Customer Reviews

Slow and Steady Get Me Ready

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book contains one educational activity for each week of your childs life, from birth to age 5. Although you are humorlessly instructed to do the activities in order, repeating the activity-of-the-week daily, the book is still useful in real life. Every few weeks, I flip through the sections for my children's ages and get ideas. The activities are exactly age appropriate- even the ones for young babies. They generally (but not always) use stuff you have around the house. And they are often ideas you might not think of on your own. I have also found that the activities have a good time-enjoyed to clean-up-the-mess time ratio!

Someone suggested I get this book because I was having a hard time thinking up ways to play with my daughter that would intrigue her. The things to do in this book are easy to follow and make use of common household items. I would certainly recommend this book!

I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend who is homeschooling her 2 kids. I won't be homeschooling, and I work outside of the house. But I like the principles of taking an active role in developing my daughter's mind & body. This book provides great activities to engage your little one. My daughter has enjoyed the games. I enjoy the new ideas. However, the writing is overly-simplistic. The illustrations are weak. An online resource pushing weekly activity emails encourages many of the same conepts. But I still like having the book so I can go back or jump ahead to meet my daughter's development stage. Buy a used/discounted copy if you can.

This book was recommended in Susan Wise Bauer's The Well Trained Mind. I have found it invaluable. Each week, there is a new, developmentally- appropriate activity to introduce to your baby/toddler/preschooler. They involve fine and gross motor skills, cognitive skills, listening skills, and many more. The activities are not complicated, nor do they need to be. Oberlander selects activities using common household objects. This is an easily digestible guide to keeping in touch with your child's developmental abilities!

I love the IDEA of this book. However, in real life I've had some difficulty implementing the ideas. Frankly, sometimes I've also been left worrying terribly about how far behind my kids are if they can't yet name the items at age 52 weeks like the author says they might. Overall though it's a great Preschool program to follow, very clearly laid out, and progressive in developmental expectations. It is the Preschool guide to follow if you're following the Well Trained Mind.

I am a mother of 3 year old & a 6 month old. Since my first child was born, I have been looking for ways to help give my children any extra 'help' I can ... and also for ways to entertain and occupy them. I don't plan to home school ... but preschool may be financially out of reach. This is an awesome book! I have checked out numerous books from the library as well as searched the internet for free (and inexpensive) ways to accomplish my above agenda. The author provides great, realistic ideas on how to make your children expand their minds.
I was even given the book by Gymboree on activities ... let me tell you, that book was dumb! My daughter never wanted to do those things and it took a lot out of you to set up the projects. This is a book I will put on my list of "perfect gift for a shower" along with the Einstein videos and a bouncy seat. Talk about a life saver.

I love the idea of this book, and some of the activities are perfectly age appropriate and I enjoy doing. Others are so off-base I can hardly believe it. For example: When your baby is about 10 1/2 months old, you are supposed to put 3 objects in front of her, tell her the names of them, try to get the baby to say the object's name, and then ask for one of the objects and have the baby hand it to you. On a good day, an 18 month old should be able to do that! At 10 1/2 months, a baby is just going to stare at you, and pick her favorite object to chew. This game is not the least bit developmentally appropriate at all.

It also doesn't take into account that babies develop at different speeds. According to this book, your baby should have a pretty wide range of vocabulary by age 1. A few babies do, but most don't. It would be nice if the book included some modified suggestions for babies who may not be up to the game suggested.

Still, my daughter is 11 months and we've had fun going through the book doing the activities that are appropriate. I think that this is a great resource, and I do recommend purchasing it. I just think that it could be better.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the pacing in this book is off for the majority of children. The activites will not line up with your child's interests and abilities on a week-to-week basis since every child is truly different.

Is that a problem? No. Simply pick and choose to suit your child's interests and abilities.

Don't stress if the author seems to think that a not quite 2 year old should be able to button, snap, and zip and yours can't.
(1) The author taught kindergarten, not nursery school. She doesn't have tons of experience with thousands of infants and preschoolers. Who does, really?
(2) Every child IS different, learning things as they WANT to, not as they are forced to by some odd adult schedule. Many 5-year-olds still mix up colors. It's normal. It's also normal for a 2 year old to know them all.
(3) You can always skip activities that seem beyond your child, move ahead to ones that she is ready for, and come back to any of them at any time for any reason.

Are the activities and games basic, needing little money or prep? Yep. But as a tired, overwhelmed mom I can tell you that I couldn't think of most of them. It's nice to have a handy guide of simple, fun things to do with my child. Hurray for other moms who aren't as tired or are more creative than me. And hurray for me for having this book.

Is it too late to use this book if your child is no longer an infant? Nope! I bought this book when my daughter was 2 and kept forgetting to pull it out. She is nearly 4 now and I just went through the book again, flagging fun things to do with her. I've even flagged a couple of things out of the 1-year-old chapter.

I especially love the fun games to play that require nothing and can be played in the car or out shopping. Like what doesn't belong... can, box, cat. Or simple riddles... what has one eye and uses thread? Or "is this right" questions... Is the sky red? Yes, they require a bit more work to think up but they get a child listening and thinking. Both good things.

The only real problem with this book is in the "intro to the alphabet" section in year 4. For the letter X, the author uses a xylophone to teach the letter X and has the parent teach that the letter X makes the same sound as the letter Z. It doesn't. Any basic phonics book will stress to teach the proper sound for this letter - box, fox, exit, x-ray. These are words that the child will learn to read long before learning to read "xylophone" and other rule-breaker "x" words. So if you use the alphabet section of this book, I strongly suggest you change that lesson so it reflects a true phonics approach.

One "bad" lesson out of 260 fun, inexpensive ideas. Not bad!

I bought this book as a recommendation from the book The Well-Trained Mind, which is a classical education approach to teaching your children. This book is great for my 3 mo. old and my 2.5 year old. I am homeschooling my 5 year old and of course my toddler wants to "do school" too. This book has great ideas for kids from birth to 5 years old. The suggestions are fairly easy too. Not much preparation needed. My 5 year old helps me "teach" when we do these activities, so he is part of it too. So far, we really enjoy it. I would recommend it.

My wife and I got this book as a baby shower gift before our first child was born. It has given us incredible insight in the area of development and progression. This book is basically an activity book. It gives you simple and extremely inexpensive activities you can do with your developing child to help them progress and develop.

We liked the book so much, we decided to make it our "standard baby-shower gift."

Definitely worth the read!