pipe cleaners and pom poms

today, for the first time in a long time, we did a little impromptu preschool.

pipe cleaner twisted around a marker

we started off trying to weave pipe cleaners through a cooling rack.  (inspiration here)  i demonstrated it a few times (the boys promptly pulled them out) and then let them have a go.

that lasted approximately two minutes.  it was a little beyond them.

moving on then.  

next i brought out the pom poms and lidded container.  they spent some time putting them in the hole, and used the cardboard tube as a chute to make it a little more fun.

i had an idea and got the cookie sheet (which fits conveniently underneath the cooling rack--excellent crumb catcher when you're cutting homemade bread, fyi).  we dropped the small pom poms through the slats and took turns poking the big ones down.  

my next brilliant idea was a slide.  (this was a good day for me, friends--after coming off of a medication that had me feeling like a complete zombie for most of last week, i felt amazing today)*.  

that orange blur is a ball sliding down.

also, at what age do i have to stop dressing them alike?

we took turns holding the tube (and by "took turns" i mean i held it 90% of the time) and sticking pom poms down it.  they popped out the other end, slid nicely down the nonstick surface of the cookie sheet, and fell through (or were poked through) the slats of the rack.  this one was a hit.

after desmond went down for his nap tesla and i had about 20 more minutes to play.  we spent it doing this color matching game using, once again, the pipe cleaners and pom poms.

tesla had a script for us as we played.

tesla: say, tesla, what color do you want?

me: tesla, what color do you want?

tesla: um...green.

(i hand it to him)

tesla: (gives it back to me) say, there. 

me: there.

tesla: mommy, what color do you want?

me: um...blue.

tesla:  you want red?

me: sure. red.

tesla: big one or small one?

me: small one.

tesla: you want big one?

me: sure. big one.

talk about leading questions.

*yes, these simple activities are me at my creative peak.  be impressed.

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i hope your week is starting off well.  oh, and happy april fool's day.  i'm not on facebook anymore so i missed all the fake pregnancy announcements and completely forgot about this venerated holiday.  but if you pranked someone today, i hope you got 'em good.

preschool: prewriting skills

placing coins into a slot,

threading pieces of straws onto yarn,

and stringing and sorting froot loops.

skill-building doesn't have to feel like work.   :)

messy

messy hair.

desmond

messy beans.

 tesla and desmond

(now imagine every single one of those beans spread across the entire living room and kitchen.  i'm still finding them.  sensory bins and i are not on good terms right now.)




and an unrelated but delicioso cheese sandwich.

happy monday.

our foray into the realm of sensory bins

i've been intrigued by the concept of sensory bins for a while.

they just seem so...cool.

i mean, i want to play with some of them.

but they also seem so messy.  jello, birdseed, beans, rice...tiny and squishy things that i do not want to be cleaning up off the floor.  (if we had a house i wouldn't mind doing some of these things in the driveway or on the yard but alas...we do not.)

so i decided to start simple.  with shredded paper.

i tossed in a couple plastic serving utensils, a horse, a dinosaur, and a cow.  (yeah, so i didn't make an artfully constructed themed sensory bin...)

desmond

but they loved it.






...and then they did this.

tesla

tesla

i didn't get a picture, but by the time they were done, the carpet was covered in tiny bits of paper, and the kitchen had been sprinkled liberally.

plus pieces of paper kept sticking to the boys' feet, and they obligingly tracked them through the rest of the apartment.

so.

was it messy?

YES.  YES,YES,YES.  i fully expected them to dump the contents of the bin out, and i had prepared myself to be okay with it.  however, i did not anticipate the full scale of the mess that would ensue.  thankfully, it was just paper.

was it hard to clean up?

a little trickier than i expected.  i enlisted the boys' help by telling them they couldn't eat dinner unless they assisted me (and yes i would have sent them to bed without the evening meal if they had refused to help).  we scooped up as many handfuls of paper as we could, but there was still so much left on the floor that we couldn't get.  so i had to bring out the vacuum for the rest of it.  not the best thing to do to your vacuum, but i didn't really have any other options.

(it was, however, a piece of cake to clean the kitchen--all i had to do was sweep the paper into piles.)

was it worth it?

well, when i was taking the above pictures, tesla came up to me and said (unprompted), "it's great!  oh mommy, thank you!"



:)

well then.  i suppose it was worth it.

maybe i'll do it again sometime.

next year.

clean messy fun

we did preschool again yesterday.

