I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! We certainly did so “school” was light this week.

Although DJ can easily count to 50 now, when I asked what he wanted to work on he chose to go back to the beginning and do the Cards & Counters. Because he has done this many times before I let him do the non-traditional pattern for the counters. Typically the counters would be placed in pairs so that odd numbers would stand out with the extra counter standing alone. But DJ fully understands odd & even already. After completing the layout, he chose to add the Bead Stair by matching each bead strand above its corresponding number. You can see he’s also still in his PJs. Now that it is mostly too cold to go outside he has decided there is no point in getting dressed. Lol.

After the Cards & Counters which work on 1-10, DJ decided to do the Teens Board again. For the first time ever, I think, he completed the entire board without my help. He did, however, insist on sitting so he was seeing the numbers upside down. He does this often with letters too, which drives me nuts!! I don’t expect him to sit in a fixed position at a desk, but he at least needs to see the work properly. But the more I press him, the more he digs in his heels. My stubborn, stubborn boy!! He also then refused to do the Tens Board for 20-99 although that is the section he’s actually working on learning!

The next day, he used a new cookbook, The Toddler Cookbook by Karmel, to make mini banana muffins to take for Thanksgiving dinner. I still have to help quite a bit but he participated in every step, especially the taste testing!

Later that night during our Skype call with grandpa, we got to talking about the Constructive Triangles which inspired DJ to pull them off the shelf a play with them. In this photo he has the small hexagonal box that I haven’t presented to him yet, so he is just exploring the pieces freeform. I love the look of concentration on his face as he’s trying to decide how the shapes fit together.

I didn’t get a new photo, but DJ pulled out his Phonetic Command cards again this weekend. It takes him awhile but he can work out many of the words if he puts his mind to it. When he tired of the cards, he pulled out the movable alphabet. But as is often the case, he just put a bunch of random letters together and asked his dad to read it. So instead I wrote a group of words and then asked DJ to point to the correct word as I said it. He was able to do that fairly easily.

Then DJ pulled out his puzzle maps and worked on them for a good hour. He started by removing all of the pieces and tracing the continent shapes with his finger. Then he placed all of the pieces on the control maps. When he had finished with that, he returned the World & North America pieces to their frames but in the process he dumped all 49 US state pieces into a pile.

Replacing the US states into the frame is harder because there is no outline for the various state shapes so other than the outer borders of the country, there’s no guide to follow. So I stepped in to encourage him to keep working and to give him hints where needed.

While he may have needed my encouragement, I was surprised by how little help he needed. Once he had a handful of states in place he started to recognize where others should go. He filled in Washington, Idaho & Oregon together by digging through the pile of pieces until he found the shapes he recognized. He did the same with Rhode Island & Connecticut as soon as he had identified Massachusetts. Finding Delaware actually triggered him to seek out New Jersey & Pennsylvania. It was an amazing process to watch as I saw him recognizing groups of states based on memory.

After returning the puzzle maps to their cabinet, DJ brought out his 6 biology puzzles. He decided to challenge himself by turning the boards upside down and placing the pieces without the help of the frame.

And that was the extent of school for this week.