Books and Rhythm Sticks

From the block center this morning I heard " Look Mia we made a community !" Sure enough, I look over there and this is what I see.

The girls were so proud of themselves!

Other experiences we had today was using our scales to measure things. We used important words like equal and more than and less than. Did you know even princesses can be scientist ?

This is a toy that has a magnet wand and the kids move the little pieces around. There are pictures to try and match but I have it out for the fine motor practice. See how Orrin has to hold it to pick up the dots ? Perfect grip for writing !

We do a lot of matching but this game also reviews shapes !

We took the rhythm sticks today. First we tapped our names . Some of our friends had one beat and others had 2 and 3.

Why do we use Rhythm sticks ?

Rhythm Stick Play: Objectives/Learning Outcomes
Playing and using rhythm sticks promotes and develops the following:

• Small motor development—using the small muscles of the hands and fingers
• Eye-hand coordination—eyes and hands working together smoothly
• Dexterity—skill and ease in using hands
• Eye tracking—eyes being able to follow an object as the object moves in space
• Directionality—the inner sense and knowledge of where things are in relation to the body
• Auditory discrimination—being able to hear and identify differences in sounds
• Listening skills—ability to follow verbal directions
• Coordination—parts of the body moving smoothly together
• Rhythm—aspects of music having to do with time; patterns of sound perceived in relationship to a recurring beat
• Beat—recurrent throb or pulse in music; important rhythmic skill to develop before the age of seven as the ability to keep a steady beat is linked to linguistic development
• Tempo—the speed of music
• Thinking processes—creative thinking and problem solving; develops memory (pattern and sequence)
• Crossing the midline—occurs when left or right arms or legs cross over the center of one’s body and promotes communication between the brain hemispheres

The next lesson we did today was learning how to take care of and " read " books". We have been having more and more books torn up and thrown on the floor after reading. Today we took time to talk about that. Sometimes we assume that kids KNOW what to do. We should never assume anything. :) So, we first talked about how to pick out a book. Even though we can't read sometimes we can tell what the book will be about by looking at the picture on the front of the book. So, we each chose a book and told what we thought it would be about. When you are reading a book ask your child before you start what they think the book is about. So we established if we like dogs that we could go through our books and find one that interest us. Next we talked about turning the pages carefully one page at a time. We also talked about the words in the book and how we can use our fingers to scan them. That one day we will be READERS too! How exciting ! When we got to the end of our books we talked about what we should do next. We always need to find the proper place to put our books even if we are in a hurry.

We had a great day. Hope yours was too!

NOTES FOR PARENTS:

Tomorrow night at 6 is our trip to the nursing home- Quail Ridge to sing . It will take 15 minutes tops.