Gardening with a toddler. Growing strawberries.

We live in a flat, and I think that it is obvious that our toddler doesn't know where and how fruits and vegetables grow. The perfect way, to explain this process to him, would be to go to a farm and show him. Even with such activity, I suppose that our toddler would not really understand all the process. We thought with my husband that it would be great to grow something easy on our balcony, and our toddler to have the opportunity to see all the process of fruit growth.

What we did?

We bought strawberries' plant that already had flowers. We encouraged our toddler to take care of these, and water strawberries. He enjoyed the idea, and even wanted to water these various times a day. But, the biggest present for him was eating red strawberries from balcony and not from supermarket.

How do you like the idea? Have you done something similar with your kids. Let me know.

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Soft blocks. Montessori name recognition.

Our toddler began to learn letters in the nursery. I like the way nursery make this and I thought that it would be great if our toddler would recognize his name spelling. He perfectly distinguish letter A and letter E, maybe some more, but I haven't identified this yet. Many times, I have written his name on paper or on dashboard and he enjoyed this. Every person loves to hear and to see his name.

I thought, it would be great to make a play with letters, and create something interactive for my toddler. Soft blocks - great way to develop fine motor abilities such as touching and playing with them. Apart of this, I made these soft blocks colorful and he can learn colors. I made them in such a way, that he can match letters, once blocks are arranged correctly, he can spell his name, DAMIAN. This montessori activity develops his creativity and makes him easy to learn new letters. And of course his name.

How do you like the idea?

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Number recognition. Learning activity.

My toddler knows numbers from 2 years old, as I was singing and playing with him a lot with 1 to 10 numbers, even I have sew him these numbers. Now, I just try to repeat them with him, and I like when he recognize numbers in different manners. Here I would like to share with you some of ideas to play with numbers.

1. Draw houses with numbers. Explain that in a house live a number.

2. Apple tree, counting apples on a tree.

3. Sew numbers and play with touching them.

4. Playing with cards.

Other ideas you can find on my previous articles below:

1. Number recognition, perfect inside activity for a toddler

http://happymamasecrets.blogspot.com.es/2016/02/number-recognition-perfect-inside_22.html?m=1

2. 1 to 10 counting educational activity

http://happymamasecrets.blogspot.com.es/2015/06/1-to-10-counting-educational-activity.html?m=1

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3 years birthday celebration. Ideas for toddler birthday.

This year I have had no time to prepare our toddler's birthday. After giving birth to our second son, I was upset about the idea that I haven't thought about Damian's birthday. And the worst thing was that I had no idea of what to do. When one day, my husband proposed to go to the zoo on his birthday, and ideas began to run on my head. Of course....it is a great idea to do a zoo theme birthday, Damian loves animals.

 Damian's birthday:

1. Morning - 'Happy Birthday' song with cake and wall of memories.

The idea was to prepare a wall full of his images from 2 to 3 years and through the images to put some zoo animals, to make this mural more zoo friendly. Like in the image. (animals' pictures are from pinterest)

Other idea was to write 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY' with animals signs. Letters I have found on pinterest.( I love pinterest)

2. Nursery - cake and birthday things for all toddlers of his class to play during the day, balloons as well, but no image :(.

3. Midday - go to the Zoo Barcelona

The idea was to go next half of the day to the zoo Barcelona and to enjoy the day with zoo animals.

4. Evening - family celebration.

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Throwing & Catching a ball. Toddler outside activity

Looking through studies about toddlers development I have found a really interesting information about the topic we will discuss today. Throwing balls our kids are able more or less from their 18th month, I mean a conscient throw of a ball, not simple throwing of any objects, that even babies of 6 months are able to do. But how about catching? I was quite surprised when last week I tried to play with our toddler in catching a ball, and he perfectly did that. I wouldn´t say that he can catch 100% of times I throw him the ball, but more or less every time. As well, here depends on the distance between us, less distance, more possibilities to catch a ball.

I have never thought about this game before, but seems like a great outside activity for our toddler. According studies, were made about development of toddlers and kids of different ages, were seen that such a simple game as throwing and catching the ball, develop ‘hand-eye’ or ‘foot-eye’ coordination (when our eyes work together with our hands or feet), develop timing and balance of a kid. This skills are not an inherent skills, these are more learnt through repetition. This mean that more you play with your kid, more you will develop this skills in your child, no secrets at all here :).

The game is simple, you as a parent has to stay in front of your toddler having a short distance between you. Once you see that your toddler has mastered the skill to catch the ball you gently throw the ball from the larger distance. Eventually, you can move on to larger or shorter distance depending on how perform your toddler in catching the ball.

It is important in the process of the game, leave your child to catch the ball as many times as it is possible and engourge him doing this activity by telling him about his wonderful work of catching a ball. He must be proud of the results, to be motivated to play other time as well.

Here are some lovely images while we played this game.

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Watercolor discoveries, painting with red color

Watercolor is always good inside activities, that capture all toddlers attention and you can enjoy playing with him. The only thing that I do not like is the mess that I have to clean after this activity. To keep my toddler busy and to make the activity fund and not so easy I have opted for other way of painting.

