Moving with Mother Goose Time

I'll admit it, I'm a homebody.  Especially when the weather is too hot or cold or if I'm not feeling well.  That's hard with kids because I feel the need to give them the opportunity to be out and about and moving around so I push myself to do things like go to story time at the library, play at the park or go to one of the various child-friendly museums in the area.  However, there are times when we just need to stay home and I have to find ways to keep the active.

My girls are natural movers so just letting them run from toy to toy in our play area takes care of a lot of that but sometimes we need ideas.  It's one of the reasons I adore the Dance N Beats DVDs from Mother Goose Time.  They are fun, my girls like the music and I find them to be a pretty good work out for me, too.  It's easy to pop in a disc while I get lunch or dinner together and they are ready for a rest after that and go down to sleep pretty easily (double bonus).

The curriculum itself has a lot of opportunities for kids to move around.  A lot of the Circle Time songs involve hand or whole body movement.  We sang about airplanes this week and did the described movements from the Teacher's Guide and then Miss M made up a verse and ran around the living room for about five minutes doing her own variations on the movements.  I loved the linguistic creativity and exercise she gave herself with just a little prompt from what we did first.

Writing in shaving cream activity
from our recent MGT lesson.  She
didn't love the feel of this but other
kids really like it.

I also want to help foster fine motor skills in my girls.  I've recently read an article indicating that children are entering kindergarten with lower fine motor skills, which hampers their development of handwriting skills.  A doctoral dissertation I perused indicated that there is a correlation between poor handwriting skills (the ability to form letters legibly and quickly) and poor writing skills (the ability to communicate effectively in written form).  We have an epidemic of poor writers in our country (just check out Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site inhabited by the current "young" generation if you don't believe me).

I don't want my girls to end up in that population if I can help it so in addition to building language skills, we work with a lot of (supervised) Lego play, blocks, stickers, beads and coloring with varying thicknesses of pencils, crayons and markers in order to build those hand and lower arm muscles.  JoAnn's has seasonal $1 crafts that come with their own little marker set that my girls love (and they come off my little Ikea table with just a diaper wipe).  The crafts included in our Mother Goose Time curriculum are specifically created to support this goal and we always make a point to do them even if that's the only activity we get to that day.   One of my girls' favorite activities is to thread beads onto pipe cleaners (it's easier for them to handle the pipe cleaner, which stays straight, rather than a string that needs more support so they can concentrate on one skill at a time).  I bought a bag of glow in the dark beads for $1.50 and a pack of pipe cleaners for $1 at my least favorite global chain store that I sometimes go to out of the sheer need for convenience but would rather not name.  We use them all the time.  When they are done, the beads go back in the bag and we reuse the pipe cleaners as well.

Please don't misread this and think I'm trying to be super mom.  Probably the biggest lesson I learned from my dad growing up was to find balance in life.  Real life is not well reflected on Pinterest or Facebook.  We definitely do our share of TV watching and iPad playing so Mommy has a chance to get housework done faster than it gets undone.  Miss M has one hairstyle because I don't have the time to research more or the energy to pin her down to create them.  My goal as a mother is to help my children develop into well rounded individuals physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and I'm thankful for the ideas and resources I have found to help me do that

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