School Time!

As I mentioned in my last post, we've decided that JD needs a structured learning time during his day. He needs to learn how to sit still and concentrate on something. Up until now, the only things that were structured in our days were meal and nap times. The rest of the day we pretty much just played and did whatever, whenever.

So, I perused some blogs (most of which had 2 year olds sitting still and creating beautiful artwork... how they get their kids to sit still is beyond me!). Most of the things I saw on the blogs, JD is still too young for so I came up with some ideas on my own. Now we sit at the kitchen table during Allie's morning nap and have "school time".

This week we did finger painting and stamping with cookie cutters:

We started out by dipping heart and star shaped cookie cutters in finger paint and stamping them on the paper. That quickly turned in to smearing paint with fingers. JD had a ball and I think Dave had fun helping him too!

We did shape matching with glue:

I printed different shapes onto red and yellow construction paper. I cut out the yellow shapes and had JD match the yellow shapes to the red paper. When he correctly matched the shapes he helped me paint the shape with glue and then stuck it on all by himself! He was great with the star, heart and oval. The others took some coaxing. But I think he did a good job of sticking the shapes on the paper!

And we made star flowers, which involved color matching:

I had red, orange, yellow, blue and green pipe cleaners. I cut out 3 stars of each color. I let JD choose which color pipe cleaner he wanted to start with and we talked about the color. Then he had a plate full of different colored stars. We started with orange. He had to find all three of the orange stars and we threaded them onto the orange pipe cleaner one by one to make a flower! He loved helping me make the flowers but didn't do very well with matching his colors. He pretty much just picked up a star and handed it to me, not worrying about it's color at all. I said a lot of "That star is green. Try again to find mommy an orange star".... insert various colors into the previous statement!

It's a start. He is OK with a few of his shapes but definitely needs to work on colors. Right now everything is orange if you ask him. Last week everything was blue. Once we start showing improvement with shapes and colors, we'll move on to letters (he recognizes the letter A, but that's it), numbers and counting (he counts to two but refuses to say three and doesn't recognize any of the numbers). I just hope I can keep coming up with fun ways to work on these things. I may have to enlist Dave's help. He's definitely the more creative one in this marriage!