held drill, both for boring holes into wood without electricity. Screws work better for some projects than nails. Show your youngster how to use a screw driver, and have her go around tightening the loose door pulls in your house. (Don’t allow preschoolers to play with screwdrivers unsupervised. You do not want your child sticking the screwdriver into an outlet.)

Woodworking is such a great activity for preschoolers! They learn measuring, counting, and problem-solving. They develop eye-hand coordination, fine and gross motor skills, logical thinking, sequencing, spacial awareness, completion and independence. If you add some photographs of people using tools, read picture books about wood working, or set out pictures and directions for projects, you help your child’s language skills, as well.

So what are you waiting for? Maybe your budding Frank Lloyd Wright will want to design houses, not build them for a living, but you will have laid the groundwork to develop your child’s creativity and help him reach his full potential.

Photo credits:
Hammering away by un-sung
Hammering Nails by Janet Dancer
Faith chiseling byHoyasmeg

1. Sheep are farm animals
2. Baby sheep are called lambs
3. Mommy sheep are called ewes
4. Daddy sheep are called rams
5. a group of sheep is called a flock
6. Once or twice a year, sheep get a “haircut” that is called “shearing”
7. Sheep “hair” is called wool.
8. Wool can be spun into yarn to make sweaters and socks and other things
9. Sheep eat grass, leaves, clover, and other flowering plants

There are directions for making a simple Lotto game. Lotto is a great game for preschoolers. It is simpler than Candyland, and you can vary the rules so that there are no “winners” and “losers”. You could make a new Lotto board for every single week! But if you even just make a couple of them, and rotate them, you can maintain your child’s interest.

Jesus is called the Good Shepherd. There is a lot of imagery in the Bible comparing God’s people to a flock of sheep. As your child grows, these concepts will be easier to understand if your child knows something about sheep. I hope you enjoy these activities with your little one, and that you are able to find a sheep farm to visit.

I invite you to stop by my daughter’s website, Valhalla Hills . She raises registered Icelandics, which are really cute little sheep with curly horns.

May you and your family have a happy, blessed Easter!

Easter is Coming Lesson Plans

Photo Credits:
Top:http://www.flickr.com/photos/wealhtheow/ / CC BY 2.0