Sophie seems to at least be interested (and not appalled) by the feeling of grass on her bare skin, contrary to her brother at this age.
She did, however, switch to crawling up on her hands and knees (as opposed to her normal army crawl) when on the grass.
Or... she may do one of these walking/crawling numbers where she's still technically on all fours but with the least possible amount of skin on the grass. :)
Will was pretty intrigued by the robin on our deck one morning too.
Our Practical Life lesson this week was putting on and taking off a shirt. Daddy helped Will practice with jammies at night.
Thanks for your help, dad!
I picked up a 10-well painter's palette for like a dollar at Hobby Lobby and showed Will how to pattern some pom poms around the circle using the tongs.
Not the best picture of either of them, but it's the only action shot I took of this. Craig holds Will's hand so he remembers not to attempt using tongs with two hands. It messes him up.
This looks pretty basic and pointless, but it takes a lot of precision to balance several of these "floral stone" pebbles on each colored craft stick without bumping others off. Craig showed Will how to hold the stones like a disc with only pointer finger and thumb on either side for the easiest placement.
Then, Will could flip the sticks over where I numbered them 1-4 and put appropriate numbers of dots on each for him to count the stones.
On that beautiful (but a little windy), 80 degree Tuesday we had, we went outside and did some water play using an empty grapefruit juice bottle, a funnel and a small pitcher.
We made our first attempt at incorporating a turkey baster with our water play... and it was mostly unsuccessful. He just doesn't get it yet. But we'll keep trying.
He really enjoyed Sophie's pinwheel on this windy day!
And both Nana and Aunt Casey gave him some grow capsules that drop into warm water and expand into vehicles and bugs and stuff.
You'll notice he's wearing his boots in all of the above pictures. They have been worn almost daily at one time or another. :)
On Wednesday evening, we sat out on the porch and watched the storm. Very cool. I have always loved storms.
Really blurry, but cute of Will and Bru before his appointment with the groomer on Thursday.
Also on Wednesday we did some fun sensory play. I purchased a canister of salt (for like 44 cents, I think) and dumped enough into a pan to make a thin layer. Will swirled his hands in it, "drew letters and shapes" with his fingertip, and sifted it through his fingers.
More practice with taking off his shirt.
Poor kid. A big head is a real disadvantage sometimes. Hehe.
Next, I put him in some swim trunks and set him up in our bath tub with a cheapo can of shaving cream ($1.19). He had a bit of a hard time squirting it, and at first acted disgusted to get it on his hands. But soon he was loving this experience.
Will used a plastic shovel for scooping and spreading too. We only ended up using about a third of the can of shaving cream so we can definitely do this again! It was super easy clean up and he got a bath right there after we rinsed him and the tub down.
One evening as I was cleaning up toys, I found this line up of his barrel of monkeys. Nice job of number sequencing, Will!
I also want to add in this post that the majority of the work we do come from ideas I find on other Tot School blogs. The "homepage" for Tot School link-ups is: lapbooksbycarisa.homestead.com. Lots of moms do this stuff and there are sooooo many good ideas for learning activities out there. I have actually gotten creative and come up with some of my own activities, but I choose not to link up because I still prefer to keep my blog mostly private.
This is another cool (and pretty much free!) idea I found. Craig picked up two each of several colors of paint samples. I already had a whole package of clothes pins laying around, so this activity was essentially free. I cut up one of the color strips and glued them onto the clothes pins. Then Will had to match each of the colored clothes pins to the correct color on the opposite color strip. So this goes a little beyond knowing colors - now he's learning to differentiate varying shades of the same color. We talked about light and dark colors.
I actually left him to do this independently while I cleaned up dinner dishes and he did pretty well. I see he flip-flopped two of the greens, but otherwise perfect! I also have swatches of purples, blues, and I think browns to cut up now for the future.
Aunt Casey and Uncle Dub got Will a couple really cool games for Christmas that have actually been waiting in the wings of his closet for when he's old enough. You can always count on the teachers to get him something educational. I love it! This is a match-the-rhyme card game with picture and word cards that link together like puzzle pieces. He loves it!
