Today, Lily and I spent the day in Chama, NM. Russ was working on a new site build, so she and I went exploring. We walked a couple miles into town, found basically um, nothing, except a place to have lunch.
While at lunch, she and I colored a couple pages full of fairies and lilypads. She has lately started separating her coloring pencil/crayons by hue, to quite a thorough degree. For a while, she’d pick out the most brilliant or bold of a color group, and all the in between hues mostly were smooshed together in a rainbow pile. Now, she separates the colors (of which there are close to 30 crayon sticks) into reds, blues, greens, and yellows. She puts the oranges with reds, purples with the blue, and white, gray, black in their own pile.
This development is intriguing because we have not, to my knowledge, worked with color groupings at all with her. Though she may have seen something on one of her edu programs, I have a feeling that mostly it’s her perception and sense of order that is triggering her actions. Which, she then takes one step further by asking me to color the grass, for instance, with ALL of the greens. She did this to the water we painted in her mural on her bathroom wall too (pics forthcoming, it’s not yet done). For the water/pond, she designated no less than 7 blues, grays, and greens, and proceeded to mix them on her palette. She painted the pond. It looks like it’s alive, moving in the wind, and perhaps the fish swimming just under the surface. (Maybe we should paint in some fish…)
Ok, so then, after lunch, we found a park and she played with two other girls there for an hour. She is finally learning how to swing and increase her swing, on her own. She paid a ton of attention to how the older girl there did it today. I have tried to get her to watch and copy us, but needless to say, hours of watching me and one minute of watching another kid.. Well, you can guess which is more effective.
😉
___
When we returned, she and I played fairies for an hour or two, read the entire Fairy Realm book, and then discovered some new games and activities on a few of her learning related (and just play, as far as she knows) sites (web).
She did a slew of puzzles, drawing and tracing, had a book read to her, did some letter/sight word/word family puttering, and then we went to poissonrouge.com. She hasn’t played at this site for probably a year or more. The last time we were there, she mostly just messed around, played with the “toys” (flash based). Today, however, she got it! Even the complicated math, which I assisted with, she figured out how to manipulate the games to complete them, on her own.
Here are some screen shots for reference. I will note the specific area of development on each. She played the games on this site for over an hour, self guided and initiated. She spent close to a half hour on the literacy sites mentioned above, and then another half hour on pbskids.org after the poissonrouge.com site. This, after she played at the park, running and climbing constantly for over an hour, spent near two hours riding in her stroller around town, and played with her fairies in role playing for over an hour, 60% of which was independent and self guided. She read with me for about 30 minutes, then we spent another 10 on a word family creation exercise, in which she correctly identified the following families, reliably: AT, ET, IT, AN, EE, and… bamboo. (Note, for the most part, she is controlling the laptop, including the mouse touch pad and buttons, arrow keys, space bar, and letter/numbers as indicated by whatever activity she is completing. This includes, but is not limited to, moving puzzle pieces around, holding the mouse active while she draws letters/numbers/traces, and simple selection. Her fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination are developing steadily in this regard.)
It was a big day. Most are, but tonight I’ve managed to stay awake longer than she did… so I get to write about it!