Perfect Parenting Projects

Hello from Impending Doom (i.e. Sunday night before another week of pandemic parenting)! I hope you are holding up – if so, you are killing it! Nice job! 

For those of you who, like me, now have a preschooler at home and previously had absolutely no skills at keeping said preschooler engaged because you work and they go to preschool for a reason, I am here to share with you my new Perfect Parenting Projects advice. I’m qualified to provide this advice because my brother and his wife are preschool professionals, and I have rudimentary Vulcan Mind Meld skills (don’t tell), so I can now be trusted to guide you along on this newly-appointed-preschool-teacher journey. 

Step 1: Flail around on various Montessori-at home websites, and become totally overwhelmed by the volume of material and required time investment. Also get extremely confused because you have no formal Montessori training and you are not privy to the above-mentioned mind meld. Close 45 tabs and come back to this one. Now. Ready?

 

Serenity - it will all be ok (maybe, unless we all die and/or lose our jobs/housing//family members/friends, but who is counting...ok back to focusing on relatively small things because the rest is too much)

Step 2: Set up a sensory day:

(a)   Sight – cut paint swatches in half, and/or gather pairs of different-looking things like different sized washers, nuts, bolts, etc.  kid can do matching and then also ordering. Kids with Montessori experience in particular totally get this. It’s kind of magical. 

Estimated set-up time: 5-20 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 5-20 minutes, depending how hard you made it (I had like 16 shades of taupe – so proud of past me for keeping those). 

(b)  Smell – grab some things from the kitche that are kind of obvious-smelling and wrap them in foil, then poke some holes in them. Offer them to your kid to identify.
Estimated set-up time: 5 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 3 minutes. 

Not the most visually appealing

(c)   Taste – cut up tiny pieces of things and have your kid close their eyes & pop them into their mouths. Probably best not to give them things that will make them freak out, like maybe no jalapeños, and probably nothing deemed “gross”. 

Estimated set-up time: 2-5 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 3 minutes. They will probably ask to do it again with different things. 

(d)  Touch – put random objects into a cloth bag and have your kid try to identify them without looking in the bag. 

Estimated set-up time: 5 minutes of casting about the random things in kitchen drawers. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 5-20 minutes, depending on how hard you make it and how many clues you give. 

(e)   Hearing – re-use your paper towel/TP rolls to make matching-paired-shakers. Put inside things like dry beans, washers, rice, etc. 

Estimated set-up time: 30 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: Maybe 5 minutes, but more like 2 if you make it too easy. 

There are probably faster & definitely less crappy ways to do this

Step 3: Design and carry out a super-creative craft project using items from nature:

(a)   Find an old Glass Gem corn cob in a drawer. 

(b)  Kernels must be plucked off using tweezers. This is good for fine-motor-skill development/practice. Disclaimer: I did not come up with this; we bought this cob to copy a work from the little one’s preschool, but then the little one decided the cob was too precious to take apart. However, I convinced her to use the cob for this work because of the awesome final-outcome, which will be to have a beautiful necklace to wear and show off said awesome kernels.

(c)   When the older child decides this looks way more fun than doing math worksheets that have been assigned, spend 30 minutes negotiating with the little one that the older child can also pluck half of the kernels from the cob as long as the little one gets to wear all necklaces made from said kernels.

(d)  Drill holes in a portion of the kernels the younger child has plucked while the children try to build robots from random nuts and bolts, and you explain what torque is and why the little whirring battery-powered motor that will spin a tiny propeller won’t propel a wood/nuts & bolts robot across the floor.

(e)   Partway through the hole drilling, the kids get bored of their robot plans.

(f)    The younger child decides she doesn’t want to make a necklace after all, and the kernels now must just live in the bowl she put them in. 

So pretty! Maybe I'll just make a necklace for myself

Step 4: Feel discouraged. Decide maybe we can just do playdoh, read, and watch movies for the next month. That probably never killed anyone.  

Never underestimate the awesomeness of facepaint