New Challenges with Old Puzzles

Completing jigsaw puzzles are a great educational activity, which helps to develop manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, memory, reasoning, concentration, etc., and I am happy it has been one of LM’s favourite activities. However, after completing any given puzzle a couple of times, she seems to start losing interest in it, so I have been looking for ways to “challenge up” her old puzzles. Here are a couple tricks I have learned:

1.   You can mix two or more different puzzles, depending on the difficulty, for example two 50-piece puzzles or three 30-piece ones are fine for LM for now as she is comfortable with 100-piece puzzles.

2.   Another way is to ask your child to do the puzzle upside-down with the pictures facing the table and with the shapes of the cuts as the only guide. LM quite liked this new approach!

If you know any other way to make a puzzle a bit more challenging, please let me know.

Music for Little Mozarts - Music for LM?

Although teaching playing music to LM is by far not the biggest priority for me at this stage, I would hate not to give her some sort of introduction to it. Besides, it is suggested that “playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brain's sensitivity to speech sounds” and “could help normal children as well as those with developmental problems”.

So after some research and thanks to the brillkids forum (which, by the way, is indeed a brilliant forum!), I have been pointed in the direction of “Music for Little Mozarts” series by Alfred Publishing. There is a free downloadable sampler at http://www.mflm.com/ which gives a bit more detail about the programme.

This programme can be purchased as a deluxe package (containing Level 1 only), but coming at a fairly steep £45, this, unfortunately, was not an option for me. So as much as I would like the whole kit, I decided to limit myself to a Level 1 Lesson Book, Level 1 Workbook and a set of Flashcards (the plush characters could become potential Christmas gifts though!). The set arrived yesterday and I already laminated some of the flashcards (the laminating maniac I am!).

I have gone through the first few pages and will need to think how to adjust it to LM’s peculiar learning style. Quite incidentally, and again on the same forum, I also learned about a series of “How to Teach Piano to Kids” lessons by Expert Village on YouTube, which ties up nicely with the “Music for Little Mozarts” approach and which is something I will definitely be referring to. (By some reason the lessons do not appear listed in order, so in case you, like me, get lost among the videos on the playlist, here is the order I think they should have been listed: the lesson, appearing as the last one, is, in fact, Lesson 1, the first one is Lesson 2, eighth – Lesson 3, fifth – Lesson 4, seventh – Lesson 5, ninth – Lesson 6, fourth – Lesson 7, third – Lesson 8, second – Lesson 9, sixth – Lesson 10.)

Sadly, I can’t afford buying or even hiring a piano at this stage, so I am hoping to go as far as I can with a little electronic piano LM got as a present from her relatives, and see where it takes us (wish me luck!).

Anyhow, I am not going to rush it at all and will only offer it to LM every so often, as the much more imperative staff we need to go thought with her on a daily basis leaves hardly any time for anything “extracurricular”.

I do hope she takes to it and likes it just like I do!

Calendar Time – October 2010

Here is a short update on our calendar time (you can read my previous calendar post here).

Apart from the new header, I have now added cards with the words “yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow”, which we attach to the bottom of the corresponding number card with the help of tiny decorative pegs.

It was LM who gave me the idea: the first couple of times after we had put up a new number on the board, she would take the next one from the hook at the bottom of the board and attempt to pin it in the following cell. I explained to her that that was something we would do “tomorrow”. So now every time we put up the new date, she would point to the following card on the hook and say, “That’s tomorrow!”

This month I also started using our calendar time for doing some simple math activities. We count forward all the number cards we have so far put up and then, more importantly, we count them backwards, as it is something I haven’t done with LM so far. This has been quite painless so far as we have started with just a few numbers and will be gradually increasing them to 30.

I also decided to let LM choose the colour of the pin with which we attach the card to the board to create a pattern. For example, this month we have started with the easiest ABAB pattern and we alternate red and green pins.

That’s all for now but I will be adding more activities to our calendar time as it has so far been a big hit with LM.

DIY Pattern Blocks

I managed to procure a few magnetic foam sheets quite cheaply at HobbyCraft and made a set of pattern blocks. These are a great math activity and help strengthen visual skills, shape and pattern recognition. LM is now using these to build patterns and to recreate images on a baking sheet:

The magnetic backing is very helpful as it stops the blocks from moving around, so LM does not get frustrated and can show the end result to her daddy!

There are many pattern block mats available for free downloading on the web. I have printed and laminated the above and a few more from http://www.prekinders.com/ (by the way, you can find many more great ideas there!). Each mat can be printed either as an outline or in colour for a younger learner.

LM is very confident playing with these so I removed all the lines inside the images and gave her only the silhouettes, just to make it a bit more of a challenge. So this now also became a great activity to develop logic and spatial reasoning.

I guess, tangrams would be a good next step from here!