A is for ... part 2

As I said earlier, on Thursday we had an Astronaut Day, inspired by the fact that lately Iona has been very keen to go in a rocket. I told her she had to be fit to do that, so at least once a day now she runs around or does other "exercises" and says she's getting fit "so they let me in the rocket!". I didn't do as much preparation as I might have, but she seemed to enjoy the day. I encouraged her to dress in a pair of grey jogging trousers and a blue fleece, to look a little like an astronaut's casual wear. She had a croissant for breakfast, and I reminded her that she wouldn't be able to have that in a rocket, as the crumbs would float around due to the lack of gravity, and might break the rocket. After breakfast I went on the computer and found some NASA and European Space Agency logos, then made Iona some badges (using our printer, a laminator and some safety pins) and an ID badge:

While on the ESA site I let Iona have a look around, and there was a fun animation about a day in the life of an astronaut. We strapped ourselves into our imaginary rocket, ran through the safety checks, then counted down. I asked Iona where she'd like to go, and she chose Mars. When we "landed" I described how it was cold, and that the ground was red, then asked her what she could see. We practised a floaty, low gravity way of walking, and talked a bit more about space. She then said she wanted to go to the planet Crayon, which was what she had called the planet she'd decorated in her Charlie and Lola magazine earlier in the week, so we got back in our "rocket" and took off once more, to go there. Once there, she wanted me to be an alien, so I decided to talk only in alien bleeps and bloops and see if she was able to communicate with me. Surprisingly, with only a bit of sign language, she worked out that I was telling her to eat the imaginary biscuit she had asked me for, and was making significant attempts to understand my alien language. This was such a popular activity that several times yesterday and today I was also asked to be an alien, but I found it surprisingly hard work to keep up the bleeping!

In addition to our play-acting, Iona drew a picture of an astronaut, or "space lady", complete with helmet (and big hair!):

I also found a colouring picture of a female astronaut which I printed out for Iona, but she didn't show any inclination to colour it. I found some information about Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space), Christa McAuliffe (the first teacher in space, well nearly), and Helen Sharman (the first Briton in space) told Iona about them, printed out their photos and added them to her timeline. We read through "I'm Going to Be the Best Astronaut Ever", "Extreme Jobs: Astronauts" (well, selected highlights of it, as it's far too old for her), and Letterland's "Annie Apple's Adventure", which coincidentally includes an astronaut and a trip into space. The latter book was very popular, and she has asked for it to be read a couple of times since. It features lots of "a" words and has a good story line, rather than being driven solely by phonics.

By the end of the day we were both glad to come back down to Earth, although Iona still shows no sign of diminished enthusiasm for being an astronaut!

Autonomous education begins

We haven't really been doing any formal learning for a couple of weeks now, as Iona seemed to have tired of it and wasn't up for any of my suggestions. Every time I tried to read her a polar bear book from the library (as she had previously agreed to a unit study on them) she point blank refused to let me! However, her autonomous learning has been going quite well. She has very quickly picked up a lot of computer skills, especially after I downloaded a free children's browser for her called Zoodles. She is now quite competent with moving and left-clicking the mouse, and has some knowledge of where the "Return" key is on the keyboard. These are too of her most recent drawings with the simple art application within the browser:

Smiley face, I think

Octopus

The games section links to various children's TV websites with games, which are mostly (but not entirely) American, and Iona was thrilled to discover Dora and Diego available on it. She also very much enjoys playing Counting with Elmo, on the Sesame Street site, which has reinforced her number knowledge, and has discovered a game on the Curious George site where she has to share out bones between 2, then 3, dogs. She still struggles with the idea of the latter, but can share fairly well 4 or even 6 bones between 2. At the moment I am unable to find CBeebies through Zoodles, so I have been allowing Iona to look at that using Internet Explorer. Yesterday she was playing on it, and I agreed to print her a colouring page, explaining as I did so what I was doing. No sooner had I returned to my place on the settee than I found she had managed to call up a different colouring page and was printing that out for herself! At this rate, I think I'll have to keep an eye on my eBay account!!

