Learning for Little Ones: Putting it into practice... intentionally!

Welcome to Learning for Little Ones! Do you have an idea or activity you do with your little ones??? Please share it with us. I'd love it if you would write a post on it sometime in the next couple days and link up to our Mr. Linky. I would ask, though, that you include somewhere in your post a link back to this post so others can participate! Thanks!

A couple weeks ago I talked about being intentional with our little ones. This is good not only with the activities we do with them, but also in the every day activities that we just happened to be doing. I've also mentioned Signing Time (oh how my son loves Signing Time ~ in fact, I no longer simply return one to the library, I also have to go all the way to the children's section and get a new one to check out too) and our use of that as a teaching tool. Signing Time is great, but I find that unless Tornado has a chance to put those signs to use in real life, he really doesn't pick up on anything.

Enter our daily walk! We don't live on a very interesting street... it's about a 1/4 mile from the end to our house (then a dirt drive after that), but we walk it every day. I usually try to get in about a mile a day... sometimes up to 3 or so, but that's not the point! The point... while we are walking we do a lot of looking around: bird watching, pointing out flowers, cars, mailboxes, airplanes... you get the picture. What used to be terribly boring to me, is now crammed full with exciting things to look at and show to Tornado.

It's during our daily walk that he finds and points out all the birds (either perched on the power lines or flying in the sky. It is during our daily walk that he first signed flower and airplane and car (and I didn't even know he'd picked up those signs).

Perhaps you don't go on daily walks together (it's not practical for all of us). Don't forget those shopping trips. Remember when Tornado found dogs in the grocery store??? I loved it around Easter when we did a normal CVS trip and there were bunnies everywhere. It was a new sign he had learned and he pointed each of them out. We spent some extra time in the seasonal aisle looking at all the animal garden decorations. Just recently while shopping Aldi's we couldn't figure out why he was flailing his arms. Then I noticed a bunch of bags of onions in his line of sight and realized he was signing "ball" for the first time!

Keep your eyes open and point things out... you can help your little ones learn wherever you are!

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What are you doing with your little ones? Write a post on your blog and link up here. Be sure to link directly to your Learning for Little Ones post and don't forget to link back here so others can participate too. Feel free to use my little Learning for Little Ones banner at the top. Don't have a blog??? Leave your ideas in the comments section. :) I'm so looking forward to visiting your blogs and learning from all of you!