Language Development

Last week, L woke up one morning and started stuttering. Nearly every word she said had a stutter in the beginning and end.  I panicked, of course, and started searching the internet to find a diagnosis.  Apparently this happens fairly frequently between the ages of 2 and 3 when kids hit periods of steep cognitive development and their language skills haven't caught up with how fast their brains are functioning (or something like that).

Salt and Food Coloring Art

The kids and I made some art today with salt and food coloring using a combination of techniques (salt painting, drip painting).

The materials were all things I had around the house - salt, food coloring, contact paper, droppers, and q-tips:

Animal Matching Activity

The kids have quite a collection of little plastic animal models.  One activity we do involves matching the animal figures to animal cards.  A month or two ago, I found some flashcards in the Target $1 section for North American Animals and another for Insects.  They went perfectly with our North American Animal Toob and the insect tub (from Oriental Trading).  After laminating the cards that had matching figures, I presented it to the girls as an animal matching game:

Shape Sorting Game

Activities seem to be more fun when they're done on a larger scale.  Since the girls (31 months) have been pretty bored with sorting by shape and color (they had it mastered around 18 months old), I thought I'd change it around by making it into a new game.  First I put some painter's tape on the floor in four different shapes.  Then I made shape cards for the photo dice, and brought out the tub of linking shapes: