This whole idea of blogging is actually really amazing, but a lot harder to actually get to. I really admire the blogging world and the incredible teachers who blog, teach, and still have time for their family. I do work part time from home, supporting my husband who together we are raising support for our church planting ministry in Colombia. I seriously wish I knew how to squeeze blogging in more, you amazing bloggers must not get any asleep… Nap times and late nights are all about either prep for some play school stuff or in reality, 95% is support raising administration and organization. I think I seriously need to create a blog sight on just what missionary life is like and what goes into this support raising process. That just isn’t as fun as talking about play school and all the fun bilingual play we do in a day! I am sure September and October everyone is doing fun fall themes, we are one of the many who have loved Pumpkin Week. We spent about two weeks doing a ton of pumpkin activities and actually the second week was mainly focused on Spanish vocabulary and since we were reviewing the letter C, calabaza was just a perfect transition into our Spanish learning. I wanted to show a sample of how I section out our planned play. I target multiple developmental areas in the day, eight to be exact. Here is a sample of my play planning over the two week period of pumpkins/calabazas.
Keys to Planned Play
The eight target areas I try to get to are the following:
- Spiritual/Relational Development
- Art/Fine Motor
- Sensory/Social Studies
- Phonemic Awareness and Guided Reading
- Sing Along Songs and Poems
- Math Concepts and Numbers
- Math Literacy
- Dramatic Play
If you opened either of the play plans you see I put various ideas and plans for just a three day period in the week. I am EXTREMELY laid back and flexible, I do not force anything on Emma. I motivate, excite, and introduce ideas though and to be honest most of the time Emma takes my hand and tries to bring me upstairs to play school while I am still having my morning cup of coffee and have not drank my crankies away yet! If you are at this place with your child where they don’t like structured play, that is totally normal! Emma wasn’t always thrilled, but I would implement at least one or two planned play developmental areas on the daily and work up to targeting four developmental areas in the morning and afternoon. Every child is different and every family situation is different. I accumulated various resources from awesome and creative bloggers that you can easily access if you ever want incorporate pumpkins/calabazas in your toddler’s day.
One of my educator mentors always told me to go deep NOT wide when reading with littles. Dive deep into books, it is not about the quantity of books you read, it is the QUALITY of how you read them. I tend to focus on a few books at a time and dive deep into them. I do crafts, have weekly discussions, create interactive play with the book characters, and incorporate activities about those books from the content in them. Check out the play plans for the literacy focus. Here are some of the pumpkin resources I used. There are many more, but for time I didn’t search too much for them. If you want to share some of your finds, please do! I am always looking for more resources and ideas!
Mama's Bilingual Play-School 