She LOVES Tape!

O is VERY interested in tape lately. She loves to pull out long strips of tape, cut them with her scissors, and then arrange them on her paper. I thought about buying tape in different colors, but she's so absorbed by the clear tape that I decided not to rock the boat :)

Spanish Language Programs???

I'm looking for recommendations for programs to teach Spanish to O (2 and a half years old). Elliott and I took several semesters of Spanish in college, but we remember very little of what we learned. O can count very well in Spanish, and she knows a few words. We read bilingual books, books in Spanish, and listen to bilingual music and Spanish music. I think that I need a curriculum or a dvd series to help us because I don't know how to progress from here. I've looked into ordering Muzzy, but it's very expensive, so I am hesitating to place the order (maybe I should put it on her birthday wish list for her grandparents and see what happens :). If anyone has any experience with Muzzy or other Spanish language programs, I'd LOVE to hear about it :) Thanks!

Melissa and Doug Playdough Tools

O LOVES to play with playdough, and until she received this Melissa and Doug playdough tools set, all of her playdough tools were plastic. Since we prefer to have wooden toys for O, I was very excited to find this set of wooden playdough tools. All of the pieces are well made and seem very sturdy. She loves the different rollers (there are 3), and I love the different texture stamps. We are using the chocolate playdough, and it smelled divine! I could have played with it all day! In fact, maybe I should start carrying a little bit of this playdough around with me to help me combat my nausea that is brought on by cooking odors (and the smell of my office. Yuck!).

Squeeze & Match

 
 






This is one of O's all time favorite activities! Probably because she had to wait so long to do it...I started putting this activity together in early January before I started getting so sick. It then sat on my kitchen counter waiting for me to finish it for 2 months. O asked about it frequently during those two months :) To make this activity, I filled 4 pairs of balloons (one red and one blue for each pair) with the same substance (rice, lentils, popcorn kernals, corn starch). To do the activity, O squeezes a red balloon and then squeezes the blue balloons one at a time until she finds a match. She doesn't look at the balloons while she squeezes. After she makes her matches, she checks them by looking at the balloons (you can tell if they match by looking at the textures of the balloons).

Easter Themed Activities

I LOVE Easter, and I was very excited to incorporate a couple of Easter themed activities into our daily work.
For this activity, O picks up an egg with the tongs and transfers it to the egg carton. Sadly, she doesn't really enjoy this activity. I'm hoping she'll grow to like it :)
















Since O has not been interested in the sound cylinders in months, I thought I'd spice things up a little by making sound eggs :) To do this activity, she picked up a blue egg, shook it, and then picked up a purple egg and shook it. She continued to pick up purple eggs until she found a match for the blue egg. She LOVED this activity, and she did a great job the 1st time she did it. She immediately wanted to do it again and proceeded to miss all but one. Lately, she thinks it's funny to get things wrong on purpose. She says she's "just teasing." I'm not sure what to do about this...

More Gardening Fun

O is learning a lot about gardening from Guh-guh and Grandpa! I'm hoping she'll plant our garden this summer since she has so much experience!

Yummy lettuce! We're planning on using earthboxes and having just a container garden this year. I guess we need to get started soon :)

Sound or No Sound

The idea for this activity came from The Wonder Years. It's a simple and fun activity which was easy to put together. I took 10 bells and removed the balls from the centers of 5 of them. Then I put them in a bowl together. O picks up one bell at a time, shakes it, and determines if it should go on the sound side or no sound side.

 







 

Black & White Art Activities

I bought Young at Art by Susan Striker months and months ago, and we've done a few of the activities in it. I'm trying to get into more of a routine of doing art activities now, and I'm using this book as a guide. Here is O's white sticker collage on black paper. I offered her small white dots, small white rectangles, and these big rectangles. When I first showed her the materials, she was not interested AT ALL. She was much too busy flying around the room in her new fairy costum and playing with her punch balls. I didn't push it, and she was eventually ready to try the activity the next day. I was surprised by how focused and intent she was once she got started. She was into minimalism on this day :)


 
Yesterday we tried a couple more white/black art activities. I offered her white chalk and black paper and a black crayon with white paper. She was only inerested in this activity for about 2 minutes. She tried the chalk on the white paper and was curious about why she couldn't see it.



Today O painted with water on her Buddha Board to go along with our black/white theme. Again, she was only minimally interested in this activity. I'm glad to be done with black and white. I hope she'll be more interested in next week's art activities!

Water Transfer & Color Mixing

I planned on doing a green water transfer for St. Patrick's Day, but then Shannon suggested mixing colors as well, and I realized what a great idea that was! Thanks, Shannon! I love that I am a mommy during this time of great blogs and email :) All of the ideas and support on my online mommy friends makes our lives so much easier and more fun!

First, O squeezed a few drops of food coloring into 3 different glasses. Then she poured water into the glasses. It was fun to watch the water change color as she poured it in, and she said "Ohhh. Beautiful!"

 
Then I showed her how to use the dropper to transfer a little bit of water to each bowl. I was surprised by how well she did with this because we have not done water transferring in a few months.

 
She then added blue water to the yellow water to make green! She was VERY impressed!

 
She kept adding colors until the water turned brown. Then we tried red and blue to make purple.

 
After she was finished experimenting with color mixing, we went outside and picked flowers to try our science experiment again. We put a white flower in each color, and we're hoping they'll change colors :)