September Shelf: Community Helpers
As mentioned in my previous blog post, I recently joined an online membership community called Hands-on Kids Activities (HOKA) Club in which parents/educators are given access to thematic resources every month. No more endless researching and going down the rabbit hole (aka the internet) for me in search of activities or printables that would supplement Kimi’s learning. If you are a parent, like me, who wants to free up more of your time for meaningful interactions with your child/family and for personal pursuits while offering your child worthwhile activities that he can do and learn from or if you are an educator who is handling a group of students who are of varying age and are in different levels of cognitive development and who is wanting a stream of resources and ideas that could help you to come up with engaging activities for them then I say that you can give this a try.
Upon joining, which I think was the 3rd week of August already, I immediately got access to the themed resources for the following month. This still gave me a lot of time to prepare the materials.
What I love most about HOKA Club is the exhaustive amount of printables and activity ideas they have for kids from ages 3 to 6. They also offer members a recommended book list, list of supplemental materials and an artist study wherein they highlight the life of a particular artist and study a number of his/her paintings. More than that they also were able to give me recommendations on how I can better present the materials for Kimi through shelf mapping.
For the month of September, the theme revolves around Community Helpers. I decided to dedicate an Ikea Kallax with 4 cubes for this theme alone.
For the printables, I decided to focus on color sorting, size sorting, categorising, counting, identifying beginning sounds and following one-liner instructions. For the books I decided to go with 3 out of the 21 recommended books by the wonderful book expert Ashley Speed. As for the supplemental materials, I decided to go with 1 out of 7 recommended. And as for the artist study, I decided to print and introduce the artworks to Kimi.
Shelf Organisation
Community Helpers Activities and 2 books
Supplemental Materials
I bought this Melissa and Doug Joey Magnetic Pretend Play which I thought would utterly be perfect for Kimi. The recommended age for this set is said to be 3+ due to small parts. Even though Kimi has already passed the mouthing stage (almost is more accurate though because he still sometimes do it) we still make sure that there is someone supervising whenever Kimi reaches out for this activity.
I also bought him a working, child-appropriate stethoscope which I think is a better option than the plastic or wooden ones as they resemble the real ones.
Books
These are the 3 books that I chose from the bunch. I chose them because I think that they would perfectly complement the activities that I will put in the shelf and these would offer Kimi more diversity.
Due to the current lockdown restrictions here in Victoria these books took almost three weeks before they arrived! Mostly because these still have to be ordered from an overseas supplier. Now I have learned that even though there are books that I would really prefer to be put up in the shelf, I have to choose practicality for now more than anything else. I may also have to find local alternatives which I am sure Australia has plenty of. I just have to be more resourceful and more creative. I also have to keep in mind that I do not have to go all out at once as I can always reintroduce them theme in the future. Simplicity over overwhelm. Quality over quantity.
Perfect for beginner readers, National Geographic Readers: Helpers In Your Neighborhood by Shira Evans walks us through the different daily heroes kids from around the globe encounter in their neighbourhood. This book is very engaging as it shows large real-life images and simple texts. It also has a vocabulary tree in the beginning which introduces kids to keywords in two different concept groups (people and places), helping kids make the connection between the words.
Today I’m a Veterinarian by Marisa Polansky and Maxine Lee is quite a surprise. I knew that it is a board book but I did not know that it would be shaped like this making it easy to display as it can stand on its own. This book shows the young reader how a veterinarian’s week may look like as it shares snippets of his/her day. Each snippet is also accompanied by a vocabulary page which include images that would help the reader familiarise himself with items that were shown in the previous page thus helping with vocabulary expansion.
As much as I try to expose Kimi to books that only depict true-to life characters that do real-life actions, I still got him Stanley the Mailman by William Bee to allow for variation. This cute and colourful book shows Kimi how Stanley’s day, who is a mailman, may look like; the type of parcels that he delivers and the different encounters that he is having with the other characters.
The Materials In Action
Out of all the activities that are displayed in the shelf, Kimi goes time and time again with colour sorting and dressing up Joey.
This is how the colour sorting activity looks like. I also included subtasks within this activity such as posting smaller envelopes in the post office box (I made a slit in the post office boxes so that Kimi can slid the envelopes in) and putting the stamps on the larger envelope.
Lately, Kimi has been reaching out for Joey, the magnetic doll, quite a lot. He now prefers laying each clothing item down and completing the outfits first before dressing up Joey.
He also noticed that I am using my camera more frequently now so after he dresses up Joey he would then ask me to take out my camera and take a picture of Joey, which is why we have below images:
Whenever he dresses up Joey in his firefighter outfit, he would reach out for this vocabulary card located on top of the shelf detailing the names of each item included in a firefighter’s outfit.
I also included a post-activity with the dress-up activity by putting labels per section of the box. The clean-up process then transformed to a categorising activity as well.
Kimi also does a check-up on Joey and every member of our household every now and then using his stethoscope.
Below is another counting and posting activity. I also made a slit in the mailbox to allow Kimi to slid the letter envelopes in.
Below is a snapshot of how we are doing the activity included in the artist study. The month’s highlighted artist is Mary Cassatt and these are the 3 part cards of some of her paintings. A 3 part card includes:
A control card (picture + label)
A picture card
A word or label card
I initially introduce Kimi to her paintings by telling him the title of each painting using the control card. After which, we will move on to matching the control card (picture + label) with the picture card and label card. I place the control cards in one pile beside me and scatter the picture cards in front of Kimi and the word cards at the bottom of the picture cards. I then get a control card from my pile and put it in front of him. He will then find the matching picture card and label card and put them beside the control card. We will do this for the remaining control cards in the pile.
This is him flipping through the pages of one of the books.
That is it! This is all I have to share as of the moment. I chose to limit the activities that we have in the shelf and not change them within the span of a month as I wanted Kimi to really focus on and master each activity. I would only opt to replace an activity if I already see or had been informed that he already mastered it. It is more than 3 weeks now that we have the activities in the shelf and I have not changed anything yet. Maybe before this month ends I will, maybe I won’t. Let us see.
For now, I am already excitedly preparing for next month’s shelf. What is the theme you may ask. It will be all about botany.
