four to five

Flowering Baby, LLC is a wonderful, fully interactive curriculum created by Martha Saunders and her inspirational mother, Carolyn Schulte.  Martha, a homeschooling mother of an energetic little boy, encouraged her Mother, a long-time public school educator, to write down her thoughts and ideas in hope to encourage others with her experiences and educational talents in child development.  Flowering Baby, LLC is the result of of that encouragement.

Flowering Baby, LLC, a whole child development approach for birth to five, has been created to go with a child’s pace in learning, whether that be faster than average or slower, depending completely upon the child’s needs.  This program is designed for an educator/parent to work with the child, from ages birth to five, for 20-40 minutes daily for 20 days a month on varied skills such as social, emotional, language, gross and fine motor and much more.  A solid and full foundation is the goal created through Flowering Baby Curriculum.

Flowering Baby, LLC is designed to be used with children from birth until five.  The first two years of this curriculum provide activities based upon age alone.  Beginning with age three, activities based upon Monthly sections and theme are provided.  These include Math, Science, Language, etc. and theme’s are like mini-unit studies filled with information on various subjects.

This section was created to be used for the first year of your child’s life.  The activities in this year are simple and fun, designed to be used with common toys, household items and supplies.  Each day contains one activity, book and/or song that will take approximately 20 minutes to complete.  The purpose of this is to expose your baby to a variety of activities and sounds to encourage learning function within your infant.  Cost for this unit is $30.

Year two is about Exploration, as baby learns to walk, talk, and play even more.  The same as Birth to One, this curriculum year also includes one activity, book and/or song to work on and is designed to be used with common items around the house.  The goal of this year is to work on directional tasks, explore with sensory items like paint and tasting things, and encourage independence in your toddler.  Cost for this unit is $30

This is the year learning really begins, as your child develops even more skills and learns more about his capabilities in the physical world.  The goal of this year is to ensure that your child has a solid educational grasp of important learning concepts and structures through multiple activities.  This year covers shapes, numbers, letters, community helpers and so much more.  Cost for this unit is $30.

At age three the curriculum introduces theme studies, along with the daily general education guide.  The general guide provides math, language, science, etc. and expands upon the concepts and activities learned during year Two to Three.  Theme guides are 24 mini-unit study like themes that are used throughout the year.  The curriculum suggests using 2 a month with six days of activities for each theme.  Cost for this unit is $38.

This age uses the same kind of daily general education guide and theme studies as the year before.  This year encourages a more thorough study of math, language, science, etc. than the previous years and encourages writing and recognition in the activities provided.  Cost for this unit is $38.

For this review, I chose to use two products: Birth to One and Four to Five.  I really enjoyed the concept of this curriculum.  I often find as a Mother to four children, that it is hard to come up with new, fun ideas to use with my kids during the day.  Flowering Baby, LLC helped that by providing me with a full activity to use each day.

It was honestly fun to have activities to do with Jackson that were classified as “educational” since he is only 5 months old.  The kids enjoyed knowing their baby brother also had “school” each days.  The activities were simple and fun things like stretches, songs to sing and do finger plays along with.  Food introduction was also included in activities throughout our lessons.  We read books like “Is Your Mama A Llama?” by Deborah Guarino and listened to classical music by Chopin and Mozart.  We played “Pat-A-Cake” and “This Little Piggy”.

The best thing about this curriculum was that it allowed me to expand upon daily things that we already do by adding in new activities and also expand upon the curriculum by building upon the suggestions made in the lesson plans.  I completely recommend this year to all Moms but especially to those who are looking for ideas to use at home with their baby and who are completely new to Motherhood.

I used Four to Five with Laycie, my baby girl.  This particular curriculum year had two sections: Theme and general daily guide.  The general daily guide is a basic daily lesson plan while the theme section is a mini-unit study created to teach the child more about the subject at hand.  Themes can be chosen by interest for the child, or by monthly topic, or really however you’d like to chose it.  The general daily guide is set up to be followed as is for the most part.

Each of these curriculum years provides the needed materials per month on the first page of the lesson month.  This allows you, the educator, to gather books and materials needed before beginning the lessons.  It is a nice addition to assist in planning for the month ahead.

Laycie and I worked on the month of January for this review.  We worked through letters of the Alphabet which was something I had previously planned to do before we began this review.  We were able to practice letter writing following along with this guide, breaking each letter down to various days.  Numbers were completed the same way.

We read various fun children’s stories all of which Laycie enjoyed.  There were a few books that we didn’t have available to us but I was able to make our lessons work by subbing in a similar book to read.  This did not affected the concepts or lessons we did in any way.  The adaptability of this curriculum is a huge bonus and benefit to it’s usefulness.

 Many of our activities got Laycie up and moving, which is a nice boost for our non-therapy days.  One of our lessons had her walking up and down steps, counting to ten as she did the lesson.  This provided much needed exercise for her and also made the lesson a little more fun then just rote counting of numbers.

The theme units we reviewed were Dinosaurs and Aquarium & Arctic Life.  Both included a suggested fun activity like going to an Aquarium or something fun to fit the theme itself.  Theme’s were not long or unable to be accomplished but I did have to tweak a few things to make them work for us as I chose not to make a landscape table as the Dinosaur theme suggested.  Overall, the themes were really informative and a lot of fun for both Laycie and I.

Flowering Baby, LLC is a curriculum I will definitely continue to use with both Jackson and Laycie in the future.  It is also one that I will recommend to others to use at home with their little ones.  This curriculum was has been a great boost to our home lessons for the small ones and really enjoyed by each of them.

Flowering Baby, LLC can be purchased through their website at www.floweringbaby.com.  Each unit is a separate price and can be purchased in one large curriculum package.  Pricing is listed below:

Samples of each curriculum year unit are available at www.floweringbaby.com.

For more reviews of Flowering Baby, LLC, please visit the Schoolhouse Review Crew!