watch wonder bloom

Sep 30, 2020
4 min

Month in Moments - October '20 Edition

Happy Fall Y'all! (If you're in a place with four seasons :). I'm super excited to share October's Month in Moments calendar. Our family is moving to Hawaii soon, so we're enjoying our last little bit of fall for about four years! In that vein, I decided to make this month's calendar themed loosely around all things fall - textures, cozy clothes, acorns, pumpkins, longer nights, migrating animals, spooky monsters, and more :). It's also election season here in the USA, and y'

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Mallory G Foster

Jul 30, 2020
4 min

Month in Moments - August '20 Edition

Another month just zoomed by... 2020 is _____ I don't even know...you fill in the blank however you want :). However, despite all the chaos, the August #monthinmoments calendar is actually done EARLY, so lets dive in! My aunt is one of my most frequent users of these calendars - she has been since the very first few which were NOT the simple versions I create now :). This month, she requested cool ways to play (it is SO hot in VA and NC where we live!) and all things bugs. Wi

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Mallory G Foster

Jul 10, 2020
5 min

Camp Floral and Fawna is HERE!

On Sunday, Floral and Fawna Camp Friends will drop (here) and they can't wait to join you for camp! Right now you can head to my shop (here) and download the Camp Floral and Fawna Guide. In this guide, you'll find letters to adults and campers, daily schedules, a Remind code so you can get in touch with me (your virtual camp counselor!) if needed, activity guides/directions for each day, a materials list, book suggestions, and printables (stationary, trading cards, and more!)

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Anti-Racist Learning Resources x Month in Moments - June '20 Edition

Mallory G Foster

Jun 17, 2020
4 min

Anti-Racist Learning Resources x Month in Moments - June '20 Edition

Sooooo... it's June 17th so this is half a month late, and I hope you noticed that the Month in Moment calendars are now linked on the home page under the services bar (the fact that that took so many words to describe means it might have been hard to find... soooo I'll work on that, AND, follow me on Instagram for faster updates (@watchwonderbloom)). I want to start off this post by amplifying the voices of amazing Black people and a few equity-focused/anti-bias/anti-racist

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Mallory Foster

Apr 30, 2020
7 min

Month in Moments - May '20 Edition

I cannot believe it's only been a month since the last Month in Moments calendar! Time is so weird right now. With another stretch of uncertainty ahead, this month's calendar will build on what worked well from last month's calendar - an emphasis on SIMPLE ideas (huge thanks to all the friends and family who helped me rein in my crazy planning tendencies :). In the upcoming weeks, I would like to invite you to find what is thought-provoking, interesting, tough, or important i

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Mallory Foster

Apr 1, 2020
5 min

A Month in Moments - April '20

Whew, y'all, what a month. Between facing a pandemic, turning 30, completely changing our weekly and daily routines, and getting ridiculous and then kind of maybe awesome news about where we'll be moving in the fall (military family life), this past month has been a lot. And, we're all healthy and so is our extended family. We are so fortunate and grateful to have income stability and access to a grocery store that restocks FAST (minus eggs for HG...). HG is not a school age

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A Social Distancing Toolkit for Parents, Guardians, and Educarers

Mallory Foster

Mar 13, 2020
5 min

A Social Distancing Toolkit for Parents, Guardians, and Educarers

As officials and medical experts work tirelessly to "flatten the curve" of COVID-19 cases, kiddos and their adults are facing some MAJOR changes - school closings, activity cancellations, less play-dates, more emphasis on personal hygiene, virtual work, trying to work with kiddos at home, piecemeal childcare as we scramble to get to work and ensure our children are cared for, nutritional changes for those reliant on free and reduced cost lunches, etc. Children thrive on routi

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Mallory Foster

Mar 1, 2020
5 min

A Month in Moments - March '20

Happy March! This month's calendar will provide all educators, parents, guardians, and educarers with ideas for getting ready for spring to sprout - quickly, slowly, or in spurts :). While many of my friends know I'm always holding out for one more snow, I'm also excited to watch our neighborhood become more colorful and vibrant as flowers bloom and animals come out to play. Last season, I didn't start germinating seeds until April (or...late April), so part of this month's f

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Mallory Foster

Jan 30, 2020
3 min

Month in Moments - February '20 Edition

This month, you're invited to travel through our solar system and beyond, to galaxies far, far away. Inspired by a request from my aunt, who uses these calendars all the time with my cousin's son, this month's theme is based on Star Wars - and the worlds, droids, and spacecrafts featured in the films! I loved the Star Wars movies growing up, but more than that, I loved watching them with our extended family during marathon weekends with movie snacks. We loved talking like Yod

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A Month in Moments - January '20 Edition

Mallory Foster

Dec 31, 2019
4 min

A Month in Moments - January '20 Edition

WOOT!!! It is soooo close to being a new year and a new decade! What are you excited about this year? Do you set intentions and/or resolutions for the New Year? This year, I'm excited to dig into my personal yoga practice a bit more and to keep getting outside with my kiddo while helping other families do the same! Tinkergarten just launched an awesome challenge called #OutdoorsAll4 and I let that take over this month's calendar! If you are looking for a meaningful family res

