Experience Books

Back when the kids were younger we did what is known as experience books in the AVT world. Granted, I didn't do many, since my talents do not fall under the crafty category. But I at least took the photos. Whether I used them in an actual book or not didn't really matter. What did matter is that we used them to discuss past events, future events if we were returning to a known place such as a grocery store, and for language development and simple vocabulary. Above are examples of what I might photo. If my battery had not ran down I would have photographed her crossing the road or parking lot when we left the store, or maybe choosing her favorite fruit, or even organizing the items in our cart(she like to keep all the cold items together, etc). But I did manage to get her playing on the metal flatbed carts that were sizzling out in the sun that this particular store had, and her choosing the shopping cart and the huge pile of groceries we had to put into the cupboards when we returned and put new batteries into the camera. I could describe from the photo of pudding what "buying in bulk" is and use words like "packaged" and "cardboard" and introduce other new vocab words. I used to put these photos when they were younger into the cheap little photo albums that are usually plastic, stick them in my purse and change them out so we have lots to discuss while she would ride in the shopping cart, wait at a doctor's office, anytime we had a few minutes to kill.