Saturday, January 7, 2012

All Morning at the Work Table!

While I feel like Tyler has become quite a bit more active recently (seemingly constant somersaults, running, jumping, and general loud excitement), I've also noticed that he's into many more table activities. His favorites at the moment are play doh, coloring/drawing in whatever manner possible, and really any work that requires him to sit in his chair. He used to be much more of a sit on the floor kind of kid, but that seems to have changed a bit. Yesterday morning we literally spent a couple hours at the table, with Tyler asking for more and more to do. Here's what we came up with!
We started with scissor practice. I feel like we've really abandoned scissor work (okay, maybe I forgot about it after he completely declined one day months ago), but Ty was quite eager to give it a try. He still needs help getting his fingers in the right place, but he has the motivation to learn, so we kept at it for quite a while. He made some decent cuts!

I then decided that instead of throwing away all of the strips he cut and cut into, we could glue them onto paper to display his hard work. He chose some gray paper (he also chose the green paper to cut -- I always let him choose) and was excited to get to work. It was interesting to me that he put them all at a diagonal.

He wanted more to do. I took a look into our art supply closet and realized that we hadn't done pastels since we bought them in August. Whoops! While he doesn't fully grasp the concept of blending etc, they do make strong, beautiful colors and write so easily, all which he enjoys. Being able to really color over each color with others seemed interesting to him as well. 

I showed him how to clean the pastels when we were done, which he liked. He is getting more and more helpful around the house and is starting to truly enjoy more of our practical life type work.

He wanted more, so I asked if he wanted to paint with water colors. Of course he did! I figured that since he was so eager to learn and do, that I could let him mix his own colors with a dropper first. I filled the cubes in about 2/3rds of the way with water and put one drop of food coloring in each. He was delighted to mix! I noticed that his grip was more of a whole hand grip for some reason (it hasn't been in the past if I remember correctly), so we're going to do more of this for sure.

 I gave Ty some of the new paint brushes he received for Christmas, which he used for a while. Then he started to use the dropper to not only drip the colors onto his paper, but to drag it hard along the paper as if to paint with it. This made holes, and eventually one big hole, but he was cool with it. I mentioned that he was gettting holes in his paper due to being rough with the dropper just as an "fyi", then let it go. His art work, not mine!

Still eager for more, I decided to make the homemade pita chips with him that I had planned for the afternoon. Since baking so many Christmas cookies a couple weeks ago, Tyler is very into cooking and baking. It's not a choice to leave him out when we're cooking, which I love! First we brushed olive oil over the pita bread.

We then added salt and pepper. I was going to have us make cinnamon sugar pita chips, but italian herb pita bread was bought by accident, so we went with it, making something a bit different!

Next was the parmesan cheese. Yum! The first pita got just a bit too much, but he used sone of that cheese to sprinkle over the others. May camera died here, but we baked them at 375 degrees for seven minutes and they were delicious!

Next was lunch and nap...and a nice break for Mama. Ty really keeps me extra busy lately, which I really do love! I don't know what I'd do with a "boring" child being so "Type A" myself!

2 comments:

  1. Looks like a great way to spend the day! My boys love painting. I'm not sure I've ever met a "boring" child...but that's alright with me! I love watching my boys go from wild monkeys to loving cuddly boys in 2 seconds flat. :)

    Brittney
    www.moms-heart.blogspot.com

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