Skip to main content

Anything in between?

DSC08352Does this happen in your family, too?

Around here, there is absolutely NOTHING in the middle between "don't look... go away... this is private!" and "Mommy, come look!  Look what I'm doing!  Come NOW!!" 

Said, of course, with an urgency that tells you if you don't come right this instant to stare at the activity, your child's head is definitely going to explode.

After a few sessions of "Mommy, come and look!" this morning, Naomi fell curiously silent in her room. 

After a while, she came out.  "Do you have any kind of dish with holes in it?" 

Me:  "Like a plant pot?" 

"No, like for taking things out of water." 

"Like a strainer?" 

"Yes!" 

Hmm.  "What's it for?" 

"Well, I have some liquid in my room..."

Gaah!  Liquid in her room!!!!!!  I rushed in to discover a cooking class in progress - all her Barbies lined up watching her "cook" a mixture of hacky sack filling beads and cloves in a dish of water.

Actually, it looked like a great lesson - each of the Barbies had her own pencil and they were writing recipes.  (Later on, they'd progress to writing "number lines in French," and I was impressed by how straight and accurate Naomi's example number line was!)

But... but... dollar-store hacky sack stuffing???  What the heck is in those things, anyway?  It was a mix of two types of dubious bead/bean things:  small white balls that floated and larger red balls that sank.  And it was in her ROOM.

DSC08348So I told her she could do it AT THE TABLE... with parent-approved supplies.  And Gavriel Zev decided to join in, too.

I gave them three dishes:  flour, sugar, and mixed-bean soup mix, a spoon for transferring dry “ingredients,” and with a measuring cup full of water. 

Later, I added a shaker of slightly-stale cinnamon and food colouring (they weren't allowed to do the food colouring - they had to ask me).

DSC08350I gave them each a transparent plastic container and a spoon for stirring, and then let them go at it, stirring in "ingredients" to make their own concoction. 

I did explain that their “recipes” wouldn't be good to eat, because of the raw flour and beans, but I let DSC08349them taste them if they wanted.  Naomi had dumped in so much sugar that she actually thought hers was yummy, but Gavriel Zev had dumped a ton of cinnamon into  his and had to go rinse his mouth.

(note:  Yes, I know… I should really make him wear trousers a bit more regularly now that the weather’s getting chilly!)

They both had fun, and practiced fine-motor skills (scooping with a spoon, pouring, stirring) without even realizing it!

DSC08356Our other "painless" sensory/motor-skill of the day was transferring.  Naomi on tweezers (I love these little plastic tweezers!) with the bean soup mix; Gavriel Zev on mini-tongs (they came from a Play-Doh set) with the pompoms.

Later, we glued pompoms to make characters and designs on paper.  We reused the bingo-dabber butterfly outline from last week – adding glue to each of the “dots” and sticking on a pompom instead of making a dot with the marker.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

It's Heart Month: 3 days left to save lives!

Dear Friends & Family: Hi, everybody! Sorry I can’t stop by in person... you're a bit out of my area.  :-) We’re out walking up and down on our street on this beautiful afternoon to raise money for Heart & Stroke.  This cause is important to me (I won't say it's close to my heart , because that would be tacky!).  I hope you'll join me by donating online. Growing up, I watched as every single one of my grandparents' lives were shortened by heart disease and strokes, and my father had a defibrillator that saved his life on more than one occasion.  Heart disease and stroke kill 1 in 3 Canadians and are the #1 killer of women. Please click this link to be redirected to my main page at the Heart & Stroke website: http://tinyurl.com/AtlasHeart Thus ends my personal appeal.  Official information follows.  :-))) ----- Heart disease and stroke is the #1 killer of women - taking more women's lives than all forms of cancer combined. But no one is immune. Th