The Kingfisher Playtime Treasury

 Selected by Pie Corbett
Illustrated by Moira and Colin Maclean

This is a pretty good collection of children's rhymes, skipping rhymes, schoolyard games and the like.  They're appropriate for children a minimum of three years old.  There's lots of variety and they're organized by category.  A lot of heavily gendered rhymes about kissing boys and getting married, but that's because they're traditional. Some of the wording is not what I'm used to.

I'm planning on using it for upcoming birthday parties.

 The art looks like it's stolen from Janet Ahlberg.  They included Each Peach Pear Plum, though they use different lines.

And they seem to have a Jolly Postman, too.

Really weird.  But I guess Janet is dead now, so it's fair game?

Friday Post - Easter Cut-Outs

 By Elizabeth Teddler

Easter is coming fast, so I whipped this out and started assembling it all.  My daughter isn't ready to cut paper nicely, but she is ready to handle the decorations mostly gently while she plays pretend with them on the table.

It comes with carriages and weird bunny costumed cupid babies and real bunnies in human costumes and so many lambs and chicks.  The big carriage is made from the card on the back of the book.  It's pretty incredible.  My daughter was particularly amazed.

 We got this years ago at a book sale because we loved the art.  It seems to be out of print, so I probably should have scanned it all...  but I don't really want to print and cut it a second time and we're turning into such hoarders here...

 I'm being really careful to cut them out with generous borders or now.  I could always scan them later if need be.

Friday Post - Candyland

 I win.  I got the 2004 version of Candyland.  And I didn't have to drive to someone's house and pay them a whole $5 for it.  (Seriously craigslisters.  Just because YOU paid $7 for it 10 years ago and then lost half the pieces.  It isn't worth even close to that much.  Not even if you package it with a game I don't want.) I paid no more than $1 for this and there was nothing missing whatsoever.

Why did I want this edition specifically?  Well, the earlier editions are hard to find.  For a start.  And the newer versions just bizarre.

 But as far as game-play goes, Candyland is the only preschool game that uses cards to advance the players along the board.  It means that there's no counting and the game is super easy to play.  Newer versions have a spinner instead, which is so difficult to use.

The art is terrible, and the player pieces are ugly, and boy do I hate this game, overall.  But the reason I hate it is because the first time I ever played it, I was 12.  And really, my daughter loves it for the make-believe aspect.  So I play it with her because it makes her happy.  And when we get tired of trying to make it to the castle, I make my gingerbread man talk to hers and we make up a little story together.

But I'm getting reaaaaally impatient to play strategy games with her.

Max and Ruby's Treasure Hunt

By Rosemary Wells

My husband hates the art in these books, but I guess I'm just used to it from my childhood.  I don't have any serious attachment to these books, but they aren't bad.

 This one is a treasure hunt.  The clues are hidden in an envelope that folds down!  Exciting!  If only the answers are easy enough for a three year old to get.  But just in case, they put pictures of the answers all over each page.  Kind of frustrating.  But exciting for kids.  There was a lot of standing up and yelling out the answers.

They get a little into rhyming at one point.  Here, they have different things that rhyme with "Hickory Dickory Dock".  Hmmm...  Which of these did the mouse run up?

This is kind of nice, because it's where we're at with learning to read.  My daughter was willing to work out what the words were.

All in all, it's a pretty decent activity/story book.

Friday Post - ¢25 colouring books

I found both the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz colouring books from the Treasury of Illustrated Classics published by Modern Publishing.

I was pretty excited because we watch the Disney version of Alice, which is totally botched, and it's a nice way to introduce her to the real story.

As far as the Wizard of Oz goes, we like to watch the Japanese television series from '86, which is pretty accurate for the most part.  She recognized every scene in the colouring book, as a result.

The art is bubbly and cartoony, and nothing like the covers.  It looks like the books are still available for super cheap from Modern Publishing.  I'll probably order some other stories.  These are so much better than the average franchise promotion colouring book.  They're still cheaply made, for sure, but we've gotten so much enjoyment out of them, and sometimes my daughter likes to just sit and read them.

Friday Post - Preschool Music Lessons - The Music Tree

My daughter is tired of listening to me teach students downstairs while she watches television elsewhere.  She's started asking me for lessons.  So I decided to give them to her.  She's three years old.

Now, that's a crazy age to start music lessons at, and normally I wouldn't start a child at this age.  I'd tell the parents to sign them up for a general music class of mostly just singing and dancing and not a lot of real technical learning.  But this is different, because my daughter lives with me.  I can make the lessons 5 minutes long and teach her whenever she's interested, which may be once or twice a week, or may be once every two weeks.  In between lessons, we do what we always do: sing, clap, dance and listen to an eclectic selection of music.

