Week 2: Monday

MONDAY
I thought I'd get things started by bringing out the the Feed the Lion game. That did not go over well, and as Scout was trying to shove the terrifying thing as far back on the shelf as possible, she noticed the pipe cleaners in the next bin. I helped her bring it over to the table. It was an instant hit.
 ...On the plus side, I learned if I want her to voluntarily pick up around here all I have to do is put scary lions on her things.

Here is an action shot of her putting the lion away.

Pipe Cleaners

She knew what to do with it right away and she worked on it at least 20 minutes before getting bored.

I was originally going to draw and cut out little animal pictures and tape them to the top to go along with our zoo theme, but after poorly drawing the other animal cards we used I decided to skip it. I'm glad I didn't do it now because she got pretty creative and decided to put both ends of the pipe cleaner through the holes.

I counted each pipe cleaner she put in (6 total) and named each color as she did it (red, black, orange, purple, green, yellow). We even worked on cleaning up after we were done, but she did get it back out a couple more times.

Skills:

• fine motor skills
• identifying colors
• counting to 6
• pre threading/lacing
• focus

Vocabulary:

• in/out
• numbers 1-6
• colors

Heads and Tails Game

This started out well. Scout has some easy 2 piece farm puzzles that she likes, and this was very similar.

One thing that really upset her though, and kinda ruined her interest in it, is that they don't fit together like two puzzle pieces. If she pushes them too far they overlap. She only got the ends together correctly if they were in the right order to begin with; if the right piece was on the left side she still tried to just slide it over and didn't care that the picture wasn't complete.

I love this look of concentration.

Skills:

• matching
• very basic animal anatomy
• puzzle work

Vocabulary:

• Dolphin
• Giraffe
• Panda
• Elephant
• together/apart 

She also had fun dividing her sensory/discovery bin. She didn't like her toys being mixed up with her rocks.

Not a bad start to our week. I have an art project or two in mind for Wednesday or Thursday, and maybe the hubs (who is a much better cartoonist than I) will draw us a friendlier lion so we can play our Feed the Lion game without worry.

Thank you all so much for your encouragement last week. Tot school is intimidating at first but I am very glad I decided to give it a try.

Jes