Inside/Outside

The time has come to open up Little Man's mind and try to pour in buckets of smart (yes, for those who aren't in the know, smart now comes in buckets).

Good-bye to the lazy afternoons of sitting in the middle of a pile of recently toppled over DVDs, flapping your arms and squealing with delight as momma looks at you with her 'tisk-tisk face' (okay, not really good-bye because we just finished doing that about 5 minutes ago), hello skill building and learning activities!

The skill we have been working on for the past week is in/out.

I have found Little Man is fascinated by emptying and filling things, so I have latched on to that interest and tried to make it a learning experience.

What it boils down to is me sitting with him and some sort of receptacle as he puts in and pulls out toys, coins, blocks, bugs, etc. while I say 'in' to each object that he puts in and 'out' to each object he pulls out. Tedious? Yes. Over the past week have I noticed learning going on? Yes.

Skills that he is learning include fine motor, hand eye coordination and an understanding of the concept in and out.

And since a post isn't fun without pictures here is Booger demonstrating our activity. The first picture is him putting a shape block in his bucket. The rest of the pictures are him using his Fill and Spill Bug Jar.







Spider waves hello!



And here is a video of him putting coins in a very narrow glass vase. This is very good for eye hand coordination and fine motor skills, but please beware that the coins are a choking hazard - watch carefully and be sure that all coins are accounted for after play. Also, please excuse my annoying 'put it in' over and over again, ha ha, in fact you might want to just turn the volume down.  You know it's bad when you annoy yourself.