  As far as learning to play the piano goes, I don't have high expectations and I don't worry about teaching new concepts every time we sit down together. We're learning from The Music Tree, because I always start with The Music Tree.  It's flawed, and it requires a lot of personalized modifications, but it's the best option there is for teaching music to really young students using proper notation.

The first half of the book is all pieces on the black notes. Most pieces only have 2 notes going back and forth.  I give her a sticker every time she finishes playing a song.  I waited a month before we graduated from quarter notes to half notes.  She's starting to play the pieces properly and independently, which makes her so proud.

After 65 pages of kiddie pieces, there are a few final pieces on the grand staff, but getting to that point is not so important.  If my daughter learns to do rhythms, interval reading and ear training, that's enough.  We'll wade around in the beginning of the book until I feel like she's ready for that final step.

The biggest problem with the book is pages like this.  It's definitely a book for teachers because it's way too wordy for the kids.  I find that these big pages with all the extra information, which is supposed to prepare students for more difficult music ahead, don't contain enough practice material and aren't age appropriate.  The accompanying work book is a real waste of time except as a fun colouring book for kids who already understand the concepts.

Furthermore, a three year old can't move their fingers independently, and four year olds aren't much better.  I've had eight year olds who really struggle with good posture and finger independence.  So the idea that they would play hands together at age 4 is pretty presumptuous.

As a book for older kids, "Time To Begin" fails completely.  It's so boring.  Five pages in and a 5 year old is ready to quit.

Halfway through this book I'll probably skip to something else.  Probably Music for Little Mozarts, if only for the colouring and activity books.  I have a giant grand staff mat that I made for group classes long ago, and we'll learn to sight sing with it.  I also have so many great little music books from the thrift store, too, that we can bounce around a fair bit until she's ready to learn to find and play white notes.  That way she doesn't have to progress at all and she can still feel like she's actually playing music from a book like her mama.

Friday Post - Number Mats

 This is a "Teacher's Friend" product published by Scolastic.  I found it at the thrift store for a dollar.

Not all of the resources in this series are useful.  A lot of them are redundant or too simplistic.  This one is great for a few reasons.

First off, we love identifying numbers.  It's a favourite game.  So a box full of foam numbers that you can match up on cards is a fantastic activity on its own.

The cards with stars to count are great right now, too, because they're organized in basic dice patterns.  I'm learning a lot about teaching addition now that my daughter is working on beginner math.  It's interesting to see which concepts are easy and which are difficult.  She can count forwards and backwards to 10, and she can count up to 29 (Sometimes 30), but adding two numbers together makes no sense to her.  She has, however, memorized that 2 plus 2 is 4, and if she sees two groups of two, she will recognize it as four objects without taking the time to count.  Learning by rote and repetition has helped her understand elements of addition already, so I'm totally embracing the idea of her memorizing dice patterns and not bothering with written out math equations.

Lastly, the wipe off cards for practicing writing are fantastic.  She gets so angry when she makes a mistake and can't erase it.  This way there's no stress. 

This is the best dollar I've ever spent.

Friday Post - Chutes and Ladders

 Retroland has a pretty good post about this game.

This is a pre-2000's version.  Ebay says it's from 1999, which makes sense, I guess, looking at that boy with the burgundy vest.  That's a pretty dated style.

But, as you can see, it's totally PC by this point, at least.

It was really interesting to read the article on Retroland and discover that this has always been a game about morality. I've never had a copy in my house growing up, so I never played a version like this. They got a bit carried away here, too.  Just look at the arbitrary rewards.

On square 9 we have a boy who mows the lawn and gets to see sad animals at the circus.  That cat on 28 features a fair bit, sometimes dealing out punishment, sometimes rewarding with cuddles.  Higher up at 51, a girl sweeps the floor and gets movie tickets.  At 71, a boy returns a damsel's purse and she buys him ice cream.

It's all pretty ridiculous, and I can't imagine that there was ever a good edition of this crummy game.  The spinner is supposed to be easier than dice, but my daughter can throw dice now and can still barely play this game because counting to 100 is not very fun for her and the pictures are too distracting.  If the game wasn't so long and these weird stories weren't everywhere, maybe we'd get through more than half of it.  The best part is, none of these moral lessons make a dent on her anyway.  She's convinced of her own moral superiority and is quick to judge the kids on the board.  It's kind of hilarious.

Friday Post - Fanta Color

 This is a great little Italian peg board with coloured pegs.  It comes with some suggestions for pictures you can make, but the booklet contains pictures made on all different sized boards with different sizes and shapes of pegs...  I guess it's advertising for us to upgrade.

