Letter of the Week: D

~ Peeper is 27 1/2 months old ~

This week was a little slow on the "offical" tot schooling front, but we still did quite a few less formal learning activities.

Peeper's been painting almost every day this week. It's kind of a big to-do, because it generally involves stripping down to a diaper, and then taking a bath.

I think you can see why.

On Wednesday, Peeper helped me to I put together our first "discovery bin." (Also known as a sensory bin, but I'm not using little things to feel / scoop / pour, so it doesn't seem like it's so "sensory-y.")

In honor of letter D, we gathered up all of her rubber duckies. When I asked her to help me find all the ducks, she included the ducky from her farm puzzle. I wouldn't have thought of that one.

Over the next couple of days, we found more ducks and added them to the bin. I think we ended up with sixteen. At one point, she was going around saying "Sissteen ducks! Sissteen ducks!"

The first thing she did was line them all up.

There was also a lot of tossing them around, saying "Fly 'way, duckies!"

Every night in the bathtub, we play with these letter, number and sea creature foam shapes that she got for Christmas. When I realized that they were lowercase, my first thought was, "Oh no! She doesn't know her lowercase letters."

Then I realized, "Oh, I guess she's about to learn her lowercase letters," and she has. She's got most of them down now! (b/d/p/q are all "P - Papa!" but that's to be expected).

She also counts the animals and mermaids, and does lots of experiments in fluid dynamics.

I bought these color / shape flashcards a while back, and when decided to pull them out this week, she loved them.

This photo is kind of awful (maybe some 3D glasses would help?) but I had to include it, because she did this all by herself. I just said "Let's make matches!" and she not only put the pairs together, but lined up all the circles.

On Saturday, we finally got around to our letter art.

This is a duck. You'll just have to take my word for it.

That's not exactly where I was envisioning his bill and eyes going (I was thinking it would be more of a profile), but when I said "This is his head, put his nose on," she stuck it right in the middle. Makes sense to me.

The things on the upright are the feathers on his back, so he can rule the others with a quack, quack, quack.

I was kind of reaching on this one.

And here they are, on the "art line."