A Rainbow-rific Day

 This post is actually a day late. Our internet has been all wigged out and I was unable to post it on time. 

On many posts I have shared Vada working on different color recognition coloring books. I've never followed up on what we do with these books and recently I have had a couple of emails from curious parents wondering what we do with the books after Vada colors in them...

I save them. I laminate them all, place little rings in them to keep them connected and we keep them by the rocking chair in Vada's room where I read to her before her nap and bedtime and where she has easy access to them.

Today Vada and I read through her color recognition book once all of the way through and then on the second time around we matched the colors on the pages to the colors on Elmer the stuffed elephant.

We followed that activity up with an Elmer's book.

And continued to do some more color recognition activities with this gear puzzle from Melissa and Doug. 

We did more color sorting with the Farmer's Market set from Learning Resources. She seemed to have a hard time with this certain activity the other day. I am having a hard time knowing if it comes from not knowing the actual colors, not paying attention or being bored. So I thought that we should try again, at least once more this week.

She did great with this when she was focused but she really had to pay attention. Again, it was hard to tell if it was just luck when she was getting it correct so I brought out the crayon color sorters again as well. She really likes those and I figured repetition of a good thing never hurts.

The same thing went with this color sorting activity. Was it by chance or was it on purpose? Hmm...?

Vada and I did two interesting coloring worksheets. I say interesting because it was hard for Vada, yet I really wanted to have her finish the activity, yet I wasn't for sure if it was age appropriate and should press it. It turns out that we did two of the worksheets. The uppercase 'E' and the lowercase 'e' worksheets. They had Large, medium and small sizes for each upper and lowercase letter and for each size you were suppose to color each a different color. It was difficult and took a great deal of restraint on Vada's behalf but with my help and guidance, she did do it. She yelled at me a bit, she got frusterated a little but she completed the pages and I was proud of her but I did question myself...should I have stopped the lesson when she got frustrated? or what it good to push her a little even though she wasn't pleased about it? Seriously...Im looking for opinions and advice here...what do you think?

While Vada did put up a stink about coloring the upper and lowercase 'Ee's, she was all for writing practice, We used an orange dry erase marker for our hand over hand practice writing but Vada used a purple marker on her own. If you haven't already figured it out, I chose these two colors because they are are our colors of the week.

Vada's grasp does seem better with the mini markers. Thanks Christy, your awesome!

Check out Vada's horizontal line attempts! Not bad for a three and a half year old, ehh?

Notice the little 'v' as well...

Now check out this uppercase 'V'. Pure accident? Probably, but I am telling myself that there was some effort put into this letter 'V'.

I asked Vada to connect the "big E to the little e" and look what she did! All on her own! With NO, assistance or guidance from me! She is awesome, right? This is great, right?!? Oh my gosh, I am just smitten with this little girl!

After Vada had her own practice writing time we moved on to shape tracing. 

These last two sheeting activities came from 3Dinosaurs.com.

After talking about the tracing sheet we moved onto another puzzle-like activity. 

We also turned this activity into a math and color recognition activity.

At first Vada had a hard time getting the shape pieces off of the posts but once she figured it out she didn't want to stop. We did this activity two times.

Since I used the last activity as a counting activity (as well other things) I also used it as a sort of transition activity. We went from the puzzle onto the number one TouchMath flash card and counting single object activities.

After doing everything we did in our last activity yesterday, I added another step. It was simple but added more counting. I had Vada put each object, one at a time, into the cup. As Vada added objects into the cup I would count them, "One orange Numicon, One gray cat, one purple cup", and so one. I just wanted to highlight on the fact that we were focusing on one.

After Vada put everything into the cup I brought out the book that we worked on the previous day and we read through it then began coloring more in it.

And that was our rainbow-rific day.

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.