Pirate Story Books
As part of our focus on pirate crafts and activities, I have invested in a couple of story books to help stimulate The Boy's imagination and explain the concept to him. It's a tricky thing to teach your three year old son about when you're desperately trying to keep him away from violence. There are a few really cool books by Jonny Duddle, like The Pirates Next Door, but he's not the type of boy to appreciate the bone-crunching humour in it.
"The Night Pirates"
The shadows around Tom's window are keeping him awake, and it soon transpires that they belong to a crew of girl pirates and their captain who need to borrow the front of Tom's house. The concept of an adventure on a pirate ship is far more exciting than bed and so he sets sail with the girl captain to a treasure island.
Simple, exciting with just the right measure of butterfly-inducing adventure, this beautifully illustrated tale of friendly pirates is by Peter Harris and Deborah Allwright.
"Peppa Pig: Pirate Island"
Absolutely no book anthology of The Boys would be complete without the porcine pair gracing it. This soundbook is really fun and follows the adventures of Peppa and George, along with their friends, as they accompany Grandpa Pig and Granny Pig on a boat trip to Pirate Island. They find a variety of natural and manmade treasure, before having an adventure of their own due to Grandpa Pig.
The Boy adores this book and we have to read it every day. A must for any Peppa fans.
"Pirate Pete"
Pirate Pete is quite a cheeky pirate and steals a treasure map from the Queen while she is asleep. Trying to race ahead of her fleet to take the treasure before she can get there, he soon becomes distracted by the potential of more gold in other places. Will he make it to the treasure before the Queen? Will he be taught a valuable lesson?
I actually bought this on Kindle to use on the iPad when out and about. A slightly more detailed story book it's a lovely, moralistic story with colourful illustrations throughout.
"Pirates!" Activity & Sticker Book
This is a fantastic full colour activity book with over thirty activities and puzzles in it, ranging from dot-dot to cookery activities, mask making, stickers, spot the difference to making a hinged puppet. It's certainly got plenty of ideas to keep all the jolly pirates happy during the Summer holidays. It's part of a four pack set (including knights, dragons and dinosaurs) from Igloo Books.*
I was sent the item marked * to feature on this blog. All other books I bought myself and all my recommendations are based on my honest opinion.
Tuesday 14th August 2012 – 'Hula-Hoop' (227/366)
Flashback Friday: Sport
Every single week I mean to join in with Flashback Friday over at A Matter of Choice, and every single Friday I fail. Horrendously. I think it's because I work the latter half of the week but really there's no excuse. Well, over the Summer that changes. The lovely Emma is going on maternity leave, so Mummy Mishaps and The Real Housewife of Suffolk are taking over for her. I'm still late with this post, but it's better late than never!
My little boy has always loved climbing, from the moment he could crawl he'd climb up onto the sofa and straight up onto the wide windowsill behind it, pulling the net curtain over him so he could watch everyone. He's an explorer, but a cautious child, and a gentle one too.
In January of this year I enrolled him in our local Tumble Tots class. He's gone from cautiously holding on to my hands to cross a beam to walk across with excellent aeroplane arms. His cautious attitude at climbing the ladder is still there, but it's controlled and careful which sees him turning around on the top of a five foot high ladder and coming down backwards. And he's gone from not being able to hold onto a beam, to hanging from one.
The change in The Boy's physical development is astounding, and in his confidence too. The top right and bottom left photos were taken in January of this year, the other two were taken in July. I'm so proud of how far he's come.
I'm even more proud to see him transferring these skills to real life situations:
Keep going my boy and let's see how far you can go by Christmas.
—
Monday 13th August 2012 – 'Eyes Tight Shut' (226/366)
Monday Mobile & The Gallery
Angie over at Cakes, Photos, Life has a new linky (she's started today) for mobile photographs. I'm a sucker for a photo linky, especially when it allows me to show off photos that normally only features in my Instagram feed.
Sunset on my birthday, taken on my Samsung Galaxy S3, edited using Camera+ on the iPad.
I'm also linking this up to The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers, where this week Tara has given us the theme of 'Sky'. Having posted quite a few photos recently of blue skies, I didn't want to do another specific photo and really like this one, so am choosing to link it up instead.
Pre-Literacy Carnival Call-Out
As I've mentioned before, I'm not sending The Boy to state nursery for his free 15 hours. I know, shock horror right? There is a good reason for this, several in fact which are far too boring, convoluted and not important at the moment.
However, what it does mean is that I want to be sure that I'm doing the best that I can to get him ready for Reception next September. And this is where I'm going to do something that I don't tend to do very often on this blog; I'll don my teacher hat, draw upon my experience as a Literacy co-ordinator and come up with a bank of pre-school activities that focus on developing pre-Literacy skills.
Pre-Literacy skills are vital to ensure that your child is ready to learn how to read and write when they get to school. Don't be in a rush to teach them yourself, that's the point of the teachers who have gone through years of training to ensure they are delivering the best teaching to our children. I've worked in a Reception class and trying to re-teach a child phonics is nigh on impossible. More important for us as parents is to ensure that they have the pre-Literacy skills in place, general things like: fine motor skills development, hand-eye co-ordination and communication. More specifically; sequencing, shape and pattern recognition, letter awareness, positional language, and (for those who are ready) proper pronounciation of phonics.
Next month when the big kids return to school, I want to focus in on these all important skills and create a resource bank for parents like me. This is where I'd like some help please.
If you have a post on your blog about pre-Literacy skills (like the ones listed above) please leave that in the comments box below. If you have any ideas that you'd like to contribute (but no blog posts) leave those in the comments box. I will credit everyone in.
Let's help our children learn through play, let's treasure their childhood and not push them to grow up!
Sunday 12th August 2012 – 'Letters' (225/366)
Slow Cooker Sunday: Fruit Medley
As Mediocre Mum is still enjoying the balmy weather in Canada, it falls on me to host #SCSunday again after the sterling job from Plus2Point4 last week.
Fruit Medley
What do you do when you have a ton of fruit that you bought last week when you started your diet, and haven't managed to eat it all? Especially peaches which are beginning to look decidely dodgy? Peel them and bung them in the slow cooker for two hours on low!
Added to the peaches were cherries and a bramley apple to counter the sweetness. I then might have sprinkled on some cinnamon and glugged in a slosh of Disaranno. Because I felt like it.
I was going to serve it with fat-free vanilla yoghurt which would have made it über-diet food, but quite frankly I craved ice-cream after 9 days on this diet, so I had a small amount of Cornish dairy ice-cream instead!
If you've got a Slow Cooker recipe to share, then please add it to the linky below. It doesn't have to have been done in a slow cooker, as long as it was cooked slowly.
366 #32
We've had a busy seven days, exploring many adventure parks, conquering new challenges and meeting up with good friends. Best of all is that my birthday was on Friday and I took one of my favourite photos in ages… which had no comments!
So you know the drill people, join in with your favourite photograph of the week and show some comment love to everyone else in the community.
Don't forget that the linky is open until midnight on Monday during the Summer season.
- Choose your favourite photo from the past week and link it up below.
- Please add the badge to your linked-up post so that other people know how to find all the other fabulous entries.
- If you can spare five minutes to comment on just a few other entries I know they'd appreciate it!
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