"Topic of the Week" Showing Up in Our Daily Lives

The other day, Talia was playing outside and found a ladybug. She was happy to find it and had no qualms with picking it up and letting it crawl on her. I can see the benefits of our "Topic of the Week" library study already! Usually she freaks out when she sees a bug.

I don't think she'll be quite as friendly with bees anytime soon though... lately she has been re-telling the story of the time a bee stung her, to anyone she can get to listen to her, over the phone!

Library Topic of the Week

We've been choosing topics to research at the library each week for a few weeks now and I think it will be a lasting thing!

Each week as we approach our library day, I announce that we need to pick something that we want to learn about from the library, and Talia chooses a topic. She will often make comments during the week like, "Oh, we should get a book about that!", or she'll ask questions about something and I'll suggest getting a book about it. It's been great!

Topics we've done so far:

- Insects
- Zoo Animals
- Birds
- Fruit
- Crocodiles & Alligators

This week is fruit, but she also wanted to know the difference between Crocodiles & Alligators, so we got a couple of books on that topic as well.

I'm sure we'll revisit each topic in a number of ways in the future as there is so much more to learn than we can cover in a few books. I'm still getting the hang of trying to incorporate more learning activities into our days, and I'm sure you could choose a topic of the week and have lots of learning activities and field trips and other experiences planned to help your preschooler to learn more. I've already discussed the Aviary with Talia and hope that we'll be able to visit sometime- she's been talking about how she'd like to go see the birds in real life :)

We've also used the library for craft ideas (we got out a book of ideas for crafts using pipe cleaners).

The library has been a wonderful resource for us!

Bee Study

Talia's insect of choice yesterday was the Bee. We read two books about bees, and then made a paper Bee similar to the ladybug she made the other day.

This time I let her make more choices and do more of the work on her own.

Observations:

She liked being "the cutting person" :)
She wanted me to help her with gluing a few of the things, but seemed to enjoy doing it herself as well.

Note the long tongue for drinking nectar (it is not a stinger-and did you know only females have stingers?) It was good to let Talia do the cutting because not only did she enjoy cutting, but we were able to discuss how many legs we needed, how big the tongue should be, how many wings a bee has, etc.

Ladybug Study

Yesterday I took Talia to the library in search of bug books (her topic of choice). We came home with an armful of books plus the Paper Bag Princess movie.

I'm going to see if we can get to the library as often as once a week, and choose different topics to find books for, each time. This way we can have a "topic of the week" to focus on.

Today she chose the Ladybug book and we read it together. I was impressed with how much she learned from it when we reviewed it. The plan is to teach Daddy all about ladybugs later (the babies are called Larva, the children are called Pupa, their feelers smell, in the winter they sleep, etc.)

I've already noticed this blog being helpful to my own motivation to do more with Talia. After we read the book, I thought to myself, "well that was a good, educational thing to do with her... too bad I don't have a picture to share it on the blog." And then I thought of something that I could post a picture of, and the idea of an activity to do with her, related to our Ladybug study, came to mind.

So, I prepared some pieces of lady bug out of construction paper, and she put it together. It allowed us to review again about the the different parts of the ladybug's body.

This next photo demonstrates her idea to bend the legs so that the ladybug could crawl :)



Things I Would Change:

I would probably let Talia cut out the dots, legs, etc. next time so that she could do more of it herself. I think she enjoyed doing it a lot, but I want always to reinforce her own creativity and abilities. It would probably be more of a "thinking" activity for her, if I had discussed with her about "what else does the Ladybug need?" for example, and helped her figure out how to make it.