Day 3, more interest

I spent a long time last night digging up new practical life activities to put out. I came up with 3 new/modified activities.


1. Pouring -- I changed from two pitchers to a pitcher and small cup. This seemed to catch her attention, and she did a lot more pouring today.


2. Tongs -- A favorite, apparently! Tongs, pompoms, and a mini-muffin tin.

3. Stringing colored pasta onto pipe cleaners. She's seen this before, and only did it once before putting it away.

We also did a new set of worksheets (math, language arts, fine motor, hidden pictures, and connect the dots) and a few "games". From Montessori for Everyone's free section, I downloaded the pumpkin lifecycle cards that we put in order and the whole fruit/half fruit matching. Nugget and my husband also did another game from the GAMES workbook, where she had to match ants with letters to the picnic food that begins with that letter.

She spent a lot more time working in her homeschool area than I intended. We worked together for maybe 20 minutes -- demonstrating the new activities, worksheets, and the games. Then I started cleaning the kitchen and she stayed behind, working on pouring and tonging and generally revisiting her favorites. She kept working for another 30 minutes or so; so after that, plus the time she worked with my husband, means she "did school" for about an hour today! My aim is 10-15 minutes, so this kind of blows that out of the water. I think it's kind of like the toddler diet -- some days eating constantly, some days getting by on a single fry. I expect this day to balance out some days where she doesn't want to do anything.

Off to put out new worksheets for tomorrow! Tomorrow is also library storytime, and my "schedule" had put geography/culture on Mondays. I wonder what I can pull together for that....