Stressful Week

R has not been focusing on school work very well lately.  I have temporarily given up on most of the Montessori type activities.  He is no longer all that interested in the pre-Montessori activates such as poring, spooning, stringing bead… He is pretty good at all of that stuff.  He has not yet progressed to the true pre-school Montessori activities, most are still beyond him.  The only Montessori like activity he is currently wants to work on is cutting.  I consider cutting a Montessori activity because it is one that he chooses, and it is a life skill that he will need later.  He is getting quite good with scissors.  He will happily cut paper up for a long time.  He will even begin cutting on lines that I draw for him. 

My Grandmother got R a subscription to “My Big Backyard”  We learned about a lot of different animals.  The magazine had a little book inside to cut out and staple together.  You can see the little book in the picture below.  R cut it out, I was totally shocked at how well he did.  

Even though I am having trouble doing Montessori activities with R, T has recently gotten into them.  Here he is a picture of him after he poured the tiny acorns from our sensory bin, doesn’t he look proud of himself?

Their dad bought these tongs.  R picked the counting bears up off the floor and put them into the egg carton.

R can now name a word that begins with most letters of the alphabet, but it is pure memorization.  He has not really made the connection between the sound and the letter.  For example he will tell you that e is for elephant, but if he sees a picture of a rabbit next to an “R” he will point to the “R” and say that it stands for “bunny”.  I tried having him sort words by their first sound.  This activity was a complete failure.  I will have to try it again in a few months.

R can count to 14 and is beginning to have one to one correspondence, but has not yet made the connection between the quantity and the number symbol.  I pulled out his hammering board that I made him last summer, and printed out numbers and put the correct number of start stickers on each number.  His job is to hammer a nail into each star, and then count the number of nails he used.  He did a couple of numbers and then lost interest.  He was more into figuring out how to use the claw end of the hammer to pull the nails back out. 

While R was hammering, T practiced spooning glass gems and acorns from one bowl to another. 

I love this picture, it is so rare that both boys are working on something and focused at the same time.

T began learning how to thread beads onto pipe cleaners.  This is still a little beyond him, but he had fun putting a single bead on and taking it right back off for a few min.

I briefly thought about doing a letter of the week study, but I admit that it has never made much sense to me.  For me it seems to work better to work on several letters at once.  Below is one of  the “A” activities we tried before I gave up on letter of the week.  We did several others, but it seemed more like I was doing them while R was watching.  

R is using an apple stamp to stamp the a’s while eating an apple.   He did a great job on this.  

R has also gotten into "writing" his name, to me it just looks like scribble but he has assured me that he really is "writing" his name.  Using word art in Microsoft word, I wrote his name in huge bubble letters.  I then had him trace the inside of the letters so that he really did "write" his name.  He did a pretty good job on this, but it still needs a lot more work.  

R learned to draw circles this week.  He drew one that was nearly perfect, I wish I had gotten a picture of it before he attacked it with his scissors (as I said he likes to cut, no paper is safe from him).  

 

One day when I came down to eat lunch with the boys, I work from home while their grandmother watches them, R runs over and hands me this.

 

He told me it was a book that he made for me.  He has made pictures for others, but this is the very first one that he made for me.

Toddlers reading are always cute.

Here is the second picture in two weeks that I got of the boys working together without fighting (at least for this one moment).  

Since I never got a post up last week, here are some Halloween pictures.  I made both costumes.  R unfortunately was terrified by people in costume, especially those wearing scary masks, and adults wearing full body costumes in which you couldn't see their face at all.  There were several times in which he completely fell apart. 

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R wasn't a big fan of the hat as you can see.  

Go to 1+1+1=1 to see what other toddlers did this week.

Getting Ready for Halloween

R 31 m, T 14 m

Now that I am working, even though I work from home, it is difficult for plan activities for the boys.  We fit a lot of what we do into random moments throughout the day and often I don’t have my camera at those times.  For example we spend a lot of time counting in the car, or counting pictures in books.  

Our best pre-reading activity of the week was talking about the sound “B”.  I listed several words that began with B emphasizing the B sound, such as B B B Besta (his grandmother), and B B B balloon.  He responded B B B birdy.  I was impressed though I don’t know if it was just coincidence or not, because he also told me B B B cat.  Still he was thinking about it and a few minutes later he said b b b bat so I think the first sound concept may be beginning to click.  

The boys made pumpkins one day with their babysitter.

We decorated a pumpkin with permanent markers, R even managed to draw something that resembled a face on it, though I had to tell him where to draw each part.  Tomorrow I plan on carving out the face he drew.  

I have been trying to teach R to play games with very little success so far.  I made him this game fully expecting him not to get it yet.  You roll the die and move to the color you get, there are other levels in which you can move to the shape that you roll, for now we are just sticking with color.  He did much better than I expected him to on it and seemed to enjoy himself.  

R still is struggling with puzzles.  He is unable to see the shape of the space in order to choose the correct piece.  I made the following puzzles to work on it with him.  He did a pretty good job.  I wish I could convince him to do an activity more than once.  He still needs to work on getting the hexagons lined up perfectly but I can’t get him to try the butterfly again.  I know I can always make him a new picture which he will probably try but it takes me about 5 times longer to draw the shapes for him than it actually takes for him to complete the puzzle. 

After he showed me that he was quite good at the puzzles above I made him this puzzle below.  I cut odd shapes from card stock and traced them onto another piece of card stock that he then had to match up.  He completed this but he did struggle quite a bit with a few of the shapes. 

While out for a walk one day T insisted that he had to look at the river.

This was going on at the bottom of our hill.  We spend a good half hour or so watching the work.

These steps are on our way home from watching the resurfacing of the road.  R is actually in the picture near the top of the steps.   I just think it is a cool picture.  

R told me one day that he wanted to do stick painting.  So here he is painting a rock with his stick.

R isn’t quite ready for our Montessori Red Rods so I made a car ramp for the boys from the longest one.  T loved it, he sent the car down over and over again, laughing hysterically every time it fell off.  

We went to an indoor play area.  

I made this costume for R.  R is afraid of people in costumes.  He is also very picky about the clothes he will wear.  It was difficult coming up with a costume for him.  He loves fires so a fireman seemed like the most obvious choice of costume.  I bought a large long sleeved T shirt (size 6-7) though he normally wears a size 4 shirt.  I cut it up the middle and covered the edge with black duck tape.  The stripes on the coat are made from red duck tape with thinner strips of silver duck tape on top.  The red tabs are Velcro that I sewed on with duck tape over top.  The pants are a pair of sweat pants he already owned.  He needed new boots and I actually bought this pair for him a few weeks ago.  The hat I bought from Target.  This may be an interesting Halloween, though since he is afraid but also fascinated by people in costumes.  I will post a picture of T’s costume next week; I am still working on it.  He is going to be a blue fuzzy monster.

Go to 1+1+1=1 to see what other toddlers did this week.

Just another week

R is 30 m and T is 14 m

This week we really didn't do a ton of academic work, but we still had a lot of fun. R has been rather wild, defiant, and a bit destructive lately.  Basically he is just acting like a 2 and a half year old, but it is making it difficult to work with him.  

We spent some time at the play ground.  

While at the play ground we found a ton of tiny acorns on the ground and collected a bunch of them for our sensory tub.  I also added a few seed pods.  Later in the week the boys and their grandmother found some spiky seeds to add, and this week we added some normal sized acorns and acorn caps.  I am quite happy with it.  

 Though as you can see it didn't stay in the tub very long.

 

R is obsessed with fires.  I mean totally obsessed, he is constantly piling up small objects (blocks, pieces of paper… and declaring it a fire).  Here he is stacking wood for a real fire, he brought all of this wood up from the side of the house by himself.  

After stacking wood on a different day R and I had this conversation.

Mommy “Do you think you need to wash your hands?”

R (while looking at his hands): “no”

He is getting pretty good with one to one correspondence up to 12.  Though he still needs help organizing his counting.  For example if the objects are in a straight line he will count them correctly.  If they are in a grid (such as cookies on a cookie sheet) he counts randomly not yet understanding that he has to count one row at a time.  He still has trouble remembering the numbers from 12-20 so I decided to work on that a bit more this week.  He now counts 1-13 correctly, skips 14 and 15, then counts 16-20 correctly.  

We spent a lot of time singing "1 little 2 little 3 little fires"  to the tune of "Ten Little Indians".  That song is great because you can replace the word Indian with pretty much anything the kid is interested in.  Since I wanted to work on numbers 10-20 I didn't stop at 10.  Instead of counting backwards after getting to 10 (which is how the original song went) we continued on with 11 big, 12, big, 13 big fires.... Until we got up to 20.  R thought it was great and asked me to sing it over and over again. 

We walked along a street near our house that has been allowed to go back to nature.  It is a pretty cool area.  Daddy even came along.

R practiced cutting and spends a lot of time practicing.  He is getting pretty good at it.  He folded a piece of paper up and accidentally cut something that was sort of heart shaped.  I gave him another folded piece of paper with half a heart drawn on it and he did a really good job of cutting on the line.  He had a bit of trouble with the curve but it was still better than I expected him to do.  I didn't get a picture of his final product because he cut it into tiny pieces as soon as he was finished.

R practiced matching letters for his name that I wrote on counting chips.  I found the idea at 1+1+1=1, though she used lids to do the same thing.  After matching the letters he covered the whole thing in glue.

Daddy got a big box in the mail, which the boys thought was wonderful.

T practiced dumping glass gems from a small cup into a big cup.  He chose this activity himself.  He got a hold of the gems while my back was turned.  The kid can't walk yet but he is an amazing climber and he got them off of the counter.  

 Go to 1+1+1=1 to see what other toddlers are doing.

Busy Week

We had a busy week this week despite the fact that both boys came down with Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (for the second time in 2 months) on Wednesday.   T was pretty miserable for all of Wed-Fri and we had a few sleepless nights.   R on the other hand bounced back after about 6 hours.  At 4:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday he was laying on the floor sobbing barely able to move, he had a 103 degree fever even with ibuprofen in him.  By 6:00 that evening he was running around in the back yard collecting wood for a fire.  Kids are amazing. 

I was very happy that I had some individual time to spend with each boy this week.  In my last post I realized that I got very few pictures of what T and I do together, this week I made an extra effort to spend time with him, and get pictures of our time together.

I attempted to make a sensory box for the boys.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to control the mess?  I initially made this box, it had counting chips and beads in it.  I intended the box to be for R, but T was much more into it.  Unfortunately it was full of choking hazards that he was scattering across the room so the box did not last long. 

I then made this box; it has small pieces of yarn, some glass gems, and cinnamon to give it a bit of a smell as well.  This box was not as popular as the chip box, but it was easier to clean up and I could watch T while he was playing in it and didn’t have to worry as much about him spreading beads across the house to choke on later when I wasn’t watching as carefully.  

 T had a lot of fun playing with an old medicine bottle with marbles in it that I found at my grandmas house.  The bottle was from 1964 and I believe one of my aunts had saved it as a child.  He spent a lot of time putting the marbles in, dumping them out, putting the lid on and taking it off.  I watched him very carefully while he played.  

My dad’s birthday was this week so R made him a card.  He cut out all of the pieces all by himself and glued them on.  He loves cutting.  It is a picture of a “happy birthday cake” The purple blob in the middle is the cake; all the other pieces are candles.  

We really try to stress independence in our boys which came in handy a couple of weeks ago.   I was prying hamburgers apart with a sharp knife and nearly sliced the tip of my finger off.  Needless to say dinner did not go as planned that night.  Unfortunately my husband was not home and I was not able to get a hold of him.  I managed to toss R some peanut butter and bread while I tried to decide what to do.  R successfully made himself a peanut butter sandwich, though I was not able to convince him to make one for T as well.  This week I bought him his own jar of peanut butter, we are still working on not licking the knife and putting it back in the jar, thus his own jar.  Here he is proudly eating a sandwich he had made completely by himself. 

On Monday I noticed that T kept getting a hold of some stickers.  The first few times he got them I took them off of him because I did not want him to destroy a whole sheet of stickers.  It finally dawned on me that he was trying to get the stickers off and that it was a great fine motor activity that I should not be stopping.  So, Tuesday afternoon, while R was napping I gave T his own sheet of stickers and he spent a good 10 minutes taking them off and putting them on paper.  The picture below is his final product, and yes it did take him a full 10 minutes of a very concentrated effort to produce this one piece of paper with 8 stickers on it.   

One of T’s favorite activities at the moment is climbing.  The kid cannot walk yet, but he is an expert climber.  He has learned how to push chairs around to get things off of the refrigerator and counters.  Here he is pulling down one of R’s crafts.  The highlight of his climbing this week was when I found him in the bathroom sink.  Now if he would stop focus on going up so much and instead focus on going forward and start walking.

T and I also played with this puzzle, worked on a shape sorter, and read some books.

I bought some cornstarch at the store this week which I have been meaning to do for some time.  We made corn starch paintings.  Correction, T and I made corn starch paintings by mixing water, corn starch and food coloring and dribbling it on paper with a spoon.  R spent the time mixing the colors together.  I made the picture below in case you were wondering what it looks like.  Neither of the boys produced anything worth showing beyond a yellow blog and a bowl full of purplish goop, but they sure had fun with it.  

Wednesday Morning R and I had a good time together while T napped.  His aunt gave him a book of extremely simple mazes a couple months ago which he was not yet ready for at the time.  I ripped out a few of the pages of the book and laminated them.  He did the one page 5 times in a row.  He got mad at me when I tried to take his picture which is why it looks so funny, he was pushing the camera away.  I personally think he did a great job on the maze.  

After he got bored with the mazes I let him write on the white board on the fridge.  We practiced making vertical and horizontal lines.  I tried to show him how to make a T but it was still a bit beyond him.  He was also getting bored with the activity by that point so he was not very focused. 

I found these 4 puzzles at a thrift shop this week.  They cost $2 for all 4.  They each have between 4 and 6 pieces.  R still has a really hard time with puzzles but I did convince him to try the horse one a few times this week.

As a family we go to a bike path near our house about once a week.  This particular path has parking about ¾ of a mile from a built up area with a bunch of shops and restaurants.  We regularly eat at one of the fast food places in that area.  In the past the boys took turns riding on one of these bikes that my husband and I can actually push and steer with a broom handle. Both boys started on the bike at about 11 months old.  This is actually our second bike because the first one no longer goes straight which makes it really hard to steer.

R was getting a bit big for the bike so he just moved up to this bike.  He is now in control of the steering which is a big step for him.  We have tried this bike a few times over the past few months and up until this week he had no idea how to steer it which made it impossible to push him on it.  My husband still uses a broom handle to push it because the handle on the bike is way to short for him.  I am 5’5” and I find it uncomfortable low, my husband is 6’2” so he can barely reach it.  I do apologize that the picture is so blurry, my camera was on a strange setting and this is the only picture I got.  

 

We made cookies this week.  Here is R mixing them with an egg beater.  I was very proud of R counting the cookies when they were finished.  We made a total of 16 cookies.  He correctly counted up to 12, using proper 1 to 1 correspondence; I had to help him count the last 4.  Now that he is pretty good with 1 to 1 correspondence up to 10 which is what we have been working on for the past few weeks, I think I will work on getting him more solid on the numbers up to 20.  

I made a Tot Book for R this week, though we didn’t get to a lot of the activities.  I found the book here.

http://www.homeschoolcreations.com/firemanlapbook.html

We did this matching shadows activity (he did a great job on this).

 

And this fire truck puzzle which he really struggle on.  Due to all of the illness this week we didn’t get to the inside of the book at all.   

While R and dad were out at the store, T and I worked on his Montessori Mini Cylinders.   

And then we went for a walk.  First he rode his bike.

Then we practiced walking.

That was pretty much our week.

go to 1+1+1=1 to see what other toddlers did this week.