Dancing with Littlest

Have I mentioned lately how much Littlest LOVES our Dance N Beats DVDs?  She isn't talking much but she requests it almost daily by pointing at the TV and starting the warm up routine.  Last Friday we had no errands to run during her sister's playgroup time and I wanted to keep her out of the way while the electricians hung our new ceiling fan (quite an adventure in our two-story foyer) so instead of just playing the DVD for her, I modified one of the classes outlined in the companion book.  Most of these activities are written for children 3-5 years old but I was able to easily switch them up to apply to my 20-month old.

We followed the lesson plan for the first class in the book.  Instead of having her pick out fruit shapes during the song, I made a simple matching game using construction paper.  She loved having a game that was all hers and did a good job finding the banana, apple, pear and orange matches.  This activity helped her work on colors (yellow, orange, red and green) and the concept of same/different.

The second activity was supposed to be a letter identification one but since she's still so little I decided to change it into a shape identification game.  I cut out green circles, drew shapes on them and then spread out the shapes of the month cards around the room.  I gave her a green circle, named the shape and told her to find the same one.  She did it perfectly and enjoyed playing a couple rounds of this game.

In between each game, we danced to a song that coordinated with our activity.  She is getting better and better at being able to follow along with the dance moves on the first time through.  It helps that they are fairly simple and the songs are catchy.

After she exhausted her attention span (which was about 20 minutes), we practiced some of the spreading skills we learned the first week and frosted cookies for the guys risking their necks to help put our ceiling fan.  Maybe not the healthiest choice given our monthly topic of Food and Fitness but it was Valentine's weekend so we made an exception.

I love that I can use these fun games as a way of observing my girls' development so I know what they can do and what we can continue to work on.  We aren't in a formal learning setting so we don't have "assessments" but I can still keep track of how they are doing just by being conscious enough to watch.  I love how these materials help remind me to do that (they literally have notes of what to observe in the teacher's guide); it puts my mind at ease that they are growing and learning just fine.