matching skills

I love this game of matching cards, we first tried it before a trip to my sisters and then we played with it a couple of times in the plane ride too. It has 10 pairs of cards and they are tricky to match with subtle differences like purse/ no purse, shirt pattern differences etc. Till a few months back I would only present 4 to 5 pairs at a time for her to match. Now she is able to match all the 10 pairs at a time. I got this game from  here. Sorry for the bad picture!

Pudding

Jr S helped me make her pudding , she loves to use the whisk. Unfortunately, Jr S wasn't as interested in eating it . But it was so much fun, she helped me measure with her measuring glass and kept on saying "just 1 cup" as we measured.

Nature on the wall

We havent been able to take nature walks in many days due to a bout of illnesses . But we had a bunch of tulips which we dried and gathered a few leaves and twigs, pulled out some acorns we had gathered a few weeks ago and voila ! a nature collage . It looks so pretty , that I pasted it on the entryway wall. JrS  was so proud and pointed that collage to us several times. We sorted the leaves and petals and counted them before sticking them on.

coin rubbings

Jr S tried her hand at coin rubbings , we used quarters and stuck them on the table and positioned the papaer over them. Blue is our happening color this month, so of course we chose a blue crayon for this. Good for her fine motor and observational skills. I showed her how to do the task and then she took over!

This is a very messy activity witha lid and paint but the focus is on co-ordinating wrist movements. For this I put paint on the paper and then she made  the design by turning the lid using her wrist . Toddlers' logic: more mess = more fun, so it was great!

Lapbooks

I was very excited about making lapbooks for Jr S but at this time, I cannot seem to find the time  to make them . But this was the first one I made. It is about the letter A. The front panel has a sandpaper letter 'A' and 'a; there is a sorting activity, counting apples activity, matching sizes activity , marathi A activity, a letter search activity and a join the pictures activity. She loves it and pulls it from our shelf when in mood. The bigger activity pages are reusable . I made another with B and then on a weird whim ,made on with Q.

To reinforce the Marathi numbers and to work on jumping skills, I stuck these squares on the carpet with number 3, 4, and 5 in Marathi and then she had fun jumping in them. I was actually surprised to see her pointing out the numbers even when we walked by the squares afterwards.

Sand box fun

This sunday, we had a fun time in the sand box, Jr S loved scooping sand, she would scoop it from all over the playground and carry it upto her sand toys. I dug in a little deep and we found some damp sand so we tried to build little things with her toys. Needless to say she didn't want to leave it to come home.

Hula hoops

Hula Hoop is  a  great gross motor manipulative. We played so many games with it including ring-around the rosie in 2 variations , one simple round turns and the other with compound arm movts. The second one was a little hard for jr S but she liked it. Then we sang the Looby-Loo song and jumped in and out of the hoop. We used different activitites to initiate and conclude the session. I t was fun!

Cheerios Fun

We had fun stringing cheerios into a pipe cleaner, but Jr S kept on eating the Cheerios. So we had to pattern the activity: one Cheerio on the pipe cleaner and 2 Cheerios for her to eat. We ended up making a small necklace for one of Jr S ‘s Valentine teddy . Continuing with the cheerios theme, I pulled out an old cheerios book and Jr S really loved completing the pictures with Cheerios.

language skills and categorization

All this with our favorite song: old mcDonald. We started by giving old Mc Donald a library, house, store and then proceeded to fill in words using relevant objects  e.g Old Mc Donald had a library  EIEIO, in thta library he had lots of books EIEIO... It was fun and  helped us with categorization.