Happy Valentine’s Day! Although I don’t do much with themes, DJ did participate in a Make & Mail Valentine exchange in his toddler playgroup this year. I was so incredibly impressed with the way he chose to paint the hearts. It made me a little sad to not be able to keep them!

DJ was playing with his markers the other day, stacking them together and counting them. So I pulled out his number rods to compare each set of markers to the corresponding rod.

That inspired me to pull out the polygon drawer from the Geometric Cabinet. We started with the pentagon and placed a marker on each side. Then the pentagon was replaced with a hexagon. The markers then aligned each with a side to reveal that there was one extra side, so a new marker had to be added. We repeated this all the way up to the decagon.

While working with the Geometric Solids, I tried to ask DJ to sort them between shapes that roll or not. Here he is proving to me that a cube will in fact roll albeit in a clunky manner.

Next DJ selected the sound cylinders and matched all the pairs. This is a work I’d been planning to take off the shelf because he rarely selects it anymore. But just when I think he’s done with it, he chooses it again.

And here is another one I had taken off the shelf and he found it while I was making lunch. Look at that concentration on his face. He obviously still finds this activity interesting.

After lunch he practiced writing M in the sand tray. This is his favorite letter. I have no idea why.

We didn’t do any new letters this week though. Every time I tried, DJ refused. I’m thinking I might have gone a bit too fast on the first 10. So at this rate we won’t get through all 40 sounds in the recommended 6-8 weeks. But I’m not worried because DJ has shown me remarkable awareness of sounds during informal sound games outside of “school time” this past couple of weeks so I know once the interest is there he’ll pick it up quickly.

Later, while playing with some playdough, DJ was trying to push a toy boat through. He asked me to pretend my hands were a bulldozer to cut a path through for the boat. That reminded me of the Panama Canal so I grabbed our map of North America and the iPad. I googled for youtube videos and found one showing a boat making its way through the locks of the canal. DJ has visited locks nearby where we live so this concept was familiar to him, so after watching the youtube video a few times I left him pretending his toy boat was waiting at gates in a lock system in his playdough.

Continuing with our North America studies, the next time he pulled the map out I googled for youtube videos of music from various countries including Panama, Jamaica, Mexico and Canada. Here you can see him watching a Voices of Sweet Jamaica video that I found to be very charming.

After lunch he did some sewing with a burlap cloth, yarn and large needle. He really enjoyed this but I haven’t been able to convince him to pull the thread all the way through each time so he runs out of room very quickly. I’m just not sure how to explain it to him. I’d also like to get him an embroidery hoop for this to help him hold the cloth better.

After lunch he built another Brown Stair/Pink Tower extension based off a picture from the Internet.

Although I helped direct him, he did all the building himself.

Here he’s asking our cat, Maggie, to give him the last, tiniest pink cube back.

Done! I love that the image from the Internet has the last three cubes stacked but DJ had to put his own flare in by lining them up along the top.

Finally, I haven’t been taking pictures but DJ has been playing the bells every day. It’s been adorable how he has had to teach everyone who has visited how to play them.

I did try to present the next lesson of matching three bells to their control bells but I’ve discovered DJ doesn’t understand what I mean. No matter what 2 bells I play, if I ask if they match, he says yes. So instead I’ve just been focusing on how the pitch goes up or down as you play the bells from one end to the next. After he has had more practice listening to the bells for awhile I’ll try matching again.