BAKING AND COOKING
It is always fun for children to learn about baking and cooking. It
doesn't have to be anything fancy. The sugar cookie shown here is something
we have done in my family ever since I was small, and now the whole
family gets together to make sugar cookies with my nephew and niece.
Cooking and baking can be used to teach precision, how to follow directions, elements of science, and you can even use it to introduce math - pick your favorite recipe and tell your
child to make half a recipe, or to double the recipe, or as they gain these
skills, a fourth of a recipe, or 8 times the recipe. (You might want to check their math for a while.) It also opens up another avenue for a child to find their creativity.
Remember, there will be mistakes made here and there. Sometimes you may throw away food, which, if you grew up like I did, is always disheartening, but sometimes, that's just necessary for the learning process. Sometimes a huge mess will be made. These sugar cookies take us all day and it is still a mess, but it was particularly messy when the children were small. I figured my mother, alone, with four of us, did this every year. It was probably a day for feeling like she wanted to pull her hair out, but that's not how she talks about it. She remembers fondly the fun times we had, and the time spent together as a family with all of us playing together, learning together and having fun !
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Remember, there will be mistakes made here and there. Sometimes you may throw away food, which, if you grew up like I did, is always disheartening, but sometimes, that's just necessary for the learning process. Sometimes a huge mess will be made. These sugar cookies take us all day and it is still a mess, but it was particularly messy when the children were small. I figured my mother, alone, with four of us, did this every year. It was probably a day for feeling like she wanted to pull her hair out, but that's not how she talks about it. She remembers fondly the fun times we had, and the time spent together as a family with all of us playing together, learning together and having fun !
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NATURE
Excursions into nature are a wonderful way to bond with your children and teach them about how important it is to take care of our environment. It can also be a great avenue for talking about the science of the natural world.
Take, for example, looking at butterflies, or bringing up butterflies. You can create your own science lesson about butterflies, caterpillars, chrysalises, and changing life cycles. Butterflies are just one example. Identify trees by their leaves, identify birds, collect worms or put an insect in a jar (with holes for air of course). Whatever it is that you enjoy doing outside, your child will enjoy doing it with you. Whether it's working in the garden, mowing the lawn, fishing, hunting, or feeding birds and photographing them. Children will ask questions. They will look things up on the internet. You may start out teaching them and then soon find them teaching you a thing or two about your favorite hobbies. Children learn more when they teach it to someone else.
Just make sure to have fun!
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Take, for example, looking at butterflies, or bringing up butterflies. You can create your own science lesson about butterflies, caterpillars, chrysalises, and changing life cycles. Butterflies are just one example. Identify trees by their leaves, identify birds, collect worms or put an insect in a jar (with holes for air of course). Whatever it is that you enjoy doing outside, your child will enjoy doing it with you. Whether it's working in the garden, mowing the lawn, fishing, hunting, or feeding birds and photographing them. Children will ask questions. They will look things up on the internet. You may start out teaching them and then soon find them teaching you a thing or two about your favorite hobbies. Children learn more when they teach it to someone else.
Just make sure to have fun!
Sign up for our newsletter for ideas for fun outdoor excursions with your children !
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SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS
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Science experiments are another great way to provide some experiential learning. They also allow your child to get used to doing experiments so that when "Science Experiment" time occurs at school, they're ready for it. It's a good idea to go ahead and get used to taking really good notes about the exact steps you used, so that your child can see what goes into a Methods section. Perhaps, even start talking about the parts of a scientific paper - the introduction, the method section, results, and discussion. If you're really gung ho, you can go ahead and start talking about where you got the information from and what a reference section would look like. This was never my favorite part, so if you skip it, they will go over that in school, and you have provided your child with so much more preparation than most kids going into the whole month of time for science experiments. Starting young with science may even give your child a boost when it comes to the creativity of thinking of research questions.
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