Unfortunately, a week ago our car failed its MOT quite spectacularly - it would have cost £1000 for the necessary repairs (and the car cost less than that 3 years ago)! Consequently, we are now a carless family, so are having to get used to walking everywhere. Iona is taking the opportunity to fit some more learning in. On Tuesday we had a half hour walk back from the library, and she spotted some moss growing on a wall as we walked. She was fascinated by the look and feel of it, so I explained a bit about it. On the walk there, as well, she asked me what the clouds up in the sky at the time were called (I think her Daddy calls them mackerel clouds), so we looked them up when we got there (altocumulus, as it turned out). Similarly, on today's dog walk in a very nearby park I was able to show her some huge brown toadstools I'd noticed. She asked me what the stripes were, which led to a discussion about their spores.

Drawing progress

I can't get over how quickly Iona is growing up. It seems only a matter of weeks since she was doing random squiggles on paper, though she would tell us that they were of particular things. Suddenly, at Sunday School one week, she put 3 dots resembling eyes and nose on a blank face shape:

Was I imagining it?! Apparently not, as a few weeks later, on 14th April, she produced these faces:

3 days later, she added some hair and legs (although got slightly confused with the number of mouths!):

2 days later she surprised me once again, by producing people with eyes, noses, mouths, hair, arms and legs:

She sometimes since has added circles for cheeks, and will sometimes put some for ears, although lately she has taken to making the eyes a little less complex and just doing them as dots. I presume this is because her attention is now being drawn to detail elsewhere.

Within the last 3 weeks she has started trying to draw animals. This began spontaneously on 2nd May when she drew this elephant:

Notice the ears either side of the head and the long trunk in the middle. She has since drawn a lion and a tiger on birthday cards for friends, although I didn't think to photograph them. I reminded her what she needed to put on, but the lion had a lovely mane, while the tiger had definite stripes.

The final picture here follows her birthday, when she had several cakes and candles in one week. She told me she was drawing a birthday cake, and drew the top shape as a cake with candles. She then drew another cake at the bottom of the page, and surrounded it by people, saying it was Iona, Mummy and Daddy with a birthday cake:

More about owls

We've slowly been working our way through Iona's owl lapbook over the summer, although she's becoming a little less keen to do just what Mummy wants when she wants it! I printed out quite a few minibooks from Lapbook Lessons (http://www.lapbooklessons.com/OwlLapbook.html) and Homeschool Share (http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php) and made up the book of songs and poems, some of which I've read to Iona a couple of times. I helped Iona to make the jumbled owl puzzle (she still does need help for that) and we made an owl from a couple of paper plates.

Something I've been surprised by the success of is the memory cards from the Lapbook Lessons. I printed them out and tried to teach Iona how to play Snap, although I thought she'd be too young to understand. However, she really enjoyed it, and I had another go with her again today, having laminated the cards. She is well able by now to identify whether the cards are the same or not, although she does insist on shouting "Snap" regardless! I think I vaguely remember my nephews doing the same when they were little, but it certainly seems to be a good start.

Our next lapbook

On finishing our World Cup lapbook I started wondering what to do next with Iona. To begin with, I thought of Bastille Day coming up and planned to do a bit about France. However, nearly everything I found would have been a bit above her level. Then I found 15th July was St. Swithin's Day, so thought of a unit on weather. This was a bit more promising, and I started working on teaching her different types of weather. However, we still weren't inspired. A few days later, though, Iona seemed suddenly very interested in owls, so I asked her if she wanted to do a project on them. She agreed, so I checked up online, and there was much more on owl lapbooks than on either France or weather.

The first thing we did was make a collage out of dried peas, lentils, etc. This tied in with a craft activity at our local children's centre - they were doing the collage on plain paper, so I drew an owl on it and encouraged Iona to fill that in with the pea and lentil mix:

Another thing we did was to make 3 little pine cone owls, using the method we found here: http://thecraftyclassroom.com/CraftBirdOwlPinecone.html. This was very successful, although Iona still enjoys trying to tear them apart!

