Crafty Boosie

We started our day with some Shape Sorting that I found at Home Grown Hearts.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough plates so we could only work on 6 of the 8 shapes but I’ll buy some more soon.  At first, Paige wanted to match them by colour but with persistence, I convinced her to match by shape.  There were a lot of pieces so this one took a little longer than most of her exercises; I like that.  While I understand that most activities are created with the short attention span of a 2 year old in mind, she moves through them too quickly sometimes and I have to quickly pull out more than planned to work on.

The next exercise is a counting one.  I really wish I remembered where I found this.  I accidentally closed the page that I had kept open for days so I would be able to give credit.  I apologize.

Paige can count to 10.  She can also count to 5 using her fingers.  She doesn’t really equate it to counting objects so the idea of this simple exercise appealed to me. Each crafting stick has a number on them and dots.  She has to count the marbles as she puts them on the sticks.  Once she starts figuring this one out more, I will toss these and make new ones without the dots on there.

Paige knows her colours and is very good at colour matching activities.  I decided she needed more of a challenge and when I saw this activity on File Folder Fun, I couldn’t resist downloading it.  Paige has an obsession with apples so this was definitely a win-win exercise.  She did pretty good with the activity.  She struggled with a few and threw a few fits but she always does that the first time she is presented with a more challenging activity.  She gets over it.  I’m betting that she’ll have this activity and the shading down pat within a few more tries.  She’s a quick study.

We worked on Name Recognition again.  In a little bit, I will remove her photo and just have her name but this is a great start.

Paige kept asking for more and more activities so I occupied her with some motor skills work with the tweezers to fill the time until her nap.

After her nap, we spent a LOT of time reading books.  I’m not going to post them all but here are some of the highlights.  She received this book as a Christmas gift in 2008.  She’s only just now getting into it.  Today, she learned that the pictures in the book tell her when to push the sound buttons on the right side.  She was pretty excited about that.

This is a flap book that her grandparents gave her on Halloween.  She loves lifting the flaps and recently she’s been waiting for us to read the actual story on each before lifting the flaps so that she lifts them in sequence with the story.

No children’s library is complete without this book.  A classic that Paige has adored for over a year.  In the beginning she just wanted to see the pictures, then she liked the sing-song way that Mommy and Daddy read the book.  Now she’s letting us read the whole story.  Being patient and listening to the story is a new thing with Paige but it only works if the book isn’t too wordy.  It’s progress.

I purchased this book when Paige was only 2 months old.  Paige always fell asleep better and faster if I was talking to her so I would make up stories.  One day I decided to buy her a few books and read them to her.  I’d read softly and in a sing-song voice and it would lull her to sleep.  When I purchased the book, I had vision of giving her the same number of kisses that they talk about on each page and hearing her giggles.  Two days ago I pulled out this book and read it to her at bedtime.  It took 2½ years but my visions came true.  She had so much fun with it that she wanted to read it again today.

I’m pretty sure most households with children have this book in their library, as well.  This story excites Paige as she has to tell me what the mouse is doing on each page.  She loves it.

We read a long list of books today, far more than I posted.  It was a great day.  Paige LOVES to read so we take every opportunity to foster that love of books.  Both my husband and I love to read and are thrilled that Paige has that same love of books that we do.