This is our second Playful Learning with Spielgaben monthly post, our first post is here!  If you missed the introduction to this new series, you can see it here. We were given the Spielgaben set to review and are honored to have them as a blog sponsor.  I will be sharing once a month a detailed post featuring Spielgaben.  You can also see my Learning with Ladybug posts to see what my daughter is doing with this learning set!

This month we have been a bit off of our regular school schedule as my daughter is having a few weeks off of “planned school” time. She finished up her preschool plan with me and I am in the transition for gearing back up with her soon. Thankfully Spielgaben keeps her learning even when I plan little, as you will see below. Everything you see in this post took place during this past month.

Below you will see I have divided the post into 4 categories ~ Lessons We Enjoyed, Free Play, Mommy Inspired Play, and Nature & Inspiration Guide Play {a BIG favorite right now},  It is a long post, I hope these categories help you find what you are interested in reading.

Lessons We Enjoyed

This month we began our work with Set 6.  We only did 2 lessons since we are not doing much planned school time right now.

We always begin with free exploration before starting any of the lessons.  She loves this and I try to give her as much time as she wants, even if it means we don’t actually get to a lesson that day!  She got straight to work making a cat!

For Set 6 I chose the following lessons for her, 6-1 Crocodile Family, and 6-2 Telephone. I took small screen shots of the manual for you so you can see how the lessons are laid out.  They are very easy to follow and help me so much. I keep the user guide on my iPad and we use it for the lessons.  She likes that she can enlarge each step if needed to see exactly how something was built. it’s a nice bonus to a PDF digitally instead of printed!

 

She loves crocodiles so I knew she would love this lesson and I was correct!

We made 2 crocs together, complete with taped on eyes.

She wanted to hold them and add spikes so we taped them together and added green pieces to them!

 

 

Making a telephone was a BIG hit also. She followed the user guide to create the entire phone by herself.

She LOVES using tape!

Number stickers for the buttons.  We used our real phone too so she could see how they compared.

Think she liked it?

We added in the phone number printables from Spell Outloud and switched up our original phone design to match our phones at home.  She liked it better this way!

Thankfully, her big brother was happy to play telephone with her!

Free Play

This is a full shot of our free play area currently.  I don’t leave the boxes open all of the time, but when they are allowed to free play, I set them out like this.  She will often ask me to open them when they are shut!  Our rule is that they can only be opened by me, basically I have to give permission for free play time.  This is so pieces don’t grow legs and walk away.

She does so much freely, I often don’t even capture it with my camera. I did get this one, of the baby pterodactyls being saved from the storm {the red dots behind the mom} by the momma.

Ladybug and Krash love Hexbugs and set up a course for their bugs.  They also had fun building walls for their bugs to wiggle out of.

Mommy Inspired Play

I set up this one day and with in seconds of her walking in the room, it was like a magnet.  My husband happened to be standing in the area and was amazed with how quickly she noticed it and went right to it.

I didn’t say anything, just set it up like this to inspire her play.  She immediately put the rings on the yarn balls.

Then she wanted to twist them all up.

She realized she could unhook the top and took a few off and explore swinging them over the top of the bar!

Nature & Inspiration Guide Play

I have our Nature Guide on the iPad also, I just set it up for her if she asks.  She asks a lot, she really enjoys this. Here she was building a zebra, one of her favorite animals.

Another favorite is being built here, a horse!

Then she added a baby…

Remember there is a special discount for 1+1+1=1 readers…

Spielgaben is offering an exclusive discount to 1+1+1=1 blog readers – AUD 360 | USD 320 | GBP 195 including shipping to AU | USA | UK, which is over 12% off of the already discounted online price.  All you need to do to claim your discount is send an email to info@spielgaben.com mentioning 1+1+1=1 and you will be provided with a discount coupon!

Special thanks to our awesome sponsor!

The post Playful Learning with Spielgaben April 2014 appeared first on 1+1+1=1.