Aha, another terrific book on positive discipline. I thought, that if you read one good book, you’d be as good as it gets. Apparently not: I still often feel the urge for a good old fashioned yelling, stomping my feet and loosing my patience. I try to avoid all of the above. Yelling feels good… but often comes with a nasty friend: guilt. That one is eating her prey raw… My kids long since forgotten and I am still torturing myself… But why, why, why do parents get to feel so frustrated and annoyed when we love our kids more then the life itself? We are ready for every possible sacrifice for them… and just as ready to strangle them with our own hands at some point. I guess, most important question is – what do we do about it.

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Some of these animal babysitters were just too irresistible and funny to pass up…  Enjoy!

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Thanks to Orsi for sharing this wonderful resource:

America The Story of US — premiering on HISTORY™ April 25 at 9pm/8c — is a six week event that provides a fascinating look at the stories of the people, events, and innovations that forged our nation. It will provide you with an unprecedented opportunity to bring our nation’s history to life for your students. This 12-hour series will be supported by educational materials tied to curriculum standards and is copyright cleared for Fair Use in the classroom by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities.

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Montessory three-part lesson is used for introducing and reinforcing the concept of addition. Can be used for other mathematical operations. No need to be an expert Montessory teacher or any special tools – you can get everything at right at home. Very good video, excellent simple and laconic explanations. Short and very useful:

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My little one, Smiles, is growing and I am anxious to introduce more music into his life. Our stereo got broken, and while we are working on a fix, I decided to join a mommy and me music class. Besides, Smiles tends to feel really excited in the most bizarre and overcrowded situations, so a few friends for a playdate just don’t cut it.

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Geography turned out to be a lot of fun. But I had to do a lot of materials, and it turned out to be one of the most fun subjects! So let’s get right to it…

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This song turned out to be so much fun, that we sing it even after we were done with our unit in Geography.
“I live on Planet Earth” song to the “He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands“. We tried singing it with props: I printed pictures of earth, USA map, our State, our state with it’s city on marked, picture of our house.

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I feel like a silly writer-character in the old joke, who gets so many positive responses for his own novel, that decides to go and read it himself. I’ve passed on the recommendations to get Signing Times videos to many-many-many parents, who later became huge fans of these videos. Recently I found them on the YouTube: Caterpillar Dreams. I was enchanted: beautiful singing, excellent signing (yep, siGNing), charming illustrations, adorable kids. What more could you expect? But that’s not all! I really love that all the words in the songs are shown as signs, not only “key words”, so a lot more signs are picked up along the way. I absolutely love, that while new signs are introduced, the words are written on the screen, so it aids learning to read as well! This video definitely deserves two thumbs up! (Oh-oh, I should go and find the video with the right sign…)

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Montessori Practical Life transferring activities seem redundant and boring to me… and absolutely irresistible to my kid. I think my older one, Sunshine, can spend hours just pouring water or spooning beans. Though it’s tongs and tweezers that are the dearest to his heart!

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