Nightschool

We spent half of our morning in our local public library today looking for letter 'E' books and left with a whole stack of Elmer the Elephant books! 

I was hoping to find at least one Elmer book so that Vada would be able to relate the Elephant to his character. I was surprised to have found this many!

Once we got home from the library it was time for lunch and then Vada was very tired so I laid her down for a nap. It wasn't until this evening when my older two girlies were at church for their weekly youth groups that Vada and I went into the classroom.

We only had a little over an hour, so we couldn't do a full days worth of activities but I wanted to get in somethings today. I always feel so guilty when we miss school time. Vada and I have such a good time, she gains so much from it and well, its my job. 

Yesterday Vada's occupational therapist (Christy) made a comment on one of my recent blog posts. (I love that she follows along and offers me advice, she rocks!) She said that I should look into getting mini dry erase markers for Vada to use for writing practice. So I went out and found some. At first glance I thought the markers just looked shorter. I had the packs of mini's in my hand but actually rehung them on their hooks and almost didn't buy them because I didn't get what the big deal was about them. I was half way out of the store when I decided to compare them to a regular sized dry erase marker (duh!), so I turned back around and did just that and guess what, they were smaller. Christy didn't just recommend the mini's because they are shorter but because they are smaller in every way and would fit into Vada's small hands better. In the words of my teenager "she's so smarticle!"

Staples had two packs with multiple colors and I got both. Were working on colors and I needed some markers from each pack. Yep, that's how I am justifying this purchase. Thank you very much.

 We used Vada's new mini dry erase markers on a letter 'Ee' pre-hand writing worksheet.

We then used it on the Pre-Writing Practice worksheets that also came from our LOTW, letter 'E' binder.

Check out those almost number ones!

Vada finished her color recognition 'Ee' is for Elephant book, from 3Dinosaurs.com.

I will say this about these coloring pages and Vada's work efforts. I think that she was just not into it. Look at these scribbles. They are the same and she doesn't really color like this when she is trying and yet the coloring is almost exactly the same on each page. It was like Vada was saying "fine", scribble, scribble..."here, now I'm all done. Can we please move on!"

Earlier today, after the library and right before Vada took her nap we read a couple of the Elmer books that we borrowed from the library. One of the books was Elmer's Special Day. It was about the day that all of the other elephants paint themselves in beautiful colors and Elmer makes himself look like a regular grey elephant. Anyway, it made me think of decorating our own elephant. I got onto google images and found a perfect Elmer printable page. I made two copies. Today we made our own Elmer, later we will decorate the second elephant in a more creative way.

I gave Vada a glue stick and told her what I wanted her to do with it. Elmer needed to be fully covered in paste.

After Vada worked at pasting awhile, I did help but just a little. Wink. Wink.

I then began to hand Vada 1x1 pre cut squares of different colors of tissue paper and asked Vada to push them onto Elmer.

Eventually, the whole elephant was covered with tissue paper. We then took out the scissors and together Vada and I cut Elmer out.

Some areas, like around the mouth and around the feet were too difficult for Vada and I to cut out together so I did that and after everything was cut I took a black marker and re-drew Elmer's features so that it resembled a elephant. After I added the features Vada and I added a dot of Elmer's glue and she pushed on a googly eye.

Tonight, before bed, I read another Elmer the elephant book to Vada. My daughter Jasmine took this picture and I had to share it because we snuggling with the blanket that my grandmother made for her, Vada is so sleepy and I just think it's precious.