Crafty Boosie

Here are a couple videos of Paige working with some of her activities.

In an effort to keep things interesting for Paige, we did some new activities today.  The morning started off with counting her cars.

As I have mentioned before, my in-laws are in the process of moving and they are clearing out everything that they can so that they don’t have to move it.  They recently brought over a big blue crate that had been sitting in their basement for many, many years.  The crate was filled with matchbox type cars, mini cars, and so on.  They belonged to my husband when he was a child.  They gave them to Paige and she loves them.  If she isn’t playing with the train set, she’s playing with these cars.

I did manage to get her away from the cars for a while for Tot School.  She got very excited when I told her it was time and ran to the table.  Her eyes grew really big when she saw her first activity all set up.

She always grabs my spare big broom whenever she sees me sweeping.  She will push it around chanting, “Clean the mess.  Clean the mess.” but it is too big for her.  I’ve seen this mini-sweeping activity on many tot school sites so when I was at the dollar store on Friday, I picked up this little set for her.  I grabbed an old should-have-tossed-a-long-time-ago cookie sheet to help contain the rice.

Eventually, she gave up on the little broom and started using her fingers.  She really enjoyed herself though and we will definitely be doing this again soon.

I made this name recognition card for Paige.  She was very excited when she saw her picture on the card.

Later in the day, I asked her what the card said and she answered, “Paige”.  It could be that her picture is on it but this is one we will work with daily so that she will learn to recognize her own name.  She even happily told me what each letter was as she matched them on the name card.  I got the idea from 1+1+1=1.

This Shape Matching File Folder Game came from Home Grown Hearts.  Paige really had a great time with it and had to do it over and over again.  She knows what most of the shapes are, but has a hard time saying some of them.  If you ask her where something is, she will point to it though and that is fantastic.  She tries really hard to say the names but really struggles saying “rectangle” and I don’t  blame her.  That is a hard word to say for a 2 year old.

Of course, we cannot go a day without playing this shape activity from childcareland.com.  Paige loves the birds, although she calls them ducks.  I really need to print out some more of this type for her.

We finished the Tot School with her magnetic number book.  She doesn’t have the patience yet for the activities in the book other than putting the magnetic numbers on each page but we are getting there.  She’s identifying the numbers and that makes me happy.

After Paige’s nap, she noticed that my toe nails were painted.  She insisted that I paint hers too.  I’ve tried many times in the past and she usually touches the paint before I can even finish the first nail so I was a little wary but she listened to me and didn’t touch them.  She even let me use the blow dryer (cool setting) to help them dry quicker.  I was so proud of her and now she keeps prancing around the house and telling all her toys about her pretty toes.

Neither of our feet look that great but it’ll clean up in the shower/bath so no biggie.  The fact that she patiently let me paint them was a miracle.  I will happily buy her all the nail polish she wants if she will be patient enough to let me paint her toes.  I am not sure if I am brave enough to attempt her fingernails just yet though.  LOL.  I have visions of nail polish all over my husband’s prized Sumosac.  He would NOT be amused.

Paige always enjoys our Tot School.  Over the weekend, she continually asked to sit at the table and play.  I love that she finds it fun.  This morning, she wanted to get started early.  I was not fully prepared but that’s okay, I went with it.  I love that she has a desire and eagerness to learn.

The problem was that while she was asking for Tot School, I don’t think she really wanted it that much.  I pulled out some of the same things from last week.  Maybe she is bored with them.  I’m working on providing more variety.  I had a couple new activities planned but the glue was taking too long to dry so I improvised.

She still loves the Birdhouse Shape Matching activity that I’ve posted about before.  She matched them over and over for quite a while.  When I introduced other activities, giving her a choice of what to work on, she would pick one out but then fiddle with it and not do any of them correctly.  She would purposely make mistakes and then laugh about it.

I pulled out a new finger tracing activity that I downloaded from Home Grown Hearts.  She was intrigued.  I showed  her first with my own finger what I wanted her to do.  I followed it up by using her own finger to trace the shapes.  Next, she did it on her own.  Her first attempt wasn’t too bad.  I was quite impressed as she didn’t do nearly as well with the pre-writing cards we used last week from Childcareland.com (their site appears to not be working right now).  Her second attempt was great!  She did much better as she was more deliberate.  She was very excited by my enthusiasm so she wanted to do it a third time.  I had planned to stop after the second but how could I resist.  The third time she just played with the cards and didn’t really care about tracing, she just wanted to flip them on the ring they were hooked to. At this point, I decided it was time to take things upstairs.  Daddy bought her a new puzzle over the weekend so we worked on that.  She really had a lot of fun with this puzzle, even if it was easy for her.  I had also picked up a new puzzle at the dollar store that is just like her zoo animal puzzle but this one has farm animals.  She enjoyed it and along with her other puzzles she played for a good 45 minutes.

The glue finally dried on one of the new activities but not in time for today’s Tot School so we’ll do it tomorrow.  I ran out of glue so I couldn’t finish the others.  I also have another activity that needs to be laminated and cut.  I didn’t have time tonight to do that as Mondays are TV Date Night with my husband so I focus my attention there.  It is my one night a week that I don’t research, make, cut, laminate, print, glue or prepare any projects for Paige.  It is good to have a night off and Monday nights are my night to relax with my husband on the couch downstairs while watching West Wing from my DVD collection that I received for Christmas.

You know you must be doing something right when you and your husband are finishing up eating dinner, your daughter is in the next room playing and you hear her counting her toys.

Today is a VERY busy day.  We have lots of errands to run (before and after nap) and Paige’s Indoor Playground class so we won’t be doing Tot School today.

Today for Tot School we did a repeat of yesterday.  I am trying to sew up a skirt for Paige but since I’m not using a pattern I am making a lot of mistakes so it is taking much longer than it should because I keep needing to rip the seams and begin again.   It isn’t going to turn out exactly as I had hoped but I’m hoping it will still work.  If not, I’ll finish and send it to a friend of mine who has a younger little girl that will be able to grow into it and I’ll make a new one for Paige.  We’ll see how it turns out.

In addition, I’m on day 5 of a killer migraine and just wasn’t up to working with new activities for Paige.  She knows and understands these already so, for today, we’ll stick with activities that she already understands what was expected of her.  She did great and she had fun but I felt guilty when she kept asking if I was done yet, even though I was sewing right next to her at the table.