Zaxxon started preschool this week, which gave me uninterrupted time with Kal'El for a few hours each morning. On the first day, Kal'El missed his brother, but after that he was fine, and I really began to enjoy our time together. Zaxxon went to preschool three mornings per week last year, but this year it's all five mornings, and Kal'El is older and capable of doing much more. Zaxxon is also very overpowering right now, so it's hard to get much of a chance to interact just with Kal'El. Having Zaxxon occupied elsewhere is really giving me a chance to focus on my second-born, and to give him the attention and interaction he was otherwise lacking.
Zaxxon was about Kal'El's age when I first started doing crafts with him, so I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get started with Kal'El. We're arbitrarily starting through the alphabet when it comes to our themes, but we'll focus a lot on holidays as we come to them, and we'll follow Kal'El's interest.
On our first day of crafting, we started with an apple tree. I prefabbed the tree and apples, and just had Kal'El place them on the tree.
I started out by adding the glue myself, but after about three apples he wanted to do the glue, so I let him.
He said he wanted to draw after we were done, so I pulled out some big paper and handed over the crayons. He scribbled a bit, but mostly he wanted me to trace his hand over and over.
After it was all over, we went for a bike ride. He's really doing quite well on his balance bike, and picks his feet up to coast for short distances. He travels between 3-3.5 mph until he gets tired, and can go between 1-2 miles before getting there. I'm hoping to build his endurance more on these rides with just him, because I'm always walking a fine line between letting him go as long as he wants, but having to go at two-year-old speed, and putting him in the trailer so Zaxxon can go faster on his pedal bike.
Due to other conflicts, Kal'El and I only got one other crafting day during Zaxxon's first week. We continued with letter "A" items, making an alligator out of the letter "A."
Chomp chomp!
I love this pic
Next I rubberbanded bubble wrap around a cup, gave him a dish of green paint, and tried to get him to "stamp" scales on an alligator.
He mostly just swirled it around, but he still loved doing it.
(Btw, does anyone know if children's tempura paint can contain formaldehyde? Because it smelled like it did. I haven't used this paint much, so it surprised me.)
Kal'El really enjoyed all these activities. Week one of crafts was a success!
No comments:
Post a Comment