Monday, December 10, 2012

How To Make a Felt Board

Update 26 Dec 2012: Today, we discovered that the black felt can slip out rather easily, so I took the board apart and glued the felt down onto the plastic with PVA glue.

This craft project for the little one was turned into a Christmas gift from his Ga-jeh and Gorgor. It was easy enough for one or the other of them to do each step, with a little adjusting done by Mum along the way. Instructions are from Totally Tots, a homeschooling website dedicated entirely to tots.

First, we placed a 40X50cm picture frame we got long ago from IKEA (for another project which was cancelled) and removed the cardboard backing and plastic sheet from the frame. We went to Daiso and after some discussion, decided on a large piece of black felt as the background for the board. Ray traced around the cardboard with tailor's chalk, cut the felt out and I trimmed it a little.

Top: pic frame, bottom: felt cut to 40X50cm

Second, we replaced the cardboard and plastic sheet back into the frame with the black felt on the topmost layer, and the board was done.

Felt board complete
 Then came the fun part (for the kids). We have a few packs of small felt squares from Daiso and they set to work with scissors and pinking shears, cutting out lots of shapes to form pictures. I had to keep reminding them to cut the shapes bigger for little hands.

Felt pieces all cut and stuffed into a ziploc
Here's an example of how the pieces of felt can be arranged on the board.

Simple scene on felt board
It's all wrapped up with newspaper and placed under the Christmas tree. Made with love by Ga-jeh and Gorgor.

Domino Sorting

I took quite a long break from homeschool researching (it's the school holidays, after all), but picked it up again last week.

One of the most important things I learnt this week was from 1+1+1=1: Tot school is not about making a tot LEARN something, but rather, to expose him/her to early learning skills through FUN play.

I decided to give myself a little taste of what it might be like when I really begin to plan things for my 27mo. So when he brought out a box of dominoes himself, I showed him how to sort them by colour - start each column with a domino, place another of the same colour below it and pass him another of the same colour to place below that.


He caught on pretty quickly, but that only lasted about 2 minutes. Then he wanted to gather them up in his hands, so I joined him in "gathering". After a bit I demonstrated simple patterning (red, yellow, red, yellow) which he was willing to help with for... 1 minute? He changed his mind and decided that pushing the dominoes around on the tray would be really fun, so we did that for another minute.

After that he chose to join his brother and sister on the sofa to watch TV, so that's the end of our little lesson, which lasted for about ten minutes or so.

The biggest challenge for me was to focus on him for these ten minutes and not run off to do other stuff once he was settled. I guess I'm rather blessed in that this child is pretty good at playing on his own (trains, blocks, puzzles, counters), but I can see that I will have to change my own mindset (and still my heart) when we begin to homeschool.