Week 1 Day 3: Emotions

We started the morning with our day of the week song and changing the date and weather on our morning board.  Both kids have the song down pretty well, so I'm hoping that, with enough repetition, it won't be long until Oliver is able to answer when I say "Yesterday was _______, so that means today is ________."

We moved to the kitchen table to do our paper work for the day.  Continuing with the letter "F" and incorporating our Body and Senses theme, I found this worksheet from education.com (but I can't find it again to link directly to it unfortunately).  

I gave each boy a mirror, and had them make different faces into it, trying to point out the changes each expression made on their face.  Oliver chose to draw happy, sad, blowing (yeah I know... but he was participating so I wasn't going to fight it), and scared.  

It's hard to see his drawings because he used a mechanical pencil for this.  I should probably have him use a number 2 pencil, and I think I will (breaking it down to improve his grasp), but I found spiderman mechanical pencils and thought they might motivate him.  They also have a pad on them I hoped to encourage a proper grasp on.  I found a pencil grabber at Lakeshore Learning Store, but it is right handed and he is not, so even though he used it fairly well.... I need to go look for one more suited to him.

He then worked on the number 2 in his "Counting with the Count" (you know "wah ah ah"....from Sesame Street) workbook, coloring in Zoe's 2 ballet slippers and circling sets of two.

After a break for snack, we had a combination Social Studies/Early Literacy activity on the light box.  I had intended to use scrabble letter tiles for this, but it was such a dark day (huge thunderstorm was on the way) that I figured we needed to get the light box and take advantage of the dark room.  

These letter chips are from the game Smart Mouth, which I saved from the garbage pile at my mom's house a while ago.  Unfortunately there was no letter "I".... bummer... but he was still able to do most of the activity without a problem.

He looked at the pictures on the page and determined what emotion or feeling they were portraying, then we spelled the word and he matched the letters.

We had story time, lunch, and a very short quiet time (no more naps for him...so sad), so while the little one was still napping I closed the curtains again so we could return to the light box for some coloring.

We had some coloring pages printed on transparencies and used washable dry erase markers.  He thought it was really neat.

"This is new, mommy.... never did this before," he said.

And when we heard little brother wake up and decided it was time to put this away he climbed into my lap for a big hug and said, "Thank you coloring with me, mommy."  Needless to say, I melted.

In the end, I changed my mind about putting the markers away.  

Little brother deserved some fun too.