Odds & Ends

Here are a few activities that I thought may be of interest to others. They didn't really warrant an entire post by themselves, but I didn't want them to slip through the cracks either!

Tyler has been quite into tracing feet and hands, so I decided that we could put large sheets of paper together to trace his entire body. He was game!

He found his outlined body quite interesting

Ty was sick and pretty unfocused so he didn't really feel like trying to make any sort of face, but that was of course fine. I just let him go.

We then hung it on the wall and he added to it over the course of several days. He also wanted us to trace him again and again standing up, as you can probably see!

This is just one of those moments you walk into that make you smile and feel glad that you let your child use materials freely. His play dough press wasn't put away after earlier play, and when doing salt writing, so he decided to see what would happen if he filled it with salt and tried to "press" it. I watched him for a good while.  

We've been using all sorts of blocks with our animals to create play scenes.

Since Tyler has been so into numbers, I was curious to see if he wanted to learn to write them by tracing. I wrote them lightly on a piece of paper then tucked it into a sheet protector so that he could use markers over and over again while trying. He liked it, but didn't always follow the lines and just thought it was neat to marker on a different surface. I'm not sure he's ready for this activity, but it may be a nice way to save paper for drawing at times as we can simply wipe and start again! We used regular, washable markers and it worked fine.

I put letters 1-9 on Tyler's magnetic board to see what he would do. He enjoyed sequencing them as I figured. Anything to do with numbers is sure to delight him right now!

We've used elbow macaroni to practice pouring between small glasses.

This has been one of Tyler's favorite activities the last couple weeks. I really thought it was a random activity that may last a day or two if that as it seems like a "younger" activity! His work is to put popsicle sticks into the jar, dump them out into the old play dough cup, and pick up any sticks that miss. He does this at the table while listening to his favorite versions of "The Twelve Days on Christmas" on our laptop (yup, still!), which is useful only as a CD player at this point. It shows the old Windows Media Player visualizations as it plays, which our mildly-sensory-quirky, highly visual Tyler likes to look at on occasion to self-regulate. We also switch out puzzles and shape sorters for him to do as he listens.

I've noticed Tyler looking out the windows at the birds and squirrels a lot lately as our weather has warmed. A neighbor has also put plenty of bird seed in his feeders which attracts quite a nature show for us to relax with.

We tried Hopscotch with Ty for the first time seeing that we've had great weather! I knew he'd be into it as it involves numbers and jumping! He loved jumping forwards and backwards in sequence and calling out each number as he hopped.

Montessori kids have to be the only ones who get down and trace their hopscotch numbers with fingers!

I showed him how to throw a rock and see what number it would land on, for future skipping, but he didn't want to throw it too far. I think he was afraid it would go outside of the board and that was apparently not acceptable to him!

I taught him how to jump to keep his feet on different numbers. He doesn't fully have the movement down, and he liked to get creative as well, putting his feet at a diagonal, say with one foot on four and the other one five.

After his tracing session a few days before, he decided to try to trace all of the numbers as well. He did well with ten!