Some of you may recall my mentioning Daughter's obsession with Norman the Slug with the Silly Shell by Sue Kendra. As she begins to understand the book on an increasing number of levels - beyond, 'those are bright colours!' - she comes to love it more and more.
I always said I wasn't going to decorate her room in any 'theme', but thanks to my incredibly talented friends, she now has a wonderful Norman wall hanging and a cuddly Norman of her very own. The theme happened organically and was Daughter's choice. For some reason, that makes it all the more beautiful.
In any case, I thought it was high time to use this love of all things Norman to try and get Daughter to focus a bit more. We don't have TV in our house, so background noise has never been an issue, and we're slowly decluttering so there aren't as many distractions to her having some really in-depth play. Still, her attention span is like that of any two-year old and sometimes, that's exhausting. I feel as though I might break my neck looking from one activity to another to a third and back again in the space of about three seconds. In order to give myself a break, I wanted to come up with something she would need minimal input for.
So, first of all, we made these:
Please excuse my shoddy art-work. Daughter recognised my debatable slug though and it was easy to explain to her that we were going to find him a shell. Out into the garden with some glue, then. I pretty much left her to it - counted the number of Normans and told her she would need to get that many different shells and away she went. The result posted above was entirely her own work.
This worked so well, I decided to look up what else was available along a similar line:
- Great print outs with colouring sheets and 'find the odd one out'.
- A video of the story being read.
- Some more printables with Norman-themed mazes.
- For slightly older children, here are some notes about tying in the syllabus.
Hope you have a lot of fun with these. I'd love to see any Norman ideas you come up with! :)
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