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Mallory Foster

Dec 1, 2019
3 min

Month in Moments - December '19

I'm excited to share a month of fun activities with you and the learners in your life! This month's calendar is all about "Winter Wonder". You'll explore forests, send snail mail, learn about celebrations of light around the world (and around the year), create cozy nooks, and get ready for 2020! These activities are designed to help you find joy and beauty in cold weather and to inspire hours of cozy indoor play when you're looking to mix things up! Here's a week by week over

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A Month in Moments - November '19 Edition

Mallory Foster

Oct 31, 2019
7 min

A Month in Moments - November '19 Edition

This month's theme is very heavily inspired by NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month! NaNoWriMo is about a billion things - it's an online platform for starting a new novel, tracking your goals, and building a community of writers; it's a nonprofit that supports all writers from as young as kindergarten on up; it's in-person write-ins in bigger cities in small coffee shops; and soooo much more. So, it's like all the things... exceptttt, writing with pre-writers (which ma

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Mallory Foster

Sep 30, 2019
5 min

Month in Moments - October '19 Edition

It's fall!!! And... hopefully we'll start to get fall weather soon. October is one of my favorite months - we generally start to get crisp weather, we don't have beginning of the school year "AHHH ALL THE THINGS" happening, and we're in the quiet before late fall/winter holidays. And, I think that makes this month a great time to fill the well - to make sure we are caring for ourselves, modeling self-care to the young people in our lives, and sharing mindful strategies with t

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A Month in Moments - September 19 Edition

Mallory Foster

Sep 1, 2019
6 min

A Month in Moments - September 19 Edition

This month, we'll dig into building play in a variety of ways. Learners will be invited to explore buildings around them, test materials for building, use a layered approach to make a painting, create a map of their community, and try different building challenges. Before you take a look at the calendar below, here is some background information that can help you make this play project as meaningful and impactful as possible with learners in your life! Construction play leads

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Mallory Foster

Aug 23, 2019
6 min

Mini-School Planning Process

This school year, I'm going to be continuing to lead Tinkergarten and family yoga classes, and I'm going to be doing "Mini School" with HG (2yrs) and a friend (4.5yrs). I'm super excited because, especially right around the start of the school year, I REALLY miss teaching in my own classroom, and I like a challenge. And this is not simply one challenge, it's quite a few. I'm excited to figure out how to ensure that I'm offering learning tasks that engage both learners AND hel

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Take it Home: What I learned as a teacher that shapes what we do at home

Mallory Foster

Aug 10, 2019
10 min

Take it Home: What I learned as a teacher that shapes what we do at home

I am not 100% sure I know where teaching ends and being mom begins some days - so much wonder fills these early years that I'm always learning with my kiddo, modeling new things, attempting to explain stuff in 1000 different ways, asking questions, exploring new places, trying to stay calm when I want to pull my hair out... The snuggles are wonderful compared to classroom side hugs only though :). My work as an educator has definitely informed some of the choices I make as HG

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Mallory Foster

Jul 31, 2019
6 min

A Month in Moments - August '19 Edition

WOW summer is flying by! I hope this summer has included outdoor adventures, slow days, good books, melty popsicles, and TONS of water play :). This month, I'm playing around with a new format for my Month in Moments calendars - everything is on one page - book list, supply list, calendar, descriptions! This has helped me to be concise and it should be more user friendly. However, it might be harder to print legibly because it is a calendar sized layout. If you print and have

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Mallory Foster

Jul 12, 2019
10 min

How to Play - Practicing Mindfulness

I think that sometimes the image that pops into our minds of "mindfulness" is an image of someone meditating or someone who is juggling three kiddos at once with a calm smile or a teacher with a storm around her while she is totally calm. This calm may seem unattainable so we may throw out the idea of practicing mindfulness without a real attempt. In this post, you'll find strategies to create your own image of mindfulness so you can play with mindfulness at home or in your c

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Mallory Foster

Jul 1, 2019
5 min

A Month in Moments - July '19 Edition

It's July. It's hot. Most of the kiddos are on summer break. As a former classroom teacher, my brain still wants to go into summer mode after all the play and learning and exploration HG and I have done this year :). This month, the entire Month in Moments calendar is planned around one of the most universally enthralling things to play with and an incredibly important resource, WATER. In this post, you'll find a few ways to approach a Month in Moments calendar, water conserv

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Mallory Foster

Jun 25, 2019
5 min

Making Reading Meaningful

One of the best, and scariest, pieces of advice I received as a student teacher was to throw out my textbook. The textbook for the class I was teaching was confusing, boring, out-of-date, and full of vocabulary words and text and not enough diagrams that were simple and easy to understand. I fell in love with Earth Sciences because you can see it at work every day (and over millennia), and our textbook was confounding all of that. As I taught longer, I learned how to teach st

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