Toddler Activities: Week in Review 7.7.13 (2 years 1 month old)

How Damien plays with play dough: tearing it apart into little pieces

Damien was 2 years, 1 month old this week (25 months)

A few people commented how many activities we got done last week and what a great week it was and, yes, it was a pretty productive week in terms of toddler activities.

But not every week is like that.

Not saying that it is difficult to do those activities. When I am thinking about it (and have the materials already made and planned) it is a seamless, nearly effortless part of our routine.

But some weeks life just gets ahead of me, and the planned learning activities don't happen so much.

This was one of those weeks.



The beginning of this week we had relatives visiting from out of town and were entertaining them and going places with them.

And the end of this week was filled with lots of Independence Day celebrations, outings, and parties.

We really could have done a lot more, in the way of specific learning materials, but I just didn't ever get around to planning which things to do and so it didn't happen.

Here are a few pictures I got of some of the things that did happen (all of them unplanned):



Damien did quite a bit of coloring this week. He is extremely particular about having every color available and will keep asking for a color if one of the hues is missing. The above picture he intensely worked on for about an hour!



At an earlier stage in his picture, he pointed to the purple squiggles and said, "That's /a/! (said the short a sound)"

He also did quite a bit of coloring with his crayons, and did some coloring on my walls (whoops).



Another impromptu art/sensory experience was "painting" with cherries. I was cutting up some cherries on a paper plate for him to eat and noticed how beautiful the designs from the juice were. So I gave him a piece of paper and let him have at it.



He really enjoyed this. It was neat to watch the different colors the cherries made and talk about the changes.

It started out a bright pink but turned purple as it dried, even greyish in some areas where he had been "painting" heavily. The juice on the paper plate stayed pink (and orange!), though, so I'm guessing it varies based on the paper you use.

Of course, he was painting and eating at the same time. No waste here!



Another day I was cutting up some cheese for him and he said, "Look it's a farm!"

I had no idea what he was talking about, until I finally saw the logo on the cheese of a barn, fence, and some cows. I thought it was interesting how he said "farm" and not "cow" or even "barn". I guess he gets the concept.



Playing with Mega Blocks (his big brother made part of that structure in the picture, and Damien was tearing pieces down and adding more). I was pretty busy and didn't get many pictures of him playing this week, but he also did a lot of trains, books, his alphabet magnet matching game, and others.



One day as we were headed out the door to go to a sporting event, Damien spotted this puzzle in his closet and got all excited. So we took it with him and he played with it on the bleachers.

When we were at Lowes one day he saw this display and became so excited. He kept asking for different letters and numbers.



He watched his flash card play list a few times, but not the usual 2-3 times per day as we were gone so much. It was slightly changed from last week and included:

State Locations 

Numbers 30-40 

Numbers 40-50 

Addition: +2's 

Notes of the 3rd Octave 

Presidents Song

He also regularly asked to watch "soccer ball" (plus 1's) and watched Hunter's timeline song a couple times.



He spent a long time rearranging these (empty, clean) tubes that were going to be used to launch off fireworks later in the evening. I love watching him get so into things like this and wonder what's going on in his head.



He spent a long time playing with this ball game at a party. 



Playing in a kiddie pool. We found a baby toad near this pool and he learned the difference between frogs and toads.



During the several different fireworks displays we got to see, his reaction was either quiet and reserved (see above picture), occasionally startled and scared at a loud or unexpected one (but only for a minute), or naming off all the colors of the different fireworks that were going off.

Here are next week's plans:

Thanks for reading

(I'm linking this post up to Tot School & The Preschool Corner)