One Inch World

Rebecca has a swing in her (smallish) bedroom. I’m not sure what this says about me, or my husband that he agreed to hang it there. Anyway! It is a very tippy swing, and has been great for her balance. The other day I suggested we stack blocks on it, it was great! It turned an easy block stacking exorcise into quite a challenging one. So, if you just happen to have a tippy Ikea swing in your bedroom… no, I thought not.

Also, see those little people? Big hit. I got some peggish people, thinking I would paint them, but it turns out the smallest, ‘1-1/8″ Baby – Little People‘, are the perfect size to go with European blocks that have a basic measurement of 4cm, like Plan blocks and HABA blocks. So now they are all living with Rebecca’s blocks, and I’m not going to paint them. I think it might be a good idea to stain them different colors, because Rebecca kept getting mad at me when I would loose track of which one was ‘her’. And I might give them eyes, but probably not, and I’m definitely not going to paint them to be different community characters, because they are so much more flexible this way.

There are so many games you can play with maps. This is a map of the San Francisco Zoo that I found and laminated when I was cleaning out my desk. I set it out for Rebecca with a marker, and when she wanted to play with it we started by circling where different animals lived in the zoo, then traced lines on the sidewalk from one animal to another, then traced some of the different colored dotted line tours, and then I think there was a bunch of scribbling. I’m pretty sure we did some other things too, but now I can’t remember! Just pretending your marker is a person and walking them around on the paths is great fine motor pen practice though. I have a map of Gilroy Gardens around here somewhere, I’ll need to get that out too. Of course that will raise the question of when we are going back again, hmm. But it’s a very colorful map! The tradeoffs of motherhood. Maