Mother Goose!

I usually teach school during the daytime, but it was spring break last week, so I got to go to Mother Goose on Friday!

I went to one of Holly’s story hours, the Mother Goose story time (for 1-5 year olds).  It was multi-sensory experience!  She really does a fantastic job with all the little ones. 

If they come up to give her a hug while she’s reading, she just gives them a hug and sets them back down.  By then, the child’s parental unit has noticed them and has them sit back down in the circle.  More parents came to the story time than this, but I didn’t get up to take pictures near the end, as I had to sit down with Luke, as you can tell from the photo.

She sings songs, reads stories, and shows them the pictures during the formal ‘story time,’ then there’s a hands on activity designed to let them work on their fine-motor skills.  She knows all of the kids and mothers and sings a song at the beginning that includes each kid’s name, a different verse for each one.

I think one of the main reason the mothers keep coming, once they start, is to have some adult interaction time with the other mothers.

Of course, I knew all the melodies because I here many of the songs around the house, so I sang harmony while taking pictures. 

Mark is really getting his letters down.  he does power reading with Holly every day in the afternoon using the magnetic letters on the fridge.  The do a little song about it and work on the various one syllable sounds like bat, hat, rat, cat, etc.

It’s tempting to worry about his lack of accuracy with the order and arrangement of his letters in his name, as seen in the photo, but I think that’s just a normal stage that kids go through.  He’s finally interested, somewhat, in penmanship, so I’m definitely proud that he’s getting ‘into’ it, as they say.  You can probably tell from the picture that Mark found some scissors and shortened his hair a bit…  These things happen.

My mother said I used to write my name all backwards and upside down and such when I was a kid, and I’ve read that often people that turn out to be good with numbers and spatial manipulation do that when they are younger.  He writes them down in the correct order, they just don’t appear left to right, which is actually pretty cute, I think.  I like having a digital camera, because then I don’t actually have to keep all the crafts, just take a picture of them 🙂

Luke played ‘big brother’ to John Caleb, keeping him interested in something and smiling while Mark and I worked on the craft.  John Caleb has really come along with the controll of his neck and eyes–he can really make genuine eye-contact and is REALLY thriving!

I really can’t imagine a much better story hour for the kids.  I did put down the camera  to pick up Luke after he ran out into the middle of things, and I did help Mark do the craft at the end of the story time.  We ended up getting the movie “Brother Bear” by Disney and watched it on my PC.  That was my fault.

Being a good big brother is hard work but a lot of fun.  The older two sure like to make John Caleb smile!