The Stuff In Between

This week was especially busy for me at work so there wasn't the usual plethora of new and exciting activities with the kids to post about.  I thought I'd put together a post of some of the typical activities we do in a day that may not be all that innovative and noteworthy, but get woven together in the tapestry of our daily lives.

I try to give the girls a new 'word of the day' every morning:

For some reason, they love the word 'dog'.  Whenever I put up a new word and ask them what the word of the day is, L says 'D-O-G Dog!' before I ask her to sound out the letters of the real word of the day.  We also sing the word to the tune of Bingo. 

A month ago, the girls' grandmother brought them a calendar with pictures that children drew about marine conservation.  They love to point to the pelican and tell me that he's sad because there is trash in the water.  We put a sticker on every day, sing the days of the week, talk about yesterday/today/tomorrow.  The girls are really getting it.  The other day, Barney (the Dinosaur) started singing the days of the week song, and E said "Mommy, look!" and pointed to our calendar.

We have a number of activity books for cutting & pasting, connect-the-dots, mazes, find-the-difference, etc.. which we try to do at least one of every day.  To add a little math-twist to the pasting activity (since I'm a math-geek), I labeled the pieces and their locations with numbers so the girls could match them up:

I love how the resulting pictures are so different and such a great reflection of the girls (L is a good rule-follower, and E is the free-spirit who does things her own way).  L is also getting pretty good at cutting on a straight line:

One of these days I'll have to set up some of those cutting strip activities that I've seen on so many other blogs.

The girls' grandfather (my dad) brought them a crystal garden.  You can see the crystals grow throughout the course of the day - almost right before your eyes.  I'm not sure the girls quite got a science lesson from it, but it was very cool to watch:

Finally, I wanted to share how creative the girls are.  Here is E making drums out of things in her junk drawer (the 'junk drawer' which has all the random objects I collect for the girls to play with is a constant source of entertainment throughout the day).

Notice the dog-food on the floor?  Well L decided that it would make a great manipulative for making letters.  It was actually pretty funny to watch - she'd carefully place the dog-food in a pattern only to have one of the dogs come along and eat it.

 

 

I'm not all that excited about having my kids play with dog-food, but who am I to stifle their creativity?