For this activity I needed:

• toilet paper roll
• piece of sponge
• watercolor, I choose red color
• special kind of dress that can get dirty

This activity develops fine motor skills of my toddler as he learns the texture of a sponge and how this changes once he use it to paint, learns red color and how he can paint with that color, and then paper roll, to paint it is not the easiest task for them as it is not a plane like a paper. I feel like I gave him a good lesson of feeling shapes and color.

Once finished the task, Damian enjoyed painting with fingers on the white paper, I think he loved the idea to get dirty :).

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If you stay at home for a long weekend, you need to go to the park with your toddler

As we had a looong weekend of 3 days, we decided to spend it outside the flat, as much time as possible. Recently we have found a park for children of 0 to 3 years, till now we were going to another park that is for children between 2 and 11. I think you can imagine the difference between one and another park. In the park dedicated for older children, I had to run after my toddler and to lift him up and down of the slades that weren't well prepared for his age, and now on this park for 0 to 3 years all the objects to play with, are very well prepared for my toddler's age, and now I can sit down relaxed as my toddler can do all activities alone. Now for me this outside activity help to relax and take a time to think and don't worry as my toddler is a big boy and can manage his desires alone without my help.

I like these kind of parks for different reasons:

• our toddler can breathe fresh air
• he can run there and forth and I am not worried as all these spaces are closed, and no dog or cat can enter this space (I like animals, but just those which know that are clean)
• he can make new friends of his ages
• he can develop his vocabulary with the kids who are older than him
• he learns how to manage his body to get what he wants and needs
• I can relax and enjoy the moment to look at him

If you like to go to the park with your toddler, share your experience.

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Great fine motor activity with pipe cleaners

Few time ago I bought pipe cleaners on Carrefour, as I found them a good choice for inside activities with my toddler, as well some other thing to play with my toddler at home. Looking through pinterest I found out a lot of great ideas to play with pipe cleaners, and thought in our own activity that we could do together.

Preparation: It took me less than 10 minutes to prepare all. I took pipe cleaners, scissors, and pack of colored foam paper. Cut foam paper into pieces, and then made a slot on this pieces.

The goal was to learn to insert these pieces on pipe cleaners, learn colours, and learn the texture of each thing.

The result: I enjoyed this activity, and my toddler did this. It took all his attentions as he found difficult the task to insert these pieces on pipe cleaners, but after several times of trying it was ok for him. He loved the texture of pipe cleaners, he took them into the mouth, made shapes with them and we made some colorful bracelets with them.

I didn't expected, but on this activity my toddler spend more than half an hour, this means that this activity was interesting and unusual for him.

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Outside activity - feeding pigeons in the park

When we do not know what to do, we go to the park, there is always a lot of fun and a lot of kids who like to play. But how make this activity really interesting and make zero effort? This weekend to my husband came a great idea of making our outside activity really interesting. We took bread and we went to the park to feed pigeons. Pigeons are really smart, they were afraid to come and to eat bread, because Damian was running there and forth and send all of them away. But this happened just till pigeons understood that there is no harm in this, and they began to come more and more, and eat our bread. Our toddler liked the idea to run all the park, and send pigeons away, but to feed them for him was very unusual activity as he never did that. So, little by little, we showed him how he has to feed them and he found this activity quite interesting. At the end our toddler learned how to feed pigeons and they on theirs side were more confident in staying with us. Look at this beauty in the images.

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Playing with shapes, lovely inside activity for toddlers

As I mentioned previously, looking through pinterest I have found amazing things to do with my toddler, the most that I really liked were printables. I think that after first time playing with alphabet printables with my toddler I understood that this was the right choice for an educational activity, even now, we play with them, and when Damian really wants my attention he takes these printables and show me to play with him. So this time, I decided to make something more complex and make printables with shapes. I printed different shapes and bought pipe cleaners from carrefour, as he enjoys playing with them. It is actually a good fine motor skill, as your kid try to repeat you, and this pipe cleaners are very pleasant to move and make shapes. Damian liked the idea to play with them, but when I stopped doing shapes he didn´t follow the game, so for me it was tricky as I thought to leave him to play further, but no way, I had to stay and invent another game.

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How to teach easier alphabet? Printables is a good choice for this educational activity

Printables.... How I even haven't find them before?...but, I'm happy that I find them now.

It is not so easy to teach a child a language living in a multicultural environment, when you come from a bilingual family and the city where you live as well have 2 languages. It is difficult, but who told that this is impossible. I always tried to speak to my child just one language, and to learn with him songs in the same language, watch youtube videos in this language. I have seen a really good progress, but I didn't know that printables can help me so much on our educational path. Last week me and my husband prepared this printables in the alphabet order, as we wanted him to be familiar with the letters and all the words which begin with that letter. This educational activity I think is good way to teach your toddler new words and makes this task easier for mums.

Preparation: dad looked for good quality images on google search, each image have to begin with a letter of the alphabet, then I made a power point slides with images, printed, cut and the printables were ready for use.

See below in the images how these look likes. The amazing part of the printables was that my toddler told me clearly two new words just this weekend.

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