(2 whole days in a row!  i'm so proud.)

desmond

tesla

silas remarked at dinner last night, "preschool makes them...really happy."  

meaning that dinner was actually a really pleasant experience for everyone involved.  (score)

they do seem to like it, and it puts them in good moods.  (i don't have high hopes for today, since i'm anticipating them to be tired, cranky beasts.  we played at nana and papa's today and then they FELL ASLEEP IN THE CAR on the way home...so of course naps were not taken.  naptime's about 30 minutes from being over and there is still a lot of noise coming from that room.)

this is what "ice cream cones" turn out like when you do them with children under 3.

tesla

desmond

we did the indoor bubble blowing from play create explore yesterday for our activity.  i figured it would be an easy "messy" activity to help me ease into that sort of thing.

it was a hit!

after taking a few pictures, i wanted in on the action.  (it was actually pretty fun...of course i made the biggest bubbles.  not that i'm bragging or anything.)

not pictured:  the floor after they splashed and then dumped the rest of the water out.

but hey--it was just soap and water!  the floor was actually cleaner after we wiped it all up.  win win.

*confession:  sometimes i can't tell the boys apart in pictures, from behind, and from above.

and they're not even twins.  

preschool--our first attempt (part 2)

so!  last time i talked about my decision to make an attempt at preschool (or "play school") with the boys.

here's how it actually went down.


after naps/diaper changes, i called the boys over to the table with an "everybody sit in your chairs" song.  we then went over today's date ("Today is Tuesday...say Tuesday!  Good.  August...can you say August?  Good job.  The 7th!  See, the number 7?  Let's count to seven."  you know how it goes.) and sang the "days of the week" and "months of the year" songs.  twice.  (the boys love songs.)

(last night i made construction paper cards with the days of the week, months of the year, and numbers on them so we could change the date every day.)

construction paper and markers.  that's about as crafty as i usually get.  try not to be too envious.

after finishing the date, we talked about the shape of the day (circle).  we identified some circles and then practiced drawing them.

tesla

desmond

obviously desmond had some assistance with his circles.  ;)

desmond

i don't have a picture of this, but i also made some shape cards (construction paper again) with different shapes on them (square, triangle, diamond, star, and of course, circle).  we went through the cards and identified the shapes ("Is this a circle?  Noooo...it's a star!  Is this a circle?")

the boys shocked me by being really involved.  they usually will only draw/color for about a minute, but they enjoyed making circles (and tesla also worked on drawing lines).  they loved identifying the shapes on the cards and desmond surprised me by joining in to answer some of my questions.

i think next we did music time (i ended up modifying my lesson plan as we went so i can't remember the order right now).

music time is pretty self-explanatory, but we basically just danced in circles and sang a bunch of songs. i'd made a list of about 10 or so action songs beforehand, and it really helped that i could just go down the list without having to think of another song off the top of my head.  

music time was a HUGE hit.  i've done a few half-hearted attempts at it before, but i didn't get nearly the response i did today. there was a lot of grinning, jumping, and choruses of "again?  again?" 

we sang most of the songs at least twice (some of them five or six times), and the boys loved dancing around and singing.  sometime i'd like to get a cd with a bunch of our favorites on it (we were just doing it a cappella) and maybe incorporate some rhythm instruments.

after music time we did starfall time.  i should do a separate post on starfall sometime, but basically it's free and awesome.  it was a big help in teaching tesla his letters and sounds.  (i've been slacking on teaching the alphabet with desmond though, which is why i decided to include starfall time in our day.)

for starfall time, i set a timer for 15 minutes and tesla sat on the couch and played starfall on the ipad.  (i explained to him that he would be playing for 15 minutes, and once the timer went off, he would be done.  i was hoping giving him fair warning might help avoid the usually inevitable meltdown when time was up.)

by the way, the starfall app is not free, but it is worth it.  tesla LOVES it.  desmond's still too young to really use it, so i brought him into our room to use the computer.  he sat on my lap and we went through A-G a couple times (with me walking him through the letters and sounds, narrating, asking him questions, etc.)  he knows probably a third of the alphabet but i haven't really worked on it consistently with him.

after the timer went off (tesla turned off the ipad and put it away without whining or freaking out!  it was like i'd stepped into a parallel universe), we went back to the kitchen table for our "activity".