We made 3 in a nest to tie in with the book "Owl Babies", by Martin Waddell. We've read it before, a year or more ago, and I thought it would be ideal for this unit. We got hold of a copy, as well as a book about nocturnal animals (a hedgehog visited our garden for a couple of nights last week, so we could tie that in). I was quite impressed, on reading "Owl Babies", that Iona knew what an owl's house was called, and she had some idea, when we made the pine cone owls, what the nest was made from. She has also been saying, over the last few days, that owls and hedgehogs come out at night, so she's certainly learning something.

Today we tried playing the Counting Owls game that I found at Homeschool Share: http://www.homeschoolshare.com/owl_babies.php. I thought that, at 27 months, Iona might be a bit young for it, still, but that it was worth a try. However, it went really well. Iona didn't really have the idea of playing a board game, but accepted, without too much complaint, that we had to take turns and that she couldn't have all the owl counters but only as many as were shown on the die. It's a great way of reinforcing the idea of 1:1 correspondence when counting, and with only 9 squares to fill with a die labelled 1-3 (twice) it lasted just long enough to maintain her interest. I look forward to playing it again, if I'm able to round up all the miniature owls (Iona's been enjoying giving them swings on her rocking horse's stirrups!).

Seaside lapbook

At long last (or so it seems) we finished the seaside lapbook this week. Here it is:

We've sung a few of the ocean songs, as well as buying a children's CD of seaside songs, which Iona likes but has already scratched. "Thank you God" was a book of the 6 days of creation, with emphasis on the seas and sea creatures. "My Day at Skegness" was my own invention, designed to encourage Iona's use of the present continuous tense and also to introduce the idea of stories from the (in this case, her very near) past, as a prelude to talking about first her immediate family's history, then going into history further back.

I made a drawing for Iona to colour of the seaside, with plenty of seaside-related words beginning with "s" labelled:

She's getting very good at knowing most of these words now to say, although not to read, and enjoyed colouring the picture in. We also made a seaside painting, using handprints to make a fish and jellyfish, and cut out shapes in yellow card which Iona stuck on the painting to make a "sandcastle". The latter was good practice for her shape recognition, which has taken a bit of a back seat lately to colours, and while doing it she was able to remember her triangles, squares and rectangles.

This picture is now on her wall, while I put a photo of it in her lapbook. Lastly, on the back page I put a starfish picture I had printed for Iona to paint, then sprinkled with sand to make it feel a lot like a real starfish. I also printed out some Disney princesses pictures from a free website (http://www.4kraftykidz.com/arielcoloring.html) and found that Iona coloured one of the Ariel ones in such "oceany" colours that it looked perfect in this lapbook.

This has been the first lapbook that I've properly finished with Iona, and that she's really got interested in doing with me. We've also got lots of library books out about the ocean and the seaside, and Iona's still keen on reading more, so I feel it's been a real success. My only disappointment is that I can't leave the lapbook where Iona can read it on her own, as she's in a real "tearing things up" phase, so we'll have to wait 'til she's more grown-up before we can get the full benefit of re-reading it regularly.

Rhyme time

How old are children when they start to make up rhymes? For the last couple of weeks Iona has started coming out with silly little rhymes, such as "belly, jelly, delly", "sorry Lori" (which we do actually say), and ""Andy, mandy, bandy". They're definitely phrases she's inventing herself, but we've always tended to say silly rhymes to her, such as "smelly nelly", so I guess that's set up the right environment for her to get the idea of rhyming. I'll be interested to see whether it leads to her starting writing poetry earlier than usual, especially as her dad's a keen writer.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

As David assumed he hadn't got the job he had an interview for last week (they told him they'd let him know on Monday but we heard nothing), and the weather's been so nice, we decided to have a day at the beach on Wednesday to get away from it all. I decided that Skegness was the easiest to drive to, so after a 2 1/2-hour drive we arrived. Iona was a bit grizzly by the end of the journey, wanting to go to a playground, and after so long sitting in one place she was not in the mood to sit still one moment longer, so we decided on fish and chips the best way - sat on the beach!

She managed to sit for a little food and drink, but decided that it would be best liberally doused with sand! Apart from a flying visit to the beach at Port Talbot last December it was her first visit to the seaside, and she loved the sand, particularly "swimming" in it.

