Playing to Learn

Welcome to my new blog. I'm so excited to start recording and sharing my efforts to enrich the lives of the children entrusted to my care. Maybe something we do here will inspire you to join in the fun with your own kids.

Photo taken by  Marquette Mower

I recently took on a child care job (based out of my own home), that has made me really think about how much time I spend doing quality activities with my little guy. Having less one-on-one time with him, I need to make sure that what he does get is good quality. It also puts the pressure on me to make sure that even though my friend doesn't get to be home all day with her darling little girl, she still can know that her Paisley is getting the kind of love, attention, and growing opportunities she would be providing for her if she was home with her all day. I don't pretend to be able to take her place as a mother, but I can make sure I'm doing my best to help her out.
I've been spending lots of time reading my old textbooks on curriculum planning, books by and about Montessori, library books, blogs, etc trying to get ideas for exactly how I want to make this all work. It's still a work in progress, but we are making progress. My first priority is being a wife and mother, not running a ship-shape child care center (or blog) with strict schedules and lesson plans, so I don't promise to have new and amazing activities to post about every day, maybe not even every week. My goal is to post weekly updates on things I've done with the babies, noting what works and what didn't, so that anyone else out there looking for ideas can see what we're doing. They'll be labeled by age and type of activity so that anyone looking for something specific will have a better shot at finding what they want.
While learning is important, and technically one of my main goals here, having fun is just as important, and maybe more so. These are babies I'm working with here, if it's not absorbingly interesting they won't have anything to do with it. So, we are just going to have fun, and maybe pick up a few little nuggets of knowledge along the way. Play time can be powerful, and the best part is the little ones won't even know they're doing anything but having a wonderful time. That is why, around here, we play to learn.