April Showers, Bring May Flowers

This week has been all about spring.  The neighborhood is adorned in a bright array of blooming foliage and the sun is streaming down in such a way that screams “get outside and enjoy it!”.  It has been a little cold, but I am not a hot weather fan, so for me it has been perfect and we have made two trips out for long walks and just this morning traversed to a new-to-us park to play.
We also are spending time indoors working on getting use to a school-like schedule.  I am trying hard to spend Monkey’s nap times learning with Monster.  He is surprising me everyday with the knowledge he has retained from shows he watches and “projects” or learning moments we share together. Here are a few examples from this week.

We bought lacing beads a while back and I was saving them for this fall when we start preschool, but I have decided that many of the project we were saving are age-appropriate now.  Also I think he is hungry for knowledge and could use some distraction from the TV, which we rely on too much right now.  He had a lot of fun lacing the beads onto the string. We named colors and I attempted teaching him about patterns.  Since he wasn’t that interested, I decided to save patterns for later and focused on the colors, talking about the shapes of the beads and introducing words like: lace, pattern, and shape names.


One of my favorite home schooling blogs Mud Hut Mama, does a lot of color matching games to help enhance math and cognitive skills.  Last week we did color matching with a box of cookie cutters Grandma C brought us, which is an activity we took directly from Mud Hut Mama.  I had paper bags with the colors written in marker on the bag and Monster sorted colors into appropriate bags.
This week we made a trip to the dollar store and found these puff balls.  I plan on using some for art projects later for fine motor skills with gluing, but for now we did more color matching.  We had all the right cups except purple, which I found a pink cup for later and it worked well enough.  Monster was able to name all the colors, except red which he has trouble remembering the name of, and sorted them into the appropriate cups.  We then talked about which cup had the most and which had the least amount of balls and counted them out.  Words we introduced were: empty, full, most, least, sorting, and “puff balls”!

In honor of May Day and spring in general, our art project this week was making flowers.  The boys painted paper plates and I cut out leaves and stems to glue on.  Monkey explored the texture, and taste, of paint and Monster did some fine motor skill building by gluing his flower accessories on and painting with small paint brushes.
I hope you are enjoying the spring time as much as we are!

~M