Spur of the moment activities

It's our morning at home, trying to be quiet so as not to wake my night-shift husband. We've got a couple hours to kill, and it can be a challenge. I threw together a few activities this morning -- one successful, one not.

The first was a kind of large puzzle/matching game. I took the pieces from a wooden pattern puzzle that she isn't quite ready for and spread them out over a sheet of posterboard with a large grid. Using crayons, I drew each shape in square.


I demonstrated a few pieces, then tried to encourage Nugget to do some. She refused and said, "mommy do it." I tried a few more, working to pull her into the game. But no luck. She declared it boring (does she even know what that means?), and I packed it away.

The other activity came about when we were putting her Little People away. I had two shoe box-sized containers because all the pieces won't fit in just one. I started to just throw them in, then had the idea to keep the people in one and the animals in another. And who better to help me sort them than Nugget!

She took to it pretty quickly, enjoying throwing them into the boxes and asking their names. She was really accurate with the "animal or person?" question except for dogs. All three puppy dogs went into the person box. I understood the first one -- he was dressed up like a firefighter. I was a little more surprised when the other two very dog-looking dogs went in with the people, too. Guess we'll have to work on that a bit....