Brightly Beaming Daniel

21 months old, Preschool milestone and more!

amylee — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:43:19 +0000

So I have been very behind and eager to update. I can’t believe that in less than 3 months, Daniel will be two years old! I have so much to talk about!

My little man has such good manors. He says please if asks for more of something like a cookie or an M&M and when he says please he puts his hands up to his chin to make it hard to say no lol. He asks for a napkin if his hands gets dirty from eating and wash and dry his hands and wipes his own face clean. When he eats a banana he will take the banana peel and throw it way in the trash on his own. He will throw garbage in the trash with out asking him. He will enter a room and turn on the light switch and close the door behind him, and turn off the light when leaving a room and close the door as well. And best of all, if he spills anything on the floor; juice, food, lotion =) he will walk to grab the napkin roll, tear off a piece, place the roll on the table, wipe up the mess and walk over and throw the napkin in the trash with out me even saying a thing. Sometime I even walk in the room and he is cleaning up a spill.

He is learning how to count! This is very exciting. A month ago when learning the numbers, he started by counting up to three when throwing a ball. However he uses his own words. “uh, oou, eeee!” then he would throw the ball over hand, which by the way he has a very good arm, throws very hard and far for a little guy! So David started counting with him when they warm up his milk in the microwave. They would count down the time till the microwave beeps. You can hear them clear across the other room. So funny! =) I have been showing how to count with his hands as well. Daniel can tell you if he wants (1) one piece of candy and that he is going to be (2) two years old by using his fingers and words. Well, while we were visiting his grandmother, we asked his to count to three and throw something and instead he put his and up and counted 1,2,3 with his fingers and have been doing this ever since! He knows for certain, 1,2,3,4 & 5.

I have also been working with him his alphabet to correspond with the YBCR. It is all in preparation for real preschool curriculum. He Should be graduated from prep preschool in July and ready for the real stuff by August. =) After reading several positive mommy reviews of the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD I bought it for Daniel and he loves it! it teaches the phonetic sounds of each letter in the alphabet. He can say at least 20 of the sounds. I ask him what the ‘D’ says all the time because that his name. He will sound out the sounds if you ask him, it is amazing! I truly think this is helping him learn to read as well. He looks at words in a way like he really knows what they say. It is weird to see him interact with something after I think he read certain words. For instance, he knows for sure ‘power, volume, on, off, play, open, close. The reason, for example, is that no matter where we are he can use anyones TV, DVD player, the Wii and almost any electronic appliance. He can turn it, off, turn up th volume, all by looking at the buttons words I think. Not by process of elimination. He memorized the whole word. It is really cool!

So learning colors is an interesting thing to teach. I am using skittles as my teaching tools haha. We don’t eat candy all the time don’t worry! lol haha I put one skittle in each hand and ask him to grab a certain color skittle. He gets it about 85 % of the time, the other times he isn’t paying attention and just trying to grab both skittles! It is a fun little game.

Daniel is very independent lately. He want no help doing anything. He can do it all himself. And going up the stairs is scary, I catch him half way up sometimes. =/ And Daddy is his favorite person in the world. He asks for daddy all day and wants daddy to take him on a bike ride. My big boy is doing well with potty training. His abuelita bought a potty chair for her house and he goes there more than at home. He even asked for the potty while driving on our vacation and went in the restroom at Zaxby’s in North Carolina, #1 and #2!! Woohoo! Oh and he also is in his big boy toddler bed with Transformers sheets!

Daniel really like certain types of books latley. Only learning types like the YBCR and Brainy Baby books. He really loves the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD as well as Veggie Tales and SpongeBob of course and YBCR and also Richard Scarry’s Best Learning Video Ever!

Well there is a bunch more to talk about, but Daniel wants to play up stairs.

Up next I am planning his birthday =) I am a proud mommy.

Hugs and luv!

Amy and Daniel!

amylee — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:20:55 +0000

I have been unable to keep up with the blog lately as much asI would have liked too. The family got that terribel flu virus and lost what felt like a month of my life lol Being sicks is not fun. Being exhausted I decided that keeping the formal schedule I had would be too hard on me. However, Daniel had other plans of his own. He would grab the flash cards, books or the videos to the YBCR series. While I was sick on the couch he would go throught the dvds, find a movie or show he liked, open the case , remove the DVDput it in the DVD player and hit play. He took Care of himself while I layed on a chair immobile with a fever. It was one a few times I was glad he is getting indepedent. lol I will update more later when healthy.

