Hi, Nickel!!

Peter says, "Elliot's in the Hat Basket"

L is for Angus Lost

Peter's next preschool unit will focus on the letter L and the book Angus Lost which is about a dog who gets lost.

Today we read the book for the first time - and the second since immediately upon finishing it Peter wanted to read it again.  Then Peter spent some time making a dog house for his dogs, Bubba and Zero.

Tennessee (August 2012)

South Carolina (August 2012)

The Olympics (Part 1?)

Over the past several days Peter has done Olympic activities during learning time.

He illustrated a book about the Olympics:

 
 He and Doug made an Olympic torch:

 He cut out paper doll athletes and gave them sticker medals (numbered 1-20 to practice those teen numbers):

He has also done Olympic mazes and puzzles and matching games and enjoyed watching many different Olympic sports - he insists the tennis players keep getting home runs.

 
I don't know if there will be an Olympics Part 2 post or not.  We are preparing for our road trip to South Carolina and Tennessee and things are pretty hectic around here.  Peter, being Peter, gets very unsettled by even the slightest disturbances to our routine, and starts acting out.  Our days become less about walks and books and learning time and more about tantrums and time outs and clinginess.  We'll have to see if we fit in more Olympic activities this week.

H

H is for Horse

I asked Peter if he could come up with a name for his horse that started with H, and he announced it was Harry the Horse or maybe that was Hairy the Horse...I don't really know.


Elliot has been spending more and more of learning time with us now that his morning nap is getting a bit shorter.  This morning he was hanging out enjoying talking about horses until the microwave dinged and he had to answer on his hand phone.  It was a lengthy discussion that involved a lot of vigorous head shaking.

The master bathroom toilet started running last night and so first thing this morning the boys and I made a trip to Home Depot to get a new gasket.  

Doug, I know you are going to whine that we should have gone to Lowes where we have gift cards, but they don't have race car carts at Lowes.  Since you're out of town and don't get a vote, the motion to go to the store with race car carts carried unanimously.


While at Home Depot we got to watch a woman getting boxes down off the high shelf with a fork lift.  We sat there enthralled by the whole process for half an hour.


Our final learning time activity was fixing the toilet.

We added food coloring to the tank ostensibly to see if the new gasket was sealing well, but in actuality we just wanted to flush through different colors and see them move from the tank to the bowl.  It is never too early to learn how a toilet works.


After lunch we went to the mall play area.

While I sat there keeping an eye on Elliot, two kids came to an impasse on the sausage link bridge.  They stood there face to face with neither able to get around the other.  One of the kids was a little 3 year old spitfire and the other was a slightly older boy.  Completely unprovoked, the little girl started into a tirade about how the boy better not push her because pushing people wasn't nice.  She finished with, "Do you understand?  Say, "Yes, Katie.""  The boy looked a little baffled (there was no evidence that he had even been thinking about pushing her) and responded, "Katie?  But, my name's usually Colin."

H is for Helicopter

Meanwhile, Elliot had fun making a huge, gooey mess with shaving cream and paint.

The cup is to rinse his mouth after he sampled the art materials. Yuck!!