Science and Other Things!

Hi all,

The Monko has passed me an award. I can't thank you enough. You gotta go and check her blog, it is as beautiful as she and her son are.

Today as you know was Mad Science Sunday. It wasn't that mad but definitely Science. Do you remember the Basil that we planted a few weeks ago? Well, nothing happened :( I guess it is because of the soil thing. Sarah got bored of it anyway because it was not changing so she kept playing with the pot until we had to throw its contents today. So, I dragged myself to the dollar store, got some seeds and 8lbs soil so we spent only $2 AND we (or shall I say Sarah) planted some new flowers today. Here:

Putting the seeds.

I can say that this was the first time Sarah played with soil/mud.

She was hesitant at the beginning but it is a great sensory activity.

An expert?!

Mommy offering little help with the water.

On her own this time ;)

Taking it to the window in the living room.

Cleaning up after herself.

I told you before that I wanted to move on to the numbers (11-20). I came up with this game yesterday while the kids were sleeping. I am sure it is basic and a lot used it before but I haven't seen it on anywhere else so far. I bought some frogs (in one packet) from the dollar store and 2 large dice. Sarah chose the black ones. As you can see, I made this but note that I wrote the numbers (1-10) in digits and letters and (11-20) in digits only. I'm not trying to make Sarah memorize the spelling of the numbers, I'm letting her subconscious do that ;) The rules are very simple, these frogs need  to go back home. We choose one frog and play with it at a time. I made myself one to play against Sarah so that I can demonstrate to her what happens. We roll the dice, count and move the frog a number of steps equivalent to the number on the dice and name the number we land on. At the beginning, she wasn't so sure what to do but by the 4th frog, she didn't want to stop :) I think now she can recognize 11-13-14-16-17-18 & 19. We are still missing 12, 15 & 20 But I promised her we will play with it a lot more in the coming days. It was simple, fun and mess free. I apologize for my photos but it is so difficult to capture an enthusiastic child playing and I needed to play too. After these photos, I put the phone (camera) aside and played with my full attention.

You can at least see she is happy :)

Counting.

Moving the frog.

In the future, there will be minor changes. We'll do 2 letters a week instead of one. An Arabic letter and an English one. We'll do some Maths related things on daily basis (although we do in the simplest forms like counting the biscuits, ..etc) and I will start teaching Sarah more about Allah. Of course, the common thing will still be the fun element and our lovely guest is Farida as always:)

Thank you for joining us.

Love,