DJ and I went to a puppet show of the Very Hungry Caterpillar this week. The puppeteers were from Nova Scotia so when we came home, we pulled out the World Map puzzle to see where Nova Scotia is. DJ’s grandparents recently went to San Diego for the winter so I showed him where we live, where San Diego is and where Nova Scotia is. I had told him it would take two days to drive to San Diego, which made a big impression on him. He keeps saying “it’s really far away!”

I pointed out to him how much farther Nova Scotia is and asked him to imagine how long it would take to drive there. And all of those places are in North America. Just a little indication of how big the world is for him. As for the continents, DJ is SO close to being able to sing the continents song. He randomly sings each piece of it, but can’t put it all together yet.

He selected the folding activity again. It always surprises me how he’ll ignore this for weeks and then suddenly choose it. He folded all of them into rectangles again and also rolled them up like his work mat. I’ll have to choose them myself again to show him the different folds both horizontal and diagonal.

Then he selected the Trinomial Cube. He has struggled with this because he won’t let me show it to him so he usually dumps all the pieces in a pile and is unable to put them back. Then Abbie at Montessori School at Home wrote about lining up each layer into “trains” to keep them in order. DJ LOVES trains so I knew it would help him too. Sure enough, lining them up into 3 trains allowed him to put it back together again.

Then DJ pulled out this cylinder block and wanted to play the distance matching game where he puts the cylinders on the stairs, selects one hole (marked with the flag) and then goes to the stairs to find the matching cylinder. This block is the hardest of the four, because the cylinders vary only in height so the holes are all the same width and you can only know the matching cylinder by discerning the depth. He did a few of the cylinders, but was getting them wrong, which frustrated him, so ultimately he chose to bring all the cylinders and finish it the usual way, which he’s very good at. It’s interesting to see after working with these for a year that he still has things to learn from them.

Finally DJ asked if he could choose one of the sound object boxes. This is the J box and I think he chose it because it has a toy jeep in it. In this photo, the blue toy in his hand is a jet airplane. You can also see a jaguar and jacket. Although he mostly wanted to just play with the toys, I did do stage 1 of the I Spy game with each of them. That involves holding one item in my hand and saying, “I spy something in my hand that starts with the sound /j/.” Since there is only one item, he was nearly always successful and I think he enjoyed that because he got more excited and animated as I went through the box and started to prompt me to “do the next one”.

It always seems as I write this blog each week that we’re not doing much but DJ is obsessed with books these days and is asking me to read them over and over and over. It doesn’t really make sense to blog about reading The Little Red Hen and Boo, Bunny a dozen times but I know that it’s a highly valuable exercise for DJ. He has several of his favorite books memorized and either “reads” them to me or fills in blanks as I’m reading.