This morning Tinker Bear jumped into bed with Mama and Papa Bear. He loves to cuddle with them on the weekend. Today he notices something he hadn’t been aware of before: When Mama Bear gives him a big bear hug, her face is warm and soft. When Papa Bear hugs him, his face is warm and prickly. It doesn’t feel so good. Being the observant Mama she is, Mama Bear decides that today is a good day to explore textures. She goes through her den to find different textures for Tinker Bear to explore and experience—cotton, foil, fleece, silk, stone, sandpaper and whatever else she can find that is part of Tinker Bear’s world. She puts everything into an empty honey pot and encourages Tinker Bear take them out and explore the textures with all of his senses.
While Tinker Bear is exploring the textures, Mama Bear introduces new words to Tinker Bear. Words like soft, fuzzy, prickly, hard, rough, smooth, spongy, velvety, bumpy. She also asks him what textures he likes and doesn’t like.
Mama Bear makes up a few other games to play with the different textures:
- Sorting the objects by what ones feel the same and what ones feel different.
- Matching textures–what feels like Daddy’s whiskers? Mama’s face?
- Choosing one of the textures and finding something that feels similar in the house.
Tinker Bear and Mama Bear are enjoying playing around with textures so much that Mama Bear decides to mount the textures on cardboard, foam core, cork board or in embroidery hoops. She will keep them in a shoe box to be taken out and played with from time to time. She found a great tutorial for her texture boards storage box over at Julie K in Taiwan.
Mama Bear continues to work on building Tinker Bear’s attention span. Just yesterday Mama Bear found another quote from Charlotte Mason that she keeps thinking about:
If we are not intentionally cultivating good habits in our children’s lives, they will naturally form bad habits. If we do not make the effort to instill the habit of attention in our children, they will easily form the habit of inattention.
Let us know what worked–and didn’t work for your child in the comments below. What would you like to see My Tinker Bear explore? Let us know so we can do it for you.