After lunch I took Iona for a paddle. As when we went to Port Talbot she had no fear of the waves, loved splashing in them and was reluctant to leave.

On the way down to the sea I saw a real, wild starfish (unfortunately dead) for the first time, and showed it to Iona. She was quite interested, especially as we've seen them in books, and was happy to hold it.

After we'd finished paddling we returned to Daddy, who'd built a sandcastle and was starting on a moat.

Although she quickly knocked the castle down that was the extent of her destructiveness, and she spent some time exploring her ability to make handprints in the sand. She seemed to find it really fascinating. It's been something she's been doing at every opportunity since she did some painting last week and I tried to show her how to make fingerprints.

After a while she noticed a bigger girl making a castle nearby and went to have a look. I was wary that she'd damage it, and warned her to be careful, but although the girl said she could knock it down (I think she was just leaving) Iona was very good and just decorated it very carefully with shells and pebbles. That's a real step forward, as she's normally very destructive.

In the mid-afternoon we went for an ice-cream, which Iona also loved.

We then had to go, as we had a long drive ahead of us, although Iona was very upset and didn't want to go. However, overall she had a lovely day and I decided to begin a unit study with her on the seaside to capitalise on this. I've used the "Hello Ocean" lapbook as a basis for this:

http://www.homeschoolshare.com/hello_ocean_lapbook.php

Their tactile starfish was a particularly good idea, as it can act as a permanent reminder of the starfish we saw. Although we couldn't afford to buy "Hello Ocean" I decided to buy "What Lives in a Shell?" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0064451240/ref=oss_product and am just waiting now to see what it's like when it arrives.

Continuous Present

Iona has suddenly got the hang of the present continuous tense. A couple of weeks ago she started saying "What are you doing today?" and answering herself with phrases such as "I am piano". I would correct her "Yes, you're playing the piano". Then, yesterday I think, she started saying, for her teddy, "I am cuddling Iona", and today she kept trying out the sentence with different verbs. She also tried different persons - at lunchtime she said "I am eating peas. We are eating peas." It was fascinating to see her figuring out how language works, and amazing, too, as she's still so young.

May update.

So much has changed since the last entry I wrote. Iona has now turned 2, and had a lovely day, with a cake and presents at Mummy and Daddy's, then more cake, more presents, and her slightly younger cousin at Grandma and Grandad's. We started to prepare her for her birthday about a week before it, and she was soon able to say that her birthday was "Saturday" and that she'd be "2". She'd been singing "Happy birthday" already for a couple of weeks, and even now she keeps singing it to herself, which is OK apart from when it was one of her friend's birthdays this week!

Anyway, I tried doing some more baking with Iona this morning. I haven't tried for a while, as she always gets upset when she can't eat it rather than stir it! Well, we watched "I Can Cook" this morning, where Katie made honey tea loaf, so I promised Iona she could help me make a banana cake if she wanted. She was quite happy with this, and seemed to be looking forward to it, but lo and behold, by the time I'd got things sorted out to do it she was bored with it! Still, I managed to get her to stir it once, and she was very happy with the result, calling it "honey tea loaf"!

After our abortive attempt at cooking I gave in to Iona's requests to go into the garden. Nowadays when I tell her she needs to put her shoes on before she goes in the garden she goes straight to where her shoes are kept, which was quite a shock the first time she did it. I still haven't really got over how much she understands now. We put our shoes on and went into the garden. While I tidied it up a bit she disappeared back into the house and shortly after reappeared with one of her paints and a receipt she'd found - she was trying to get together the things she needed to do painting! I grabbed a paintbrush and a newspaper (figuring a receipt was a bit small for a toddler's painting!) and took them to her, and we had a really fun session with Iona painting the newspaper (and herself, of course!). I even managed to persuade her back inside without too many complaints by telling her the cake would be nearly ready and she'd be able to eat it. All in all, a very productive morning.