Evolution of Toddler Art

amylee — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:17:02 +0000

I was so pleased to notice lately that Daniel’s drawings are becoming art, he is now drawing circles! This is a big deal to me because he is only 20 months old and drawing ovals, circles and loops =) He also has drawn some stars, accidentaly probably, but he did it more than once! It is very cool to see how his skills grow, literally!

Week 2

amylee — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:31:45 +0000

It has been two weeks and It has been great! Today was review day and we went over what we learned for the week. I am proud to say Daniel can already read a few words!! He knows mouth, eye, clap, nose, arm and most recently bubble. He also knows !the color green for sure now, even though he calls colors blue (his first color word) He sings along to the YBCR video and does all the movements. He says mouth and nose now. He loves to color on the Aquadoodle. He really loves his drums and he even keeps a pretty good beat =) He now knows the song “Head ,Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and “If your happy and you know it!” The jungle was theme 2 and it was a bit hard to do since it was cold and could do many outdoor activities, so I just read the Jungle Book’ and we played with lions and tigers from Noah’s Ark. I also showed him vines growing on trees and we fed the birds on the lake. The birds gave us a cool flight show, at least it seemed that way, flying and diving and doing tricks in from of us! Pretty cool! Nick got me a copy of Madagascar so we will watch that too. Nick also brought over Rock Band game and Daniel loved it! He now plays air drums with his hands, SOOOOO CUTE! Also, Grandpa showed Daniel how to go bang bang with a banana, and he got it the first try!! Boys! Another BIG milestone is that Daniel has learned to ask to go potty! He did a poopy on the first try and went pee-pee 3 times the first day! The next three days he remember to ask to pee as well!! I now need to buy him a potty chair so i dont have to go upstairs every minute. I also need to potty train myself and get used to his signals. I am a very proud mommy!! It has been a very productive 2 weeks for Daniel!!

Bye!

First day of Preschool! =)

amylee — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Yesterday was our First day of Preschool! I prepared Daniel two weeks ago with the Starter Volume of ‘Your Baby Can Read’ (YBCR) DVD’s, flashcards and book. He recognized almost all the words and followed along to the video as if he had seen it before! Very cute. Even asks to see them and opens the DVD player. lol Yesterday we started Vol.1 YBCR set and he really enjoys that one as well. He has a pretty large vocabulary of over 50 words, so he recognized most words as well, but he is learning now how to READ them. We will do this volume for one month. Very exciting!!!

The Brightly Beaming curriculum is set up in weeks and days. Every week is a theme and each day is a new topic around the theme. You also have a poster you keep as the week progresses. I will post a picture of the poster at the end of each week. This weeks theme is Cows. we read books about cows, colored pictures of cows and sang songs about cows. There was also a vocab word of the week; Calf. We took a field trip to the library to read more books on cows! We even pretended to be a cow on the floor, very funny! He now says mooo! We learned so much that he was so tired he went to bed 4 hours early!!

Today was shape/color day. We learned about the shape Square. We are going around the house finding squares and reading books with shapes and Baby Einstein Shapes DVD. We also have sign language time and foreign language time. i also repeat what we did yesterday and repeat the previous days topic every day till the next week.

I will post up the weeks curriculum and photos of our progress weekly. Tomorrow we learn about the letter A!

Thanks for reading!

Ac/Dc

Welcome to Our Blog!

amylee — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:04:32 +0000

This blog is dedicated to the educational, emotional and spiritual growth of my son Daniel. It is to record all the special moments we share together as he turns from a baby to a toddler. I wanted to share this for all my family and friends to also enjoy! This year I decided to start him on a home school based preparatory preschool curriculum. He is 19 months old as of the beginning of this new year, and I found that to be the perfect time to prepare him to meet all those special milestones for when he turns 2 years old in June. I found a wonderful website to help organize myself, www.LetteroftheWeek.com, that contained curriculum ideas and plans from the age of birth to age 8. I will be using the Brightly Beaming Toddler Nursery and Brightly Beaming Preparatory curriculum combined until he is 2 years old. Once he has completed these we will move on to the Letter of the Week curriculum. Also, with this I have been blessed to receive as a Christmas present from my sister and Daniel’s favorite person, Titi Jessie, the ‘Your Baby Can Read’ program. I am very excited and enthusiast to see how this stage in Daniel’s life evolves!

Happy New Year and God Bless!

Amy and Daniel