Buddha board tray work

My daughter has dyslexia and adhd and that means lots and lots of dr appointments.  One of her favourite things to play with at the dr's is the Buddha board. They have the large one at the office but I found the mini at chapters on sale for $17. I thought Gage would love it too so I put together a tray for him

He did really well with it respecting it for about 5 min then he dumped the whole container of water over it. Hey, I tried right. My hope is that as time goes on he will show more respect for our trays. The package reads: Buddha board mini is inspired by the Zen idea of living in the moment. You simply paint the surface with water and your creation will come to life in bold design. Then, as the water slowly evaporates, your art magically disappear leaving you with a clean state and clear mind-ready to create a whole new masterpiece. 'Master the art of letting go"
This is a great activity for calming little bodies. You paint on water and the surface turns black. Then you watch the board turn back to white and start all over again. It's a great investment for my family

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your comments

Our Classroom part 2

I posted Part One of our classroom tour yesterday. Today I will show you some not so great pics thanks to the weather being so over cast today. 

First is our entrance I didn't take pictures of our door or the hooks for each child but here are some pics from standing at the doorway.  We used to have a really cute rug here for our reading/manipulates/puzzle area but the dog peed on it!  

I added a full length mirror to the wall sideways so the little ones could see themselves and explore. Lately they have enjoyed making faces, and trying on dress up clothes especially the capes and masks and looking in this mirror. Mirror is mounted with gorilla glue. The children can take the trays (Green Bins) to the table in front of sofa or use anywhere within this room. I try my best to keep the toys in each room to teach them where things belong. 

We also have a small heart shaped shelf with our sensory bottles. Mostly water beads but these are rotated weekly or as needed with eye spy bottles and more water beads etc. We also have sensory bags but that is a whole other post.

As my husband has that crazy big t.v. mounted down here and spends his evenings here I wanted this area to look more like a home than a daycare centre. Children should feel like they are in their home away from home and I think i am on my way of capturing that feeling.

Here you can see the hallway. It leads to the bathroom on the right, Stairs (gated) to go to our upstairs home on the left, my daughters room on the right and at last the lunch/nap/science and dramatic play room on the left. At first I was concerned that the two major rooms were not directly accessible but surprisingly it has worked really well. 

We have direct access to the side and backyard and tons of natural light. A huge bonus as we only had two windows at our last home and they were situated under the deck so no natural light at all. 

Overall i am happy with our new layout but want to slowly get rid of the the plastic toys and go for more natural materials. 

We also have a wood burning stove in this room that is gated in with a proper gate. In 1.5 years we have never had any problems with anyone getting hurt. Only downside is it van get very hot in this room but we open the windows when this happens. 

Our classrooms part 1

wow we moved 1.5 years ago and I'm just now writing a post about our news classrooms. we finally have natural light and lots of it and more space. I have divided our space in the most functional way possible. 

First up is our art/lunch/nap/science/dramatic play room. I now have lots of storage to change out our activities. 

our classroom has changed a lot since moving here but this is what it looks like currently. I have gone through a lot of different styles of tables and chairs and i think we finally got what works best for us and our wide range of ages.

Storage is so much more accessible now and way more organized than its ever been.

This side of the room is obviously the dramatic play area. Its always changing and always a mess. Looking for more solutions as to how to get toddlers to put things back where they belong. Behind the curtains is where I store our sensory bins and tray work that rotated daily. What you don't see in these pics is a narrow part of our room (picture a L shaped room) that's where our beds ad cribs are stored. 

 This is probably my favourite feature of this room. I used chalkboard paint on the wall then cut our a frame and nailed it to the wall and stained it. 

I fought these cuties off guard haha. 

On monday I will post pics of our other classroom stay tuned

***This post is linked up with Our Word wide classroom****

Valentine sensory writing tray

My little guy is almost 4 I can't believe it! He started preschool this month part time and he has no interest in his letters and numbers. As a mother of a beautiful sweet girl who happens to have dyslexia I knew early intervention is key. The little guy like his sister will only participate in writing trays if I make them look fun or add cute little details such as these foam hearts with the letters on them. I made sure to use pink for all uppercase and white for all lower case. 

you can find my post about the sensory stick HERE

Little guy showed some interest so it's a work in progress but we will get there. He still has a full year before he starts school.
Thanks for reading 😄

Branch sensory sticks

Recently I put together a sensory writing tray, we were using recycled wood coloured pencils as our writing tools. When I went to clean the tray after we finished there was a lot of pencil marks all over the tray. I thought hey, wouldn't it be great to have a pencil with no led of Color. I looked our pencils over and they looked just like tree branches but with coloured led in them. I remembered my daughter playing in the snow the other day and she was using a branch to drag along the snow to make tracks. The aha moment! I found the branch and took one small portion off. Then I cut using a chop saw to my desired lengths. 

