with Shelly Birger Phillips
This button board was simple to make.
You just need:
1) A board
2) Felt
3) Buttons
4) Sharp scissors & a sewing kit
Simply sew the buttons onto a piece of felt the same size as your board. Then glue it onto the board with fabric or wood glue. Cut out shapes and cut button holes in them. And you’re done! The kids love this one.
I’ve been reading a very interesting book about exactly why intrinsic motivation is so important for children AND for adults. It’s called “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S. Dweck and in it Dweck describes two opposing mindsets we all experience.
She refers to the first as the “fixed mindset.” This is the voice in our heads that tells us that we have a fixed amount of talent, intelligence, or skill at a certain task and there’s nothing we can do to change it. This mindset also associates effort with a lack of natural talent. This is the part of you that thinks you’re just not a fill in the blank kind of person. “I’m not artistic.” Or “I’m just not very playful.” Are examples of the fixed mindset.
I recently created this Montessori counting activity for our Montessori inspired homeschool. I started with number stickers and card-stock. Laminated the number cards. Found these beautiful blue glass counters in our game closet, stuck them in a beautiful ceramic bowl. Put everything on a tray and voila! We now have a very popular counting work for the math shelf. Just make sure this activity has supervision as the counters are choking hazards for children under three years.
Toilet learning is something that so many parents struggle with, yet somehow I thought I’d make it through unscathed. Julia has been using the potty occasionally since she was just a couple of months old. You can read about our early Elimination Communication journey here.
But this week I realized that I’ve been rushing her and so I’ve decided to back way off and try again when she’s more interested and ready.
She’s a pro at knowing when she has to poop and has done that consistently on the potty since she was about six months old! Hooray! However, peeing is another story.
Becoming a parent is definitely a rite of passage and I don’t know anybody who has gone through it who doesn’t get a deep and profound sense of ADULTHOOD from being a mom or a dad. Once we realize that we’re responsible for these initially helpless little human beings, we quickly identify all the ways we’ve still been pretending to be carefree and irresponsible and hopefully we grow up.
So now that I’m really an adult I keep having this realization about what life is and how different adulthood is from what I imagined it would be when I was a child.