This recycled craft is a simple and clever way to teach children about primary and secondary colors while recycling empty paper tubes. I allowed the children to decorate the craft sticks and choose what colored wings they wanted on their butterflies. But I used a glue gun to make all the wings without the kids […]
Creative Wednesdays Known for his Modernism abstract paintings, Piet Mondrian used the simplest combination of straight lines and right angles, creating geometric shapes of bold primary colors. After showing the kids paintings by Mondrian and reading “Coppernickel Goes Mondrian” go outside to make similar art using sidewalk chalk. Of course on a rainy day you […]
Creative Wednesdays I’m not sure when or where I first learned to make phonics flowers but I started making them for the kids in my care in 1993. The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out. Phonemic awareness helps children hear, identify, and manipulate spelling […]
Is this sand? Summer Learning: What Do You Feel? Summertime is a great time to head outdoors into nature’s classroom. Summer provides a perfect opportunity for kids to touch and feel new things. Kids love to feel and play with sand, touch soft petals on flowers, play with mud, touch and paint with soft feathers, […]
Creative Play This is an inexpensive project to make for toddlers and preschoolers that just takes a few minutes to make. I start with making simple designs of triangles, squares, and rectangles for toddlers and make designs more complex as the children grow and develop their matching skills. Just google craft stick pattern ideas for […]
Creative Wednesdays Here’s a quick and easy project I made with my Nanny Kids. We simply recycled a cardboard egg carton and used plastic spoons they had left over from a party their family had last summer. Since it was a huge egg carton with more than 26 eggs I added some numbers to the […]
Weekly Trip to the Library One of the challenges of working as a nanny is finding activities my three charges (aged 3-years-old to 13-years-old) can all enjoy at the same time. But this week I remembered my favorite childhood classic Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with the CD of musical themes. All three of the […]
Weekly Trip to the Library: The Lorax by Dr. Suess Over 40-years ago Dr. Seuss published The Lorax . In his search to find a real Truffula Tree a boy must find the Lorax who is a forest guardian who speaks for the trees and protects the forest. The Lorax tries to save the environment […]
I confess I love taking advantage of the fact that play and fun are the name of the game when caring for kids during the summer. Although I’m great working with schedules during the school year, I enjoy the flexibility of planning what we want to do during the summer months. I love that as […]
Weekly Trip to the Library for Nannies and Au Pairs Read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. This story describes a day in which everything goes wrong for a boy named Alexander. When Alexander got up in the morning, he found gum in his hair, tripped on his skateboard, and accidentally […]
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