Our work is never done!

Felt letters on a small piece of felt in a pencil box.  I love these boxes ($1 or less at Walmart) because they are stackable, but also easy for little hands to open and close!  She pulled out the C for Carlie & I finished it, but the H-A for Hadley was all on her own!

This activity was similar to yesterday's pipe cleaner ABCs, but she was a little more into this one!  Funnily enough, she kept asking me to make letters out of the pipe cleaner pieces - apparently she was paying attention yesterday!

Practicing gross motor skills by walking down "stairs" and jumping off of the stool!

Science & feelings

Discovery Bottles: water with corn syrup & glitter, bits of pipe cleaner & a magnet wand, alphabet and rice, toothpicks with rice on the bottom (sounds like rain), sand and shells from our beach trip, water with food coloring + oil

I ended up replacing the "rain" bottle above with this one because it just wasn't working.  I think my bottle is too smooth to hold the toothpicks any other direction than vertically, so once you turn it over once and try to shake the rice down through, it kind of loses its pizazz.  The blue one is a mixture of foam shaving cream dissolved in warm water & then colored with a bit of food coloring.  It gets all swirly & looks really cool!

Feelings cards (pics from magazines) in 3x5 recipe card protectors (more feelings on the flip side) - it's interesting that the ones I almost didn't make (like naughty, for example) are the ones she really remembers.  She always points to it and says "naughty, tongue, no-no, step!" which basically translates to 'he's being naughty for sticking out his tongue & that's a no-no - he should sit on the step (our time-out)!'  It's been useful for helping her express herself a little better and understand what she's feeling (since we've been having some issues with aggression, as of late!

From the past few weeks...

Moon Sand - 8 parts flour to 1 part baby oil (just don't vacuum it up, please! I learned that the hard way!)

Fine motor practice with popcorn kernels, spoons, clothespins, & water bottles/bowls

Naming colors (and foods) at Mama's Grocery Store

Sorting our shape puzzle onto painter's tape shapes on the floor!

A name train! She put the letter-cars on the glue & then added the wheels herself! (Sorry it's sideways! Darn phone!)

Tea party, anyone?

Indoor snow storm!! (confetti & a fan!)

Container painting - we did it as a color mixing lesson - this container was neat because we could see the colors mixing up.  I also used a smaller one that was easier for little hands to shake.  Hadley loved this and asked to do it 3x!  I lined my container with paper, put a couple drops of paint in the bottom, dropped in a marble, put the lid on, & let her shake away!

This is what we made with the container-painted paper - a birthday gift for MumMum!

Photo puzzles - a little too tricky for her at 21 months, but she'll enjoy them soon, I bet!

This is another one that was too difficult - I color-coded & cut pipe cleaners to match the colored letters that I drew on index cards.  She had to find the correctly colored pieces & put them together like a puzzle.  She'll enjoy this in a few months, too!

Stamping circles (with a large water bottle lid)

Here goes nothing!

I really don't have time for another blog (keeping up with Carlie's monthly posts & Hadley's quarterly posts is challenging enough), but I do want to have a place to chronicle what I do all day with the girls...what works, what doesn't, and what we need or want to revisit later!  It will mostly be captioned pictures, I think - and chances are that the girls won't make it into too many pics early on.  As soon as Hadley sees that she's getting her picture taken, she stops what she's doing, lunges for the camera, & exclaims, "picture!" because she wants to look at the pictures!  Ahh, gotta love toddlers! 

So without further ado, here goes nothing!