Friday Fun

One of the many great things about homeschooling is that I get to decide how long our day is going to be. Today Vada and I were having so much fun we spent over three hours playing and learning and seriously, it felt like maybe, thirty minutes had gone by!

After doing our morning devotions, the calendar and the weather we got out our Magic Moves wand. The Magic Moves wand is a fun way to begin imagination and pretend play as well as getting in exercise time! It's a good activity to build on listening skills as well! There is ninety different movements and twenty-six different musical tunes-each with its own star light show! 

Vada worked on her fine motor skills today with these bath mats.  I found these at Target (one of my favorite places to shop!), for a pack of six was under six dollar. What you want is ones with the suction cups at underneath. 

The activity was Vada attempting to put marbles into the suction cups, using her pincer grasp. This is actually quite hard for her to do. It takes a doesn't amount of skill and coordination to do it correctly and so that the marble itself doesn't just roll away.

If you have a child who likes to put things into their mouths then I would recommend holding off on this activity until they are past that stage.

Vada let me hold her hand in mine and help her a few times at putting the marble onto the suction cup and then she wanted to try it her way, which is by holding the marble in the palm of her hand. When she holds the marble her way, it makes it very hard for her to see what she is doing or attempting to do, so she end up just dropping the marble onto the mat. This just means that WE need to spend more time on this activity. I really like this one and I got the idea from Vada's OT who found it on Pinterest! Oh how I love them both!

Here's one that I made up... 

A beginners versions on Memory...

Now you can fine almost any kind of character brand for memory which I think is great! Vada is really into Sesame street so that's what I got for her.

Staring out I have Vada help me mix all of the cards up and then I begin to count (out loud) six rows of six cards.

I beging our game by asking her to flip one card over at a time and we/I name each character out loud. I may sing their song or say "Hi" to them and then we move on to the next card. When we get too high up and she can not reach the cards then I begin to flip them over myself.

Once we start making matches, I say to Vada something along the line of, "Look Vada, Rosita and Rosita. One and one make two. A pair! They go together. Put them together. Put the Rosita's together!"  I then hand her both of the card and she will tap them on the table to make them neatly combine and then I point to a section in the box and tell her where I want the pair to go. I want her to get the cards into the sections completely, like I would if we were doing a puzzle, so I may ask her to push, or to help me push them in more, if they didn't go in all of the way the first time.

She really likes doing this and each time that we have played this version of memory, she has gone all of the way through the deck. It takes about twenty to thirty minutes, depending on how long we play with sounds and songs.

At the very end, when there are only four cards left and to really teach matching I ask Vada to match the characters on her own. As she grows in this area I will add more cards for her to match on her own and then eventually we will play Memory the way it is intended to be played!

We played with Play-Doh today, using shape cutters to cut shapes out of the dough. We talked about the colors of dough and the shapes that we had cut out but mostly we just played with what we had. At they very end I grabbed two containers and put the lumps of dough into the containers and then asked Vada to put the corresponding color shapes into the containers and she did! I was really impressed! She did it with half (two out of the four) of the containers!

For a change in math we tried playing the game Don't Spill the Beans. This is a good game to teach the  concept of "more". Vada already knows the concept that she wants more milk, or more snack but not that I have more pretzels than her or that there are more beans on her side than on mine. This game is a small step to introducing that concept and that is actually an important math concept to know.

It turns out that this game will also be a great game for her pincer grasp as well as learning to place things down softly. I know that that concept may sound absurd for working with a three year old but were already doing it and she is doing quite nicely with it (photo flashcards have helped in this area!).

I think when Vada's big sister gets home from school today were going to have to ask her to play a couple of games with us, so that Vada can really get a clear visual picture of how to play this game. Plus, she just loves playing games with her sisters!