We only have the little portable one, which is enough for us.  The box that stores the pegs snaps onto the frame so that you can carry it around or hang it on the wall to display your picture.  This has been a great alternative to Lite Brite, which is sort of dangerous because you have to plug it in and is wasteful because it requires all that black paper.  Also, lite brite pegs are way too teeny for our household.

Rupert Annual

 We picked up this annual at the thrift store.  Look at those guys; they're going to fall on their heads and break their skulls! 

This annual lives up to all of my expectations of a collection of Rupert adventures.  In particular:

 Weird, blatantly racist stereotypes.

Unrelated craft.


(I also love how on the craft page it prefaces the instructions with a boast about how Rupert was so good at making the horse on his first try.  Just so you know, kids, he isn't a dunderhead like all of you!)










But the stories are jam packed with adventure and excitement.  We'll totally read this when the kids are older. 

Friday Post - Pouring - a bread recipe

I took a Montessori preschool book out of the library a while back just to get a bit of a checklist of things that I should be working on, seeing as I'm not sending my children to real preschool.  One of the activities on the list that we haven't been doing is pouring.  They say I should start with large beads, work towards beans, grains, and finally water.

I started with beads and they just ended up being carried around the house.  I gave up.

A few weeks later, I decided instead to get my daughter to help me make bread.  It worked out really well; she was riveted.  The thrill of standing on the stepping stool and being at counter height!  The the look of pride as she holds measuring spoons and dips their contents into the pan!  The squeals of delight as the bread comes out of the machine!

Yes, we have a bread machine.  It's been so completely vital to our routine, that I don't know how we'd function without one.  Oh, wait, I do know; we'd be paying $5+ per loaf of bread.

We got our machine as a wedding present, and we had asked for the Panasonic 'raisin and nut' dispenser model because it has a timer on it (hello, fresh bread baking in the morning), but also because it's one of the few models that doesn't have a poor track record for breaking down.  We priced it out, just because we were curious, and if you're making two loaves a week, you could even get a fancy Zojirushi and break even by the end of the year.

We've come a long way in just two weeks.  My daughter might be able to make bread all by herself in a year, except that the pan is too heavy and the machine is too tall.

We've tweaked the recipe a bit from the book.  This is what we do:

1    tsp yeast (either bread machine or regular dry yeast.  doesn't seem to matter.)
1    cup white flour
2    cups brown flour
1/2 cup rye flour
2    tblsp sugar
2    tsp salt
2    tblsp oil
2    cups water (usually a bit less than that, and then add more depending on how the dough is mixing up.)
1    cup or less of a 10 grain mix, or a handfull of sunflower seeds or whatever is in the house

I measure pour the flour and oil, and I prepare the 2 cups of water to be poured.  My daughter does the rest and has started to memorize the ingredients.  She knows which buttons to press on the machine to make it start, and I like to show her the dough being mixed so that she knows what kind of a consistency it should have for it to turn out right.

I'm in love with this bread.  It's gritty but moist.  It's dark and flavourful, but rises well.  It melts in your mouth.  Plus, it doesn't have that weird cardboard flavour that most store-bought bread has.  Probably because it doesn't have preservatives in it.

Friday Post - Young Math

 I've been looking up a lot of really old abandoned games recently while trying to find 'edutainment' for the toddler.  I found this gem.  Young Math is a really old and really simple math game that has animated representations of mathematical equations.

 My oldest is starting to understand addition, but definitely isn't ready to do equations by herself.  This is going to be so helpful when we're ready to take the plunge.  The equation is displayed below, and items being added or subtracted are shown above.  The only downside is that you have to choose the right answer before the animation confirms that you've made the right choice.
There is no drilling, and the numbers don't go very high, so this isn't for practice, just learning.

 The depot games are great, too.  You can play addition, subtraction, or number order.  My oldest could probably do number order, and I know she'll get a real kick out of playing with cranes and bulldozers.


Lastly, there's a game where you complete the pattern.  This is waaaay easier than those "draw the missing picture" activities in colouring books.  The controls are pretty easy for all the games.  The child needs to know right and left and be able to figure out the arrow keys, but there is no time limit or serious penalty for pressing the wrong button.  Installation is a little wacky with dosbox, because you need to mount the folder as the A drive and already have the your destination drive mounted as C before you install.  But that's about it.

 

Monster puzzle from the grocery store

I'm running or of steam on the Friday posts now that Halloween is coming up...

This puzzle was available at Superstore last year.  It's fantastic because you can mix and match the monsters, but you could also use it to teach colour matching.  It's provided us with hours of entertainment.  Definitely better than a lot of the Melissa and Doug designs.
It is very cheaply made, though.  It wasn't really sanded properly.  I would have easily paid a little more of it had been higher quality.

