Kid’s Reader’s Diary

Maria 3.5 y.

Perhaps, as every child Maria is fond of reading (better, listening to Mum’s/Dad’s reading J) before sleeping. And together, we’ve already gone through many many books for children. Sometimes I’m trying to stimulate the discussion on what we’ve read: on the characters, on their actions/emotions/thoughts, on the environment, on the plot etc. Sometimes, I’m keeping quiet and Maria starts to discuss various issues and asks multiple questions. These thoughts and impressions seem really valuable to me to better understand my child. Once we’ve been reading about a small grasshopper, who lost his parents. Maria said: “Cmon! The parents should have given him a mobile…” This was a kind of explanation to me why she wasn’t willing to stay on her own during her gymnastics classes - she didn’t feel safe if she couldn’t reach her parents whenever she needed to.

Besides, I somehow wanted to structure our reading that we keep a record of what we’ve read. For Maria the reader’s DIARY, which we decided to start, would be also a thing worth to look through once in a while and to recall what she’d read.

We decided to make it like a scrapbook, putting there stickers with characters, drawing sceneries described in the fairy tales, etc. We put there also the tickets from the events such as theatre performance or ballet we attended. I write down in this notebook the comments Maria makes, the questions she asks. Basically, one can do there whatever she wants, depends on the fantasy limits.

Creating summer mood

Maria 3.5 y.

There is a snowstorm, dark and cold outside and, therefore, we decided to organize a piece of summer in our flat by drawing, gluing and making some attributes of this warm and green time.

1.       Summer field with flowers and insects

Painted with watercolours, made flower stamps out of the toilet paper reel, modeled insects out of clay. We prepared the ladybirds according to the guidelines and then sticked them to the summer field. The whole work was purely done by Maria – I just helped to cut out the ladybirds.

2.       Fun and easy summer scenery we made pretty fast thanks to these videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The exciting part of this work is that it grabs the attention of the very active children: you don’t have to care about your accuracy, you don’t have to care too much about the colours you use and it is very interesting to figure out what kind of animal you’ve painted.

3.       Salt Dough Cornflowers

Salt dough (2 glasses of flour, a glass of salt, a glass of water) is really good one for the finger work out. Besides, one can realize his talent when modeling some figures. Another benefit is its cost compared to  the pricey colourful dough found in the craft sets.

 We used the dough to make a panel with cornflowers and a ladybird. We made the buds of cornflowers out of plastic teaspoons, coloured them in blue with acrylic paints, snapped the edges and fixed them in the dough. Then, dried the panel in the oven and finished the panel with the acrylic painting.