Found: A Dinosaur Sticker Activity Book—and a Fun-for-Free Activity to Go with It

Child-led learning has brought us to dinosaur town, which seems to be an essential phase of childhood. What is it about these reptilian giants that kids find so alluring and irresistible? The funny-sounding names? Their strange and varied forms? This is the kind of conversations we're having at home these days:

"Mom, this is a monto-saurus"
"A brontosaurus?"
"No, a monto-saurus. It's a dinosaur mixed with a cat and a leaf."

It is often challenging not to laugh, but let's just go with it, okay?

I, too, was a bit of a dinosaur nut as a kid because of Land Before Time and those collectible sticker books that were all the rage when I was growing up (showing my age here; raise your hand if you remember these). Now I happily get to pass on my limited knowledge to E. It's not in-depth, but I can tell a stegosaurus from a triceratops. So when I spotted the two (super) sticker activity books, pictured above, at National Bookstore, I was happy to feed her interest.

10 Links I Shared with Friends (#10)

Parenting

• Valentine's is over, but pink salt is always in vogue. Trying this salt sensory writing tray. (pre-k pages)
• I'll be trying this method of toy rotation. (cando kiddo)

Productivity/Creativity

• The 7 keys to creativity, illustrated and animated (the rsa) 
• Rethinking the to-do list and why you should have a calendar instead (forbes)
• The secret to productivity is motherhood. One working mom explains why. (huffington post)

Miscellany 

• Beautiful images and stories of womanhood—not just motherhood. (honest body project)
• Hearty laugh of the day: Iconic male characters introduced as if they were female characters (slate)
• What the heck of the day: How female characters are introduced in actual scripts—seriously, it's 2016, people! (fem script intros)
• Illustrate your own recipe cards (or 50). No cooking skills required (Phew!) (inkstruck)
• Married love in pen and ink: A 365-day illustration project you should be following (drawings365) 

And another thing...

What are you not doing today? Why not? Now change your tone and read it again. Why not?

A Letter-Whenever Alphabet Sticker Activity Book for (Sort of) Tot Schooling Moms

If you're familiar with tot schooling and homeschooling, you've heard of letter-a-day curriculum. Now, me, I love order and planning and so a letter-a-day tot schooling plan really appeals to me. My daughter? Not so much. I'm not actively trying to teach her to read (we'll wait a few years for that), but I recognize that she will be routinely quizzed by well-meaning adults so I felt I needed to equip her with the basics. (She once won a pink tumbler at a pizza place this way.) I'd tried printable letter-themed activities, but E ignores them, although she does them when she is at play school twice a week. Perhaps she is past the age when coloring a picture of an A and an apple fill her with glee and satisfaction.

Stickers are another story. She loves them! We do a lot of sticker-based activities using whatever stickers I happen to have handy at the time. So when I saw this B is for Breakdancing Bear Alphabet Sticker Activity Book at NBS (also available through Amazon.com—disclaimer: this is an affiliate link), I took a chance—and hit a jackpot.

10 Links I Shared with Friends #7

From Daily Motivation by Nido Qubein

This series is exactly what it says it is: links, articles, and encouraging words I've shared with my friends. And now I'm sharing them with you. Hello, friend! Hope you find something that helps you today! 

Parenting

• The secret power of stones and storytelling (desert news)
• Learning with joy is not what you think it looks like. Let's move to Finland already! (the atlantic)
• Invitations to play start with a table. Great tips! (diy corporate mom) 
• What if we took the school out of play school? Would that be so bad? (happiness is here)

Productivity/Creativity

• How to start a reading habit again this year. For real. (chronicle books)
• Go big or go home! Read 50 things this year. Here's why you should. (fast company)
• Start from where you are (jonas ellison via medium)

Miscellany

• Life is short. We know. So here's what we need to do with it (paul graham)
• Adspiring! Love this new Axe ad for magical manhood (axe)
• All the inspiration you need, beautifully brush lettered (random olive)

"If You Can Make a Circle": A Simple Way to Use Art to Teach Shapes

Exploring the beauty of shapes

I've been struggling finding engaging activities for our homeschool preschool, but this morning, as usual, it was she who showed me an activity we could both enjoy and learn from. Letting the child lead is truly the wisest principle for early childhood education in our household. She's a much better teacher and initiator than I am.

I'd tried other activities to help her practice her shapes, but she runs from anything pre-planned and presented to her as a "lesson". Quizzing her with flash cards? Not our thing. She knows her shapes already, and the goal is not memorization of shape names, but training the brain to see how shapes fit into our world and to see that there are shapes all around us. It was about exploring possibilities and using objects creatively. I'd bought her a wonderful Learning Resources wooden pattern blocks set to play with because a lot of moms seemed to have success with those, but she is completely uninterested in them. So it was back to the drawing board.

It just so happened, drawing was actually the answer I was looking for:

Exploring Homeschooling for a Preschooler

I promised myself we'd start when she turned three. Or rather, that I'd at least put in more effort and add some structure to her homeschooling. Well, D-Day has come and gone and I am at the starting line, trembling.

Where do I begin? A letter a day? A book a week? A theme a month? There are so many options, so many choices; as a pathological collector, that is a recipe for frustration and a cause for the failure to launch. 

But launch we must. Not because I want her to get into a prestigious preschool program or to learn to read before she's four or be better at math than both her parents combined, but because I realize that she is now three and time is passing too quickly.

She woke up one morning and she was three. The toddler in the house was gone and a little girl has taken her place.

Building Blocks: A Lesson in Letting Her Lead

This is my new approach to teaching her: Give her something that stimulates her mentally, then sit down and have my coffee. Win-win.

I'm half-joking. But I'm serious about how well this worked this morning. Left alone, she is able to focus on the task at hand, whatever she feels that may be. When I'm too near, she is distracted as her main goal becomes trying to get my attention. My full attention. Look away and you'll hear a crash, a splash, or a more explicit "Mommy, look at me!"

Today, the task at hand was building a tower by stacking boxes.

The Little Lady and the Tiger

A tiger at Avilon Zoo, Rizal

There are many things I don't know about tigers, but to my 21-month-old daughter, I am an encyclopedia.

I walk closer to their enclosures, carrying her. Up until today, she has called them lions ninety-five percent of the time, lions being the more common jungle cat of choice in toddler literature and playthings. “It’s like a lion, but with stripes,” I’ve said before, which is, of course, false in many regards, but toddler zoology lessons often are.

She has seen them in miniature, an afterthought in the flap of one of her books. She has seen them in fiction, but the kind that sings and bounces, with an extra ‘g’ and the wrong pronunciation, so that hardly counts. Today, she is seeing them up close.