Babar's Spanish Lessons and Babar's French Lessons

By Laurent de Brunhoff


This book is truly excellent.  It is almost entirely in English and introduces basic Spanish vocabulary such as colours, numbers, clothing and some everyday objects, and every once in a while there's a stock phrase.

 I've been searching high and low for good French books for my kids and I've been striking out.  This book is perfect...  I just have to translate every phrase myself and hope that my grammar is up to scratch.

I won't have to keep translating for long, though.  It turns out that there was a French version of this book called "Babar's French Lessons".  Currently out of print, I got it for about $10 including shipping from Abe Books.  It's exactly the same in every way.  It even has the Chocolate cake recipe found in the middle of the book.

The pictures are so great, and the pages are huge.  And, come on: ELEPHANTS.  ROYAL ELEPHANTS.  Look at him lounging in his purple smoking jacket.  What a class act.


I love Babar.

Your First Garden Book

 By Marc Brown

We have yet to start using this book.  I found it at my parents' house, and it's incredible.  It has all kinds of basic plant that kids can grow.  We should be able to start using it next spring.

 I actually like the pictures in this.  They're totally dated.  And it's full of terrible jokes and puns.

The gardening projects include planting parts of vegetables and fruits.  It even teaches you how to make your own peanut plant!

The book is divided by seasons and has recipes and other activities to pad it out.  It isn't a big book, but it's pretty packed with projects and information.  We should be able to use it for a few years.  I'm pretty stoked.

Friday Post - Number Train

These are pretty standard.  I got it for all of $2 at the thrift store.  This one is Melissa and Doug.  It looks like a square puzzle on the board, but it's just one long train with 20 cars and an engine.

It's been brilliant.  When we first got it, my daughter could count to 12 by rote, and didn't quite understand what she was doing.  She casually worked at it for about two weeks and then, finally, something snapped and she knew how to put it together herself.  Not only that, she loves to sit on the couch with the box and point to each train, counting to 20 out loud.  Shortly after, something else snapped and she was reading double digits all the way to 99.

There's still something missing; she obviously doesn't fully understand how numbers work because she's still a bit confused about the concept of relative differences in size, but this puzzle really helped her visualize what she's doing when she's counting.  I'm so glad we came across it.

Friday Post - Magna Doodle

 I have this thing about not buying my kids toys ever.  Because, why?  They get so many toys.  They play with them for five minutes apiece.  And then they get this attachment to them and I can't throw anything out without being a serious bad guy.  But my house is a mess!

But we also have this dilemma whereby I can't feed, dress or put the baby to sleep without the toddler crying for attention.  I can get by if I put on her favourite show of the moment, or by handing her my phone so that she can play a game.  I'm not adverse to screen time, but I want to limit it.

We bought her a magna doodle to keep her occupied in these situations, and she's in love.  We hid the stamps from her, because they usually end up lost, and I can't afford to have teeny objects hidden in the living room with a crawling baby.  But I do let her use the magnetic letters that we got her.  I've worked on phonics with her a bit this way, and she loves it because she doesn't have to do printing, but she still gets to place the letters herself.

Sometimes we just make patterns and faces, though.  She loves that, too.

Friday Post - Memory

This was another thrift store find.  It's pretty easy to find second hand copies of this game, but maybe not so easy to find copies with no missing pieces.  But this is such an easy game to make, and there is so much great free art on the internet already.

For instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an online collection of art that is free to download and use for your art projects.  Input the search terms Fish Ginter N8 for the "Fish from American Waters" series of cigarette cards.  I've got to say, if you had the right resources to make playing cards, you could make a pretty adorable game of Go Fish.

Friday Post - Place and Trace

This is an amazing toy that I got for a dollar at the local thrift store.  Three large yellow stencils that hold four traceable objects each.  The objects are animals, dinosaurs and vehicles, they're three dimensional and can be used as cookie cutters or molds for play-dough or sand.

Currently, we just play with it as a puzzle.  Which is great.  The kids love it, and they're going to use it for a long time.

Made by Discovery Toys

Friday Post - Vintage Puzzle Find

 This is a Ravensburger puzzle from the 70's, printed in West Germany and titled "Spring Summer Autumn Winter".  It's puzzle number 623 5 415 1

There's nothing particularly special about it.  It's a really nice frame tray puzzle with interchangeable pieces cut in the shape of the objects in the picture.  I found it in the thrift store and it has no missing pieces!!!

 The kids are way too young for this.  I'll have to put it away for a few years.  In the meantime, I'm so stoked!