Brienne B. (briebrown) reviewed Slow and Steady Get Me Ready: A Parents' Handbook for Children from Birth to Age 5 on + 12 more book reviews
Fantastic book. There are so many activities to do that involve dexterity, play and thinking about vocabulary and numbers. I'm going to end up hanging on to this for awhile, since I have an infant and a 3-year-old. Sorry PBswap members, this one will be out of the rotation for some time. Priceless!
Wendy O. reviewed Slow and Steady Get Me Ready: A Parents' Handbook for Children from Birth to Age 5 on
I have begun homeschooling my children this year, but it is still informal since they are only three and one. I decided to try this book as a tool to help make sure they are getting all the skills they should be acquiring at this age. While it is a useful tool, I think a lot of the activities aren't really age appropriate. For example, there is one where at 13 and 1/2 months the child is supposed to walk along a thick line with hands out to the sides and try to stay on the line "pretending" that it is a bridge and they have to stay on or they will fall in the water. While I think this can be a good activity to teach a child balance, 13 and 1/2 months is WAY too young to have fine-tuned the gross motor skills to that degree. It is considered normal for a child to walk--at all--by 15 months. Both my sons walked at 14 months because they were unusually tall and it takes tall babies longer to learn to balance. There is another activity for a 14-month-old where you draw a cardboard cutout of the child and then the child practices putting on and taking off clothes. Once again, a good activity, but 14 months is generally way too young for taking off and especially putting on clothes.
It's a nice tool and a lot of the activities are a great way to spend quality time with your child, but don't expect your child to be right on target with every activity--or even very many of them. And don't let it make you feel bad because many of them are just way too ambitious for the age they are purported to be for. As long as you are willing to take it with a grain of salt and not let it get you into the vicious cycle of comparing your child to so-called benchmarks and panicking when they don't "measure up," then it could be useful.
It's a nice tool and a lot of the activities are a great way to spend quality time with your child, but don't expect your child to be right on target with every activity--or even very many of them. And don't let it make you feel bad because many of them are just way too ambitious for the age they are purported to be for. As long as you are willing to take it with a grain of salt and not let it get you into the vicious cycle of comparing your child to so-called benchmarks and panicking when they don't "measure up," then it could be useful.