Then I used a sharp knife and began chipping away till I got to the point that they resembled a pencil. 

Problem solved no more coloured pencil marks on our tray and best part it was free! Took about 15 min from start to finish to make 4. I may dress them up a bit with twine or paint on the handles. 

Trusting the Process

I'm all over the map on emotions and walk around in a daze of confusion. I wonder if that's what it feels like to be dyslexic? I haven't blogged in a bit because I was feeling really irritated by the lack of help in our area for kids with dyslexia. I called around to different agencies, schools, tutors, dr.'s etc. Its been very frustrating and draining emotionally. We continue to plow through each day and try to stay on top of her reading words while making the process fun to keep Jada's attention. I picked up Ron Davis's book The gift of Learning. Although I don't agree with his methods I do find him interesting and for a brief moment was willing to pay $3000 to have Jada in his program for 2 weeks, with the promise we would see quick results. Odds are if it sounds too good to be true it probably is! anyway, One thing i took away from his book was practicing making the alphabet out of clay. Since Jada is highly tactile and creative (most dyslexics are) I figured I would incorporate this into a lesson

Apparently 'N' is not a letter according to Jada. she had to start at A and sing the alphabet each time to figure out what the next letter was to make. Once we got past N this was a challenge for her as "n" is "not a letter". By the end of making both upper and lower case letters she finally acknowledged that "n" was indeed in the alphabet.

 This is us "resetting" Jada. This sounds strange but we have to give her something messy but fun every 3 days or we end up with our bathroom painted in soap or toilet paper soup in our bathtub. Her ADHD responds well to our "resetting". If I forget a day it comes back to bite me in a bad way. I learned this through trial and error and on a whim decided to give it a try and it worked! as a parent we have to figure things out for ourselves as to how to calm our little ones. Jada is currently still not medicated and its been very challenging. Going to the mall sets her off into a tail spin and she pretty near climbs the walls. Food courts make her puke and car rides bore her to tears. We hope and pray she gets some medication and some relief soon.

A bit of a update is that by dumb luck I found a tutor school I never heard of by talking to another agency about my son that turned into a convo about Jada. See, dumb luck. Anyway I called the tutor school and they teach Orton Gillingham! I cried, literally when the lady said Orton Gillingham was their primary teaching method. I have googled tutor schools in my area and this one never came up. The free tutor school has a 2 year wait list so finding this one was a huge relief. The lady is even opening the centre on a Saturday just for us! I guess when you pay big bucks for a program doors literally open for you lol with all that said I finally feel a bit of peace knowing that once she starts with the tutor program she will be in good hands. I have researched the heck out of OG and feel very good about the success rate of their students. There are some great youtube videos on OG. I wish I could find some personal blogs about other families journeys with Dyslexia. Google has not been my friend lately in this department.

 So our week looks like this:
Monday- Lindamood Bell 30 min
Tuesday- Swimming for ADHD kids 45 min
Wednesday- Girl Guides (sparks) 60 min
Thursday- Free
Friday- Usually a bday party or play date
Satrurday-  Dyslexic tutor (Orton Gillingham) 60 min
Sunday- play date

Here is Jada at her special needs swimming

Thanks for reading. I hope this post helps someone someday. It's so strange that there isn't a manual on what to do after you get a diagnosis. If she had a life threatening disease the medical community would be all over this. Parents are left in a frustrating position of finding resources to help their children with no government help or support. In the United States there are so many centres and tutors and supports for dyslexic students, according to my research anyway. In Canada it's hard to find good supports or anyone to coach you on what to do next.

Happy Easter dear readers!

Trays

Just some random tray work we did today:

 The Easter bunny will be here before we know it!

 Classification:

 I saw this on Pinterest. trace alphabet with paint and q-tip

 We got 40 cm of snow yesterday so I pulled out the sand play so we could pretend it was summer

Thanks for looking:)