On Saturday morning, the kids and I got back out on the porch for what has always been a ritual for Will and me. Ever since he was a baby, I would sit out there with Will on weekend mornings and often on weekday evenings as long as the weather was tolerable. We would cuddle with a blanket if necessary and just watch the cars go by or sing or talk or listen to the birds. I've done it with both kids a few times, but only now is getting to be easier to keep Will seated calmly and Sophie happy in my lap at the same time. It makes me think of my Grandma Skees because she always did this with us at her house when we were kids. We'd either play a guessing game about which color car would pass by next or we'd stand in the yard and play "Mother May I?" as we stepped towards her on the front steps. So anyway, in honor of Grandma, Will and I now often play the car guessing game and he loves it. Also since our paint sample game, he now makes guesses like "light blue" or "dark red". :)
Wearing the boots again.
Me & Soph.
When Sophie layed down for a nap, Will and I went upstairs to wake daddy and bring him a bowl of cereal in bed. We all hung out upstairs and vegged for a bit. Will wanted to play hide and seek. Can you spot him? This is actually one of his better hiding spots. :)
More practice with putting on a shirt. Sorry, some of these are dark.
More issues with his big dome. :)
Check out his proud face. Love it!
Next, Will helped ME figure out how to put on MY t-shirt (over my tank top). Please excuse how terrible I look in all of these. It was still early on a Saturday morning and my expressions look so ridiculous. But he thought this was great fun.
After he got it over my head, I made a lot of exaggerated silly guesses as to how I should get my arms through. I kept doing it the wrong way and he'd laugh and tell me no and show me where it was supposed to go.
Oops! My arm shouldn't come up through the neck! (He actually does this a lot on accident.)
Pulling it down.
Hooray! We did it!
With that mission accomplished, we go to the jar to pick out our next Practical Life lesson for next week: making the bed. Hmm... that may be a tricky one... but we'll keep it simple. Stay tuned next week!
Another size sorting game using three sizes of pom poms. Will LOVES "fuzzy balls" and now he even remembers the word "medium". He kept stumbling over that word last time.
Later in the morning, we made color collages using clippings from old magazines and catalogs. Family Fun, kids clothing catalogs, and Crate & Barrel were all good ones for finding pictures. We sorted them by the rainbow (plus pink) and glued them down. We still have room to add to the pages later, but I might like to laminate them to use when teaching Sophie her colors in the future. And it serves as a fun, homemade I Spy page for Will. Today though, he had fun sorting by color and glueing. Oh, and yes I realize my son is wearing a helmet in these next couple. I couldn't help it. I simply mentioned the possibility of taking the bike trailer out for a ride this weekend and he immediately wanted to put on his helmet... and wear it around. He likes to clip the chin strap himself.
My kid is... special.
Here are our collages for the time being.
When Sophie woke up, we went back outside for a nature hunt and to enjoy the sunshine before lunch.
We brought out two empty shoe boxes and talked about filling one with smooth things and one with scratchy/rough things. And then we hunted around for each of those categories in our yard.
Sticks and mulch.
Inspecting a blade of grass.
We have a buckeye tree (Ohio's State tree!) in our front yard and Will decided that the buckeye was smooth but the shell was scratchy and rough.
Pine cones and rocks were added.
Sophie checked out the grass some more from the blanket. 
She always sits like this or in the hurdle position. It cracks me up.
And a final picture for the week: Sophie signing "all done". It's so cute when she does it. 
So that was our week! I'm hoping to actually consolidate my thoughts and ideas into one main topic (the alphabet!) for next week. We'll see how that goes. I have notes jotted but nothing actually organized yet. I keep a notebook of ideas as I find them or think of them so that helps to give me a starting point each week. But it definitely takes some brief prep work to assemble the supplies/trays ahead of time. Doing so as the child waits in front of you is NOT a good idea. Will would get impatient or I wouldn't have time after work to get stuff together in our tight time frame. So I usually do it at night after the kids are in bed or just wing it as needed, i.e. the shoe boxes outside this weekend was a last minute "hey, how about this?" sort of plan.
