This week continued to be crazy despite the fact that our family went back to Connecticut. I guess I just need to get used to the idea that our life is crazy and just embrace it! So we moved onto one of Gooba's new favorite things, Dinosaurs! The first thing we did was play with some modeling clay and some plastic dinosaurs I got at Dollar Tree. I saw this idea on Pinterest, which directed me to Our Crafts ~N~ Things, and LOVED it for making dinosaur fossils. I was under the impression, no pun intended, that the modeling clay would dry rather quickly and then harden. It took about two days to get rubbery and hasn't hardened yet. This was my first experience with modeling clay, so maybe I just didn't get it. I think if I were to do this activity again I would use play doh instead, that seems to get very hard overnight. Either way Gooba had a blast playing with the clay and smashing the dinosaurs into it. Our plan was to later bury the dinosaurs in some dirt and dig them up, but temperatures have been in the triple digits for days and it is miserable being outside. Maybe we'll save them for F week and file them under fossils.
After we were done playing with the clay we moved onto capitol and lowercase D sorting. Gooba not very interested in this activity today, mostly because it paled in comparison to the clay. She sorted one of each and then was pretty much done.
Ok, here comes a proud mommy moment, I left Gooba alone to work on some magnets while I made her lunch and TADA she made the whole letter D herself with the magnets! I love watching her grow!
After magnets we worked on some patterns. Gooba was not so much interested in making patterns with these cards today, but she was all about sorting them. That counts enough for me!
Then we did a coloring page next and Gooba seemed very interested in trying to trace the letters today. Perhaps this came from her mega success tracing a D a few days earlier. She did pretty good as far as staying near the letters goes.
Then we had another success. She traced a capitol D AGAIN! I'm so proud of her, she is really improving her control.
The next day we worked on using some dot markers to trace a capitol and lowercase D. She went crazy again with the bingo marker and started coloring the paper. Hand control is growing, but not self control. I guess I can't expect too much from a two and a half year old!
After using the bingo marker we looked at a bunch of pictures on the computer for Daddy day. I pulled up some animal family pictures and had her point out which ones were the Daddy. This is perhaps one of her most favorite activities, she is constantly classifying things into family groups. Her favorites are the ones involving babies.
Next we did this really cool activity I saw on No Time for Flashcards called magic letters. I used white crayon to draw a capitol and lowercase D on half sheets of paper. Then Gooba used watercolors to color over the paper. The watercolors don't paint the white crayon so voila.... magic letter D's showed up on her paper. She was less impressed with this activity than I was, but she enjoyed the painting aspect of the whole thing.
So this week we left out several things again that we had planned, but we had a blast nonetheless! I can't believe next week is already week E. The summer is flying by and we are living up every minute of it. Also today we broke ground on Gooba's under the deck playhouse.... hoping that will be a really fun space for our little girl to grow up.
Printables graciously borrowed from Confessions of a Homeschooler and 2 Teaching Mommies.
