Finding Learning Opportunities

Lately I have felt pretty deflated.  This pregnancy has been extremely rough, and it has resulted in my son watching entirely too much television.  Before I started getting sick I was working with him on his letters, colors, and numbers.  Once the sickness began, that all ended.  I have felt that everything he learned has slowly slipped away, and I will have to start all over again.

I am not sure if planning out how I am going to implement Before Five In A Row has changed my way of thinking, but this week was a bit different.  The week started with a trip to the library because I had a book I needed to pick up.  I let my son pick a bunch of books out (even though the ones he picked I wasn't thrilled with).  Two of the books he picked were Elmer and the Whales and Whoosh and Chug.

Elmer and the Whales may have been one I picked out, but I can't remember.  My son is convinced that I am having a baby whale, so we are trying to convince him otherwise.  This book didn't have a particularly exciting story, but it did allow us to work on his counting.  The art work has multiples of animals on each page.  We would spend the time counting all the different animals (which also involved finding them).  He really enjoyed it.

Whoosh and Chug was not a book that I wanted to read.  It was one of many train books that have entered this house.  It ended up being quite fun to read, and it has a lot of sight words in it.  Some of the words I know my son has memorized from the story, but this evening he surprised me.  He recognized the word stop! without any prompting from me!  It's fun having him participate in the story for once.

This week we also went to a local splash pad.  On Wednesdays during the summer they do special things for the kids.  This week was everything creepy crawly.  We went because we expected snakes, but there weren't any.  However, there were lots of other fun things to learn about.

There was a bee keeper there with his bees.  He had honey samples, dried honey comb, and beeswax.  It was fun explaining to my son how honey and beeswax are made.  This ultimately was his favorite part of the excursion.

A lady was there with lots of bugs in plastic for the kids to examine.  My son spent about an hour in this tent.  She was awesome with him!  She answered all of his questions, and told him lots of additional facts.  I expected this to be his favorite part of the day because he has been asking for weeks to see a bug in amber (thank you dinosaur train!), but it wasn't.

 Lowes was there as well.  They had brought a bunch of soil, pans, and flower seeds.  Kids were able to plant there own seeds, and now we are waiting for them to grow.

As you can see, I am finding lots of different learning opportunities for my son.  Even though I am still unable to do much (even our Wednesday outing was too much for me) I can still adequately teach him.  It is exciting to watch his little brain work, and it's nice to know that he will learn in spite of me.