Letter D

Letter D week has felt a bit of a disaster, quite honestly.  During Letter C week his sleeping was all over the place and as a result, I was sleeping when he was.  And there goes my planning time!  I’m not sure how much better next week will be either because OMG do you know how difficult it is to find an activity that starts with the letter E??  I’ve had to really rack my brains and even ask my hubby and BFF for ideas what on earth to do.  Most everything I can find online revolves around Easter or Earth Day, both of which have already been.  You’ll have to keep reading to find out what creative ideas I came up with!

We got out the Nomenclature cards that we first did back in Letter A week.  But as you can see, this time they’re accompanied by his felt dinosaurs.  They’ve been in the cupboard for a while but with Letter D week I dragged them out.  He thoroughly enjoyed having them out to play again.  He can even say some of the names but his favourite by far is T-Rex.  These are actually hand made dinosaurs by my very talented friend, Naomi.

I made him steamed dim sims for lunch.  They were not a hit.  He ended up with toast.

Playing with his dinosaurs.

This is a game called “Spotty Dogs” and in case you were wondering, yes, Monkey did join us.  You spin the spinner (which you can see in the top left hand corner) and whichever number comes up needs to correlate with the number of spots on the dog.  You get to keep the card and on the back of the card there is a picture of a doggie basket with some bones in it.  Whoever has the most bones wins.  Great for counting practice!  We only got through one game before he lost interest.

This is our Dora Memory Game.  He’s very good at the memory games on my iPhone (especially Animatch) but he had zero concentration span this particular afternoon.  He managed to get one pair before wandering off.

I coaxed him back to play a game of dominos.  It’s been so long since I played dominos, I couldn’t even really remember the rules.  I think you’re just supposed to match them up, right?  Well we ended up with a dead heat where no one could make any matches.  Not even monkey.

We read the book The Wonky Donkey for the first time this week.  He thinks it’s hilarious!  I found some colouring in’s so he coloured in one for Nanny and one for “Poppo”.  This is Poppo’s that he’s doing now.  And for those of you who know the story, I didn’t tell him to colour the fart green – he just did!  He also wrote “pop” on it.  Except that he put the stick of the P on the wrong side so it actually read “qop” but still!  He wrote it all by himself!

We tried out a dot to dot for the very first time.  It didn’t go too well.  Who circles numbers when they’re doing a dot to dot??

The second one went much better except for two things.  Firstly, I think that T-Rex  had a chunk taken out of the top of his tail.  And secondly, there is no twelve!  Seriously, www.busybeekidprintables.com – you only had to get from 1 to 16 and you forgot a number?? LOL

We did the dinosaur pack from Over The Big Moon.  I found some really fuzzy photos on my camera that I don’t remember taking so I think hubby tried to take some pics of him doing some of this stuff too, bless him.  Differences at this level are too easy now.

We sorted food from dinosaurs and again, far too easy.

We did the Dora pack from 1+1+1=1.  His colouring has gotten so much better in the few weeks that we’ve been doing Letter of the Week.  He still doesn’t keep inside the lines but there’s actual intent to colour the picture rather than just randomly scribble over it.  Most of the time.  He picked out all the colours himself, too!

He much prefers stickers to stamping.  Even though I don’t have any circle stickers and he has to stick square stickers on circles.  These things are apparently important…  Who knew?

Remember how I was saying how much better his colouring had gotten?  Well he was pretty much over colouring by this stage so he was back to just randomly scribbling over the shapes.  But speaking of shapes – he got every single shape on this page correct.  Even the hexagon!

He matched the upper case letters with the lower case letters.

That same afternoon where he had no concentration?  I also managed to get him to try doing some of his puzzles.  I adore this puzzle and would happily play it with him more often than he wants to play it with me!  They are three, four or five pieces each with a picture of an object and each piece has a letter of the name.  You can see parts of lion, fish and ball.  He only managed to do those three before wandering off…again!

He was really out of sorts this morning (another bad sleeping night – he kept on yawning all morning) so we went outside since that seems to cheer both of us up.  He wanted to play with his sand so I spent an hour alternating between trying to clean up our outdoor alfresco area where the sand box is and getting him more water.  I insist that he asks nicely before I get more water and he was so lovely.  “please mummy more water”

We discovered a new website this week, again, all thanks to Pinterest.  I do love that site.  This website is called abcmouse.com and J is LOVING it.  It does cost – $7.95/month but you get the first month for free.  And if he continues doing it as much as he did on the weekend, I might just keep that subscription going.  Seriously, we’re up to Lesson 11 and there are four or five mini lessons within the Lesson.  We started at Toddler (recommended for age 2) even though I thought he’d probably be best to start at Pre School (recommended for ages 3/4).  Some of the lessons are purely listening to a song.  The ones that he’s enjoying the most so far are the Art lessons as he gets to colour in and gets to be in charge of the mouse!  It hasn’t been too much of a challenge so far but I kind of expected that.  They have a rewards system where you get tickets for completing lessons and you can use your tickets to “buy” items for your virtual fish tank or room.  You also get random “prizes” for your virtual world, too.  These prizes are so very random, J cracks up when I tell him that he won a chair or a picture frame.  It is American so you get the money issue where they have D is for dime and stuff that is irrelevant for us.  But that is so minor in the grand scheme of things I’m happy to let that slide.

The Activities that were on the planner but we didn’t get to do:

• Paper Plate Dinosaurs
• Feeding the ducks (it rained here on Sunday afternoon which was when I planned to go and there went my last chance!)

An activity that we did that isn’t Letter D related is we went to a Come and Try session at a Montessori Toddler Program.  I’m very interested in the Montessori theory and have been doing a bit of research (you know, in all my spare time!) about it.  Lots of these activities are Montessori inspired, too.   I think I may write a separate post about my impressions of it because it was a very interesting morning.