Lesson Plans

At the start of the summer I walked Nora out of daycare for the last day and wondered how I would possibly keep her entertained all day. At daycare there are two or three adults, eight of nine other children, lots of toys, tons of activity. Sure, I had spent many a busy weekend day with Nora, but I didn’t really feel confident that I could successfully fill our days in ways that would please both her and me. I wondered in my first blog, what do you do with an 18 month old all day?

I think I attacked my summer days with Nora much as I attack my days in my classroom. I needed a “lesson” plan. We had our routine that made me comfortable – confines to work within. I wonder how much Nora realized the routine. I tried to vary our activities enough to keep both of us interested. I tried to be patient and loving and kind even when I was tired. Being a mom is a lot like being a teacher. And I learned that being with one toddler is as tiring as being with 100 teenagers who I get to send home at the end of the day.

Nora and I settled into a routine pretty quickly. We would wake up, eat breaksfast and watch Elmo, take a walk and visit the chickens down the street, the “doo doo’s” as Nora calls them. Then we would play outside and inside until about 9:30 and then we’d go on some sort of outing – park, shopping, errands. I tried my best to keep her awake on the car ride back, came home, ate lunch around 11:30, read a book or two and started nap time around noon (more follow up on naptime in another blog…). In the afternoon we would go swimming or to Gymboree or to run around in Mimi and Papa’s at first empty house. Then we’d come home, eat dinner, play and go to bed. Writing it that way makes it sound so easy…

What entertains a toddler generally changes every 10 minutes, sometimes every 2 minutes, but I found some things that Nora generally enjoyed and were no-fail entertainers in every mood.

Stickers. For our plane ride I bought Nora a book of reusable Elmo stickers. It seriously entertained her for an hour on the plane. No joke. It was the best 8 dollars I’ve ever spent. The book said it was for ages 3 and up, but I got it anyway since we would be right there with her. The key is the reusable stickers. They are thick and don’t rip and, just like they claim, you can reuse them many times. When we got back from vacation Nora invented the game of sticking her stickers to the floor and to herself. Since they are reusable they don’t stick places you don’t want them to. If it weren’t for stickers I would have gone crazy many days. I love stickers!

Water table. In April, Ken’s parents got Nora the water table I had been looking at for her. It seemed like the perfect toy for the Texas heat. And I was right. It is a great compromise to the pool since you don’t have to commit to a swim diaper and all that jazz, but she can get wet, put rocks in it, splash, play with toys in it. This was a daily activity for us. And you can tell from the photo that five months after getting it, she still loves it as enthusiastically as she did on day one. That’s not true of many of her toys.

Shoes. Nora, as mentioned in an earlier post, is a shoe lover like her mama. Each evening and some morning she would change shoes and walk around the house in laps looking at her feet. The key was to hide a pair of her shoes for a while, bring them out as new and exciting, and then she would want to walk around and stare. She also loved to walk around in my shoes. This was pretty difficult and dangerous, but she managed pretty well.

Picture Books. Nora’s vocabulary is exploding. I was keeping a list of all her words, but now it’s up to 52 and she says so many new things every day that I can’t keep up with it anymore. I credit this to some of her picture books. Today in the car she said, “taxi.” If we lived in New York that might not be a big deal, but we don’t see that many taxi’s around my part of Austin. She learned this from one of her picture books. And she loves to sit and read them. She had all the animal sounds down and some tricks with animals that don’t make sounds.

Then there’s all the normal stuff – the crayons, the tickling, the chasing, the dolls and puzzles. And there are the times that the only thing she’ll do is cling to me and refuse to be “entertained” by anything, even stickers.

And, perhaps best of all, were the times when Nora just entertained me. There were many of those – she’s a pretty funny little girl.