Every once in a while I see people ask about the differences and similarities between Slow and Steady Get Me Ready and the five levels of Flowering Baby Curriculum. Recently I saw (& answered) another thread on a forum asking this question.
I own both.
I use both.
So I'll post a quick comparison here on my blog as well.
While the programs compliment each other there are definitely differences. Slow and Steady Get Me Ready offers one developmental activity a week. Typically these focus on gross motor skills. Many focus on fine motor skills. A few on linguistic or reasoning. You repeat the same activity for an entire week, sometimes with variations that help build the particular skill.
Flowering Baby works on many more skills than S&S. In addition to fine and gross motor skills it suggests nature/science activities, music and musical literacy, math (counting, patterns, writing numbers, etc), logic/reasoning, cultural awareness and holidays, linguistic development (including saying, reading, writing alphabet, learning letter sounds, matching sounds to objects, introducing foreign language), literacy re books (wide variety of books are read), health, and safety among others.
Additionally, Flowering Baby offers a daily list of activities. Each day's list covers more than one skill set. It gives you more variety to choose from during the day. You can choose to do it all, or just a few of the activities. The upper levels (4&5) each have two monthly themes you add to your daily schedule. Basically, I've found Flowering Baby an excellent way to get ideas for one on one or partly directed purposeful play. It is a wonderful program for children who prefer active learning over preschool workbooks. S&S is great for keeping up with milestones.
