Learning at Home

Honestly, I feel inadequate when it comes to projects and learning styles for young children. It is just not in my mindset, possibly because I'm a 'me' person and I've had to learn to be more conscious of others as I go along; however, motherhood makes it easier because I really do want to serve those I love the most. By the way, I love my kids and the big man (Lane) the most, although don't think I couldn't do nice, lovely things for you too.

Another thing, is I love intellectual learning and until I had completely adorable children (I could've just said children but my children happen to be adorable. It's practically like a title. It could even be one word), I could only possibly fathom how to think and have a conversation with an adult. Learning and teaching styles were all adult based. Kids, me no clue. It had never crossed my mind to develop any skills in the childhood development realm. In fact, spending more than 15 minutes with kids while they were not sleeping was okay, past that it was torture (this was before my own of course).

Pretty much, I was clueless/CLUELESS as to what to do with kids. Once Porter was born and I would see what other mom's were doing, I'd think, 'seriously? Seriously?! Am I deficit because how did they just come up with that?' I think I am beginning to accumalate more knowledge in that area and can come up with things much easier than before. I also have Primary to thank for that. After I got married and was going back into a family ward, the calling I feared the most was Primary/children. Like I said, I just had no idea what to do with them. In retrospect, I realize now that the fear was a lack of knowledge.

Through a lot of time, frustration, mistakes, and in the end, fun, I gained a lot of knowledge on kid age appropriate activities by serving in three different Primary presidencies beginning when Porter was two weeks old. It was hard in the beginning but it turned into a huge blessing because it helped prepare me as a mother. I can whip together a sharing time in no time now. I am like the masked sharing time bandit. ;) Truly though, I do feel blest.

Second thing, is I had no idea the benefits of the blogging world until this last year. Who needs internet search engines to find good ideas on everything imginable, when you have blogs? I'll tell you: you don't need them. Blogs can be the encyclopedia to life. Okay just kidding! But I love getting ideas from them. I need to come up with efficiency tactics though, sometimes I practically get dizzy linking from one to the other, over and over until I have no clue how I got there or how I'll find it again!

Well, there's probably a third, fourth, and a hundredth reason why I am finally getting the kid creativity concept but it's coming, at a nice tortoise pace BUT they say he did win the race so maybe I'll be a wicked awesome grandma one day. ;) Bottom line, I've had a lot of other great young mom rolemodels to copy living in the southeast. Another blessing of location.

Here's some fun things that Porter and I have done recently.

Apple stamps:

Paint: We put paint in a bag and he was able to swirl it and make different designs with his finger without getting dirty. Porter hates having anything on his hands. Another thing he really liked on another glorious painting day was doing textures. We scrunched up paper, rolled his cars through the paint, used sponges, the works.

Learning the Alphabet. So far we've hit up the big running letters 'A' and 'B'. The first picture he had to find all the Big A's, then little a's, Big B, little b. He has success. Bravo ma boy. The last picture I wrote a row of letters and then did a box underneath the ones I did. Then it was his turn. By his turn, I mean mommy assisted turn. As well, it was also open mic time too. Sing your way to success is going to be the title of my next and first book. It's how I'm going to make it to the big leagues and compete for front cover space from Jon and Kate.

Edible Paint: So, clearly my creativity seems to be limited to paint. This is edible paint, namely milk and food coloring. He's painting his bread and then we toasted it, cut out a shape and ate the delicious morsel.