current faves

These are Leona and Eliana's current favorite activities, done almost daily:

[Play with home-made play dough. Leona still likes it more so than Eliana.

So far the most successful recipe is this one - smooth to manipulate, holds well in the fridge without getting hard, but we don't have good coloring agents for it so the colors have been dull. I recently happened upon another successful recipe, however, that gives great color ... and she looooves the smell (bottom left), but it is quite hard coming out of the fridge...this may have to do with the fact that I used coconut oil of course, so we are giving it another go today.]

[Play with plastic beads; just dumping it when done - not ironing it. Again, Leona still enjoys it more than Eliana and will do it for a lot longer.

From this she has focused on fine motor skills, colors, design (going from random to more structured) and shapes (hexagon, square, circle and heart 'plates' to work on)]

[Play with our train set. Above she notices my train is on its way to the station, so tries to move hers out of the way to let mine pass...first attempted solution doesn't work but second one does.]

[I do the majority of the work of putting it together/making adjustments so that it makes complete loops in the end...not always successfully executed as you can see above; Eliana loves pushing trains back and forth through the tunnel but most often is the Destructor.]

[Paint. We have six colors to choose from - red, yellow, blue, pink, black and white; in the beginning Leona got a glob of each color on a plate for her to paint with, but it ended up just being the same brownish color every time, so we changed it to where she now gets to choose 3 colors only. From this she has learned a lot about which colors mix to make other colors. She may say: "I want pink, blue and white...because I want purple...and light blue", or she will want red, black and white because she also wants gray, etc.]

[Initially Eliana was just painting with some finger paint we got this summer, but this week she has started with the other paints as well. She's hooked. She will sign that she wants to paint first thing in the morning, and probably once or twice more throughout the day.]

[Read]

[Drive their cars. Here I'm being told to please move 'over there' because she's going to drive suuuper fast.]

 

[Draw - with markers. On their bodies, their play table (allowed) and around the house (not allowed but Eliana loves walking around with markers and I do my best to restrict her wandering.]

 

They also love to play with water (Eliana's favorite - she will try and pull up her sleeves as a sign that she wants to go to the small sink and play) and play for a long time in the bath tub at bath time.

Usually they do at least one of these every day or every other day:

[Play with rice on the floor. I now try and have them do this at separate times, as it doesn't work so well for them to do it together anymore; Eliana will go grab/dump all of Leona's rice, something that Leona is not too happy about.]

[Play with flour on the counter]

[Work and talk on their 'computer-phones']

[Use the type-writer (only Leona uses it so far, usually while Eliana is nursing before sleep). She has been asking a lot about the letters and numbers and is now starting to recognize some through using this]

[Play with droppers, colored water and paper towels - also a Leona-activity so far.]

[Cook with macaroni in the toy kitchen - they both love this one, but Eliana usually ends up eating the raw macaroni more than cooking with it.]

Sometimes they also enjoy straw threading (Leona) and playing with pompoms (both):

 

And of course there is playing outside at home, down the road (sand box, slide and trampoline), at the elementary school's playground, or at the kindergarten.



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