A short history lesson

Today our Mums' Bible study met up in the town to choose our next study book. As we arrived a little early, Iona and I took our time walking up past the cathedral. On our way we passed the statue of Bonnie Prince Charlie on his horse, so I explained to Iona who he was, and that he wanted to make everyone Catholics. We then had a quick look inside the cathedral, where Iona had never been before, then went to meet the others at the bookshop. Much later, after we'd been home for a long time, I asked Iona who we'd seen a statue of, on his horse, behind the church. To my surprise, she replied "Charlie". I asked her what he wanted to make everyone, and she replied with a word very like "Catholic". I was amazed, as I'd never discussed this story with her before, but she'd obviously taken it in. She just absorbs words and facts at the moment!

Let it snow part 3

I think I've finally finished the snow unit with Iona, as the past 2 days' rain has washed the last snow away. On Thursday I made the most of it before the cold ended and the rain began, and took Iona out to play in the snow.

We went into the front garden first, where it was still pristine, and I showed her how when we walked in the snow it left footprints. I photographed mine, Daddy's and hers, and showed her a nice trail of cat footprints.

I also let Lori out into the garden and tried to photograph her prints but she ran around like a mad thing and so didn't leave any good enough ones! Unfortunately, Iona most wanted to go for a walk down the road, preferably in the middle of the road, and preferably on her own, so it all ended it tears when this wasn't allowed!

Next I took her into the back garden (from where she wouldn't be tempted to escape!), so she could play a bit more. Once she'd got hold of Lori's frameball she was happy to run around there, chasing after Lori, but she didn't seem very interested in my attempts to make a snowman. I showed her how to make a snowball, though. After we'd done playing outside we went back in, where Iona found that there was still a piece of snow stuck to her mitten. I rescued it from her and kept showing it to her as it got smaller, explaining that the snow was melting and turning back to water.

I explained more to Iona about snow melting yesterday, when we walked to the car to go to the Children's Centre. It was fairly slushy by then, and she very much enjoyed splashing in the resulting puddles.

Then, today, as I said, I finished making Iona's lapbook on snow. I printed out the photos of the footprints, and made a flip book of them. In addition, I found a website from which I could print out a world map (http://www.mapsofworld.com/) and printed out an outline map of the world. I coloured in blue (and Iona helped) the "areas where there is a lot of snow", and marked on it the names of the people who lived in the American and European Arctics (I had read to Iona during the week from a book about Arctic peoples), as well as a pointer showing where we lived. During the evenings this week I have also read "The Snow Queen" to her.

Overall, this has been my most successful unit study, possibly because I had a deadline of trying to get it finished before the snow went. I've tried to do a bit of work on it every day with her, and feel that it's really focussed my mind and given me ideas to cover things (such as forgiveness) that I probably wouldn't have tried yet. It's also the first lapbook that I've finished making.

Let it snow some more.

Iona and I have been continuing our unit study on snow. I found some resources on the net yesterday, such as video of polar bears and photos of arctic animals. Some very helpful sites were: http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/snow.htm and http://123child.com/UBB/showthread.php?t=3092. The second of these reminded me of a technique I learned at Sunshine Club last year - mixing shaving foam and PVA glue (with paint, too, if wished) produces home-made puffy paint. I printed a photo of Daddy outside our house, then helped Iona paint on the white puffy paint to make a snowscene. To be honest, it didn't much resemble a snowscene when she'd finished with it, as she preferred rubbing the paint off the picture and around her hands, but she enjoyed it!

Next, I decided to do some combined craft and numeracy work. I gave Iona a roll of cotton wool, and put glue in 1-5 snowman shapes on 5 sheets of paper. I then encouraged her to stick bits of cotton wool on them, all the while reinforcing the words "snowman" and "1" to "5". I drew faces on all of them and labelled them, then at bedtime stuck them up on her wall. Later, this afternoon, we went to story time at the library. In the children's area the wall is painted with a mural of a snowscene with a snowman, and during the session Iona suddenly pointed at it and said "snowman"!

While Iona was asleep this afternoon I made a flip book on "Animals that live in the snow", with photos from the computer and names written by me, which I showed her when she woke up. I also gave her a printed snowflake with the words "If we say "I'm sorry" to God he will make us as clean as snow", for her to colour. Finally, I printed out a photo of a 4-inch snowflake and wrote on it "A snowflake has 6 points". I labelled the points 1-6, reading the numbers out loud as I did so. Iona stunned me by saying each number, right up to 6 before I did each time, proving that she now knows the order of numbers 1-6!

Talking of dogs

I think Iona has finally started stringing words together, albeit with pauses between them for Mummy to acknowledge each. Yesterday, she said "Lori" (our dog's name), then, after a pause, "gone", then, after another pause "kitchen". Another milestone passed!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

The snow this year has been as thick as I've ever known it (I think it was this deep down south in '81). Consequently, I decided to concentrate less for the moment on the "Where do I live?" unit and improvise one on "Snow" (although I've not really planned it).

To begin with, I helped Iona make snowflakes out of pipe cleaners and wool, as we did last year at Sunshine Club. I twisted 3 pipe cleaners into a 6-pointed star, tied some white wool at the centre, then got Iona to help me wind it round and round them, tying it off at the top. After that, I squeezed PVA glue over it, and Iona shook blue glitter over it (while it was inside a box to reduce mess). She loved the shaking, and got upset when it was time to stop! The end result now hangs up in her bedroom, helping to make up for having to take the Christmas decorations down.

We have walked in the snow, with me explaining how the snow sounds and feels crunchy, and Iona has played a little in it, although at its thickest she didn't like falling on her hands and knees in the cold!

One of our most successful activities was making meringue snowflakes. I got the idea from the Disney FamilyFun website (http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/meringue-snowflakes-684262/), and while the mix was a bit too liquid to do more than simple 6-pointed star shapes, they were fairly easy to make, and very nice for us all to eat. Iona helped me to beat the egg whites (we don't possess a mixer, so it all had to be done by hand), and loved saying she was "mix"ing and also learning the word "whisk".

While doing this unit, I've taken the opportunity to expand Iona's counting from "one, two" to up to 6. She can't go beyond 3 yet, but it's been a good numeracy opportunity.

The unit has also gone well with the book I've started reading Iona at bedtime, which is a much simplified version of one of my all-time favourite books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The start of it features a lot of snow, so I'm able to refer her back to what we've seen and played in during the day.

When did my baby grow up?!

I know I've probably been saying this for months, but when did my little baby become a fully-fledged, walking, talking, on-the-cusp-of-reading toddler?!! I can't believe how she's suddenly copying nearly every word we say, and remembering them later. On top of that, she's understanding far more than I thought any 20-month-old could. Since Christmas I've started a project with her on houses, and am working in an exercise book with her entitled "Where do I live?". I've put in photos of her house, her uncle's house that we visited in December, and her grandparents' house that we visited just after Christmas, and she loves looking through it, talking about it. I also put a small map of the country in, with an arrow pointing to the area where we live, saying "I live in [town]". Today she handed me the book to read to her again, so I started by reading the title "Where do I live?". She immediately answered with a word that sounded very like the name of our town! I thought I must be imagining the similarity, so I checked by reading her the page that said "I live in [town]", and she again repeated the name of the town, exactly like before. So suddenly, she doesn't just understand the question "Where do you live?", but even knows the right answer - amazing!

Ins and outs of HE

Today Iona seemed to suddenly grasp the concept and the word "in". She'd been playing with her Noah's ark and small animals, and I thought I'd heard her say "in" when putting an animal in it. Later, she got her teddy and tried to cram it into a (smaller) tin, while saying "in". We then spent some time together testing out which toy animals would fit into which containers, with Mummy saying "in" when we put them in, and "out" when we took them out. It's amazing how quickly she's growing!

I''ve also been astounded over the last week or so that when Iona points to her tummy (while saying "tu") she often then signs "food" and says "f". Likewise, just after breakfast today she said and signed food, then pointed to her tummy and said "tu". The really strange part of it is, I don't remember either David or myself ever telling her that food goes into her tummy! I guess we must have done at some point, and that for some reason it's stuck in her brain.

The Older Man!

Well, it's been over a month since I last had time to write anything, and in that time Iona seems to have magically transformed from a baby into a full toddler! I can't believe how much she's changed and learned. She's picking up new words (or her version of them) all the time, and some of the Makaton signs for them, too. I've been trying to do a series of activities with her based on the theme of apples, and she used the sign for apple for the first time yesterday, which was exciting. She's also finally beginning to get the hang of walking, and loves to try to toddle all the way across the living room - at the moment it's 50:50 whether she makes it all the way across in one go!

Anyway, we went to the home education group at the soft play centre for the first time in several months today. It was nice to see everyone again, and Iona really enjoyed it, even though it was so busy with loads of other kids (apparently there was a party on, too). She was more confident than ever on the slide, and still loves the ball pool, although as it was the afternoon she was starting to get tired. During one of her stints in the ball pool there was a boy of about 8 playing in it with a younger girl (probably about 3), and Iona seemed to really take to him. She kept smiling at him, which he reciprocated, then when she slid down the slide and landed near him she leaned herself against him, smiling up at him with a winsome look on her face. Luckily he seemed amused, as Iona seemed to think it would be nice to rest against him, and she seemed quite happy to settle herself there, until Daddy and I decided it was time to be off. She definitely seems to have a thing for "the older man" - I think we'll have to keep an eye on her as she gets older!!

In's and out's of HE

For ages now I've been reading that Iona should be taking things out of containers and putting them back in - well the taking things out has been going brilliantly, but unfortunately not so the putting them in! Well, today we went to the Stay and Play session at the local children's centre and Iona decided to spend most of the time in the outside play area. They'd set up a sink full of water, with squashy fish and boats floating in it, and Iona was one of the children fascinated by this. Unsurprisingly, she started by taking the fish and boats out, and splashing in the water so much that she might as well have jumped in, her clothes were so wet! Then I watched, open-mouthed, as she put some of them back in the water - I was ecstatic! So much so, that I didn't have the heart to stop her splashing. She repeated it several times, so I began to believe that it might not be a fluke. However, I was a bit cynical about her repeating this behaviour at home.

Later, at home, the living room was a total tip where she'd been practising the "taking out" behaviour, so I started putting her building bricks away in their bag and asked her to help me. Incredibly, she put several bricks into the bag, before she got bored and started throwing them around the room. I even managed to persuade her back onto task again several times, before she started trying to empty the bag again. Okay, it wasn't just the bricks she was trying to put in the bag, but other toys too, but it's definitely a major advance in Iona's ability.

It seems to have been a day of advances, as she was asking during the evening about the ITV4 logo on the TV, and she was so taken with it that she spent the rest of the programme asking about it, then repeating "IT, IT, IT". She also got the idea that mice say "eek", which she also repeated copiously, and was very amused by the piano playing on "Show Me, Show Me".

On reading

A month or two ago I came across a website which had downloadable signs to put up around the house (URL to follow), to help babies / children to learn to read. I'd planned to do this for Iona, but not got around to it, so I printed them out and put them up. Unfortunately, several got torn down fairly quickly, but in the last week or so she's been pointing at some and asking "Tha?", so I've been telling her. She's also pointing similarly to page numbers and things like the "DK" logo on books. As she seems really interested, I decided that she's now ready to begin to learn to read, especially as her talking is coming on in leaps and bounds. This may seem ridiculously early, but my Mum taught me when I was 4, using Glen Doman's "Teach Your Baby to Read Kit", which I've inherited. According to this, and the site Brill Baby / Brill Kids (http://www.brillbaby.com/teach-baby/reading.php), now is quite a reasonable age to begin showing her flashcards, without any pressure.

Consequently, I got the kit out of the spare room, and found the large, red "mummy" flashcard, which is the one you're supposed to begin with. I showed it to Iona a few times yesterday and the day before and told her what it said. She was very interested, and pointed to individual letters, asking about them. Although I don't want to use phonics, as English isn't very phonetic, I felt I should answer her questions and tell her the letter sounds that she was asking about, while trying to maintain emphasis on the word as a whole. I also broke the kit's rules and showed her "head", as she's been extremely keen on that word for the last 2 or 3 days, and "daddy", which is one of her favourite words. We'll have to see whether that confuses her.

Today I got the "mummy" flashcard out and before I even had a chance to ask what it said she said "mmm"! Mind you, she did the same with the "daddy" and "head" cards.