we did this toddler science activity from play create explore.  i was a little apprehensive (i have a bit of "mess anxiety" that i'm trying to get over...food coloring definitely worries me) ;) but it went great!  and it actually held the boys' attention for quite a while (meaning probably 10 or 15 minutes...which is longer than i expected).

i poured water and oil into a glass bowl and then let the boys help put drops of food coloring in.  at first they were like, "so...?" but then the colors started dropping and they got excited.

tesla (left), desmond (right)

tesla kept saying, "it's going down!  IT'S GOING DOWN!" and "fish!  a fish, mommy!"

it was really, really cute to see them so interested.  especially because i didn't have very high expectations for this activity.  

after activity time, we did independent play/focus time with mommy.  i set a timer for 15 minutes and put desmond in his room with a toy (car/ramp thing).  tesla joined me for a montessori-style focus activity that i found here.  

i loosely followed the activity cycle, so i had him get a blanket and lay it on the ground.  then we brought over the activity (ice cube tray and pom poms) and sat down.  i tried to demonstrate it for him (he kept wanting to jump in), and then he worked on it.  i gave him quiet verbal guidance ("nope, it goes here", "good job") but tried to let him do it on his own as much as possible.  he started to get the pattern after a while but i had to guide him quite a bit.  after a few minutes i just started saying, "left side!" "right side!", and that seemed to help it make more sense to him.

tesla

i think this was the biggest surprise of the day.  tesla absolutely loved this.  i really thought he would want to do it his own way and get upset if i tried to correct him, but he seemed to enjoy trying to do it the "right way".  sometimes he'd ask, "right here?" before placing a pom pom, and when he got it right, he seemed so pleased.  i could tell he felt accomplished.

tesla

and you know what?  it was really fun for me.  i haven't really done one-on-one activities with the boys (shame shame) before, and it was great.  i got to focus on tesla, and he loved having my attention.

he kept saying "again?" as soon as he finished *, which was really gratifying for me for some reason...i guess i was just proud of him for doing it and proud of myself for actually trying something new.

i'm a really bad multitasker during the day...i clean while the boys are playing, do dishes while they're eating, prep dinner while they're fighting (just kidding)...so it was good for me to take some time to focus just on my boys.

tesla

towards the end of our fifteen minutes, tesla wanted to change the format.  he'd already completed the activity several times so i let him do what he wanted for the last bit.  we did some sorting and then some "freestyle".

tesla

when the timer went off, we cleaned up our activity and he helped me fold the blanket and put it away. then we switched.  tesla went into the room for independent play (puzzles), while desmond came out for focus time with me.

for desmond, we did shape sorting.  he wasn't as interested in taking direction.  i tried and then gave up and let him do it his way. 

desmond

desmond also loved having my full attention.  (note to self:  HINT HINT)  once, when i got up to get something, he let out this impatient whine and gave me this "why are you leaving?!" look.

he kept asking to do the stars again, so for a while he repeatedly put in and dumped out the same three stars.   

desmond

it was fun to spend time with my other little buddy.  like i said, i tend to get caught up in getting things done and just pushing through to the next part of the day, so it was a good lesson for me in just being with my kiddos.

(during desmond's focus time, though, tesla quickly lost interest in his puzzles and sat next to the door calling, "out?  out?  out?" for the remainder of the time. we were able to tune him out though.)   :) 

focus time/independent play was our last activity, because it was past dinner time.  overall, our first preschool attempt went SO. MUCH. BETTER. than i was expecting.  i think i needed the encouragement in order to even consider trying again.  i know that we may never have another day that goes as well as today went, but it was hugely motivating for me.  

even though i don't get paid, being a mother is my job.  and i've found that when i put actual effort and thought into my job, it's immensely more satisfying and enjoyable.  it's okay to coast sometimes, too, but too much coasting leads to boredom (which was the plague that inspired this experiment).

the boys lasted a lot longer than i thought they would.  maybe it was because i had a plan and was really involved with them, but their attention spans seemed to have tripled yesterday.  the whole thing took us a little over an hour and a half i think, and i left out a few things.  i wasn't sure how much time it would take up so i was pleased we filled the whole nap to dinner time slot.  as i told silas later, having a plan turned the worst part of the day into the best part of the day.

i'd like to keep trying to have preschool, so i guess we'll see how it evolves.  i would love to hear your ideas!

*after i ended the "school" part of our day so we could eat dinner, tesla saw the pom poms and ice cube tray on the counter and asked to play again.  he burst into tears when i said that it was time to eat right now.   i'm glad he liked it so much.   ;)