We didn’t do any formal school time this week and probably won’t next week either. ‘Tis the season for celebrating! And learning hard lessons on being patient while waiting for exciting holidays.

DJ received the Melissa & Doug Pattern Blocks and Boards for his birthday. His initial response was frustration when he didn’t have the dexterity to make the patterns without the tiles sliding all over. After getting some great advice, I began playing with the tiles without the pattern boards. In this picture, I made the flower. DJ was inspired and before I knew it, he had designed the circle to the left of my flower! He asked me to hold the yellow hexagon still but he placed all the squares and triangles himself.

After having success with free form designs, he has the courage to try the boards again. The tiles still tend to shift when not very careful but it doesn’t seem to bother him now that he knows he can do it.

He played with his knobbed & knobless cylinders again.

And he tried a new design with the Brown Stair & Pink Tower. But he learned the downside of gravity and wasn’t able to build any higher than this even with dad holding the blocks.

Also, I didn’t get a picture of it, but DJ worked with the Plants vs Animals cards again and this time he NAILED it! He placed all the cards confidently and correctly without any hesitation. Yay! Looks like I need to get some Invertebrate vs Vertebrate cards printed!

In other news, DJ can consistently count to 6 now. I’d say he can count to 10 but he always leaves out 7! Poor lucky #7. He’ll get there.

He still has little to no interest in sound games or letters. But he was playing around with an ink pen and let me show him how to hold it properly with a 3-finger grasp. He was imitating my writing and was so engaged he “pretended” to write for about half a hour. I can tell the 3-finger grasp feels awkward to him but it’s a great start!