After viewing “My Daisy DaysTM“, encourage your youngster to pretend to be Daisy living through any and all her adventures. “My Daisy DaysTM” provides adults with many ideas for props and suggestions for accompanying projects. You provide the support and the suggestions that help to make viewing “My Daisy DaysTM” an ongoing literacy experience.
The components of literacy learning are:
- SPEAKING
- WRITING
- LISTENING
- READING
1. Speaking: Building a good oral vocabulary supports future decoding of print. Vocabulary building is enhanced when you use new words many times in your own conversation and provide your children with the opportunities to do the same. Use the stories Daisy provides to converse with your youngsters.
2. Writing: Children given tools, crayons, pencils needed to draw, paint, and scribble are developing the small motor skills they will use in writing. Supply a variety of papers; little blank books and time for your “Daisy” to create his/her own stories.
PLEASE SEND US SOME OF THE STORIES YOUR CHILD “WRITES” FOR THE WEBSITE. TELL US YOUR CHILD’S AGE AND WHICH DVD THEY ENJOYED.
3. Listening: Give undivided attention as your “Daisy” relates the DVD adventure. Extend “Daisy’s” story by adding rhythm, rhyme and alliterative features of her/his words. By playing with the language your child uses, you are helping develop the auditory skills needed for phonemic awareness later on. Children learn best about letters when they are used in a meaningful and familiar context. Point out the words that are spoken that sound like those in your child’s name. Listen to the words “Daisy” uses; they are a window into how the child thinks. How better to teach a child to listen than to give respect when he/she is the speaker.
4. Reading: Each of the books recommended extends Daisy’s adventures beyond the DVD viewing. You may find pointing to the pictures and asking the child to tell you what is happening provides both a speaking and a listening time. As you read any one of the recommended books, ask your child to guess what the story is about, sharing as clues only the title and picture on the cover. Read only for as long as you are holding the child’s interest. At future readings you may find attention remains with the book for more and more pages.
Activities to Accompany and Extend Daisy’s Adventures
(Whenever you see “Daisy” in quotes, it refers to your child pretending to be Daisy, the little Basset Hound)
Make Daisy’s House
Locate a large cardboard box to create a dog house for your “Daisy”. Children should help design the door and windows that an adult cuts out. (Appliance boxes are perfect!) Place the box on a newspaper-covered floor and offer the “artist” markers, crayons, or big brushes for painting “Daisy’s” house. Two or more inexpensive feather dusters are perfect for large stroke painting. Paints, the consistency of yogurt and poured into flat pans, along with brushes, become satisfying tools for your “artist” to work with when creating this play doghouse.
Draw with Chalk
For outdoors play, provide large sidewalk chalks to create a colorful world for Daisy. If it doesn’t rain, spray water on the drawings to blend the colors. Your “Daisy” will love the purples (blue and red), the oranges (yellow and red), and the greens (blue and yellow) that appear.
Stepping Stones
Make steppingstones out of cardboard or other sturdy paper and place them in a line or circle for a child, pretending to be Daisy, to crawl on all fours from “stone” to “stone” (Put the stones close to each other, and separate them as “Daisy” requires a greater challenge. Suggest that “Daisy” can stand on her hind legs to move from one “stone” to another, or perhaps “Daisy” can crawl backwards. Vary the movement for “Daisy” as your puppy moves around.
Make a Daisy Collage
Tape a large piece of self adhesive paper onto the floor, wall or table top with the sticky side out. Make available a basket or box of textured pieces you and your child have found in the environment (leaves, twigs, feathers, acorns, pine cones, seed pods, flower petals–and more). Once there are many natural items for your child to put on the sticky side of the self adhesive tape, encourage the creation of this unique collage of Daisy’s outdoor environment.
Exercise
Challenge “Daisy” to do some climbing before watching another adventure and listening to additional stories. Offer sturdy plastic storage crates as indoor climbers for “Daisy”, or if they are not available suggest running or jogging around a piece of furniture several times. Increase the number if Daisy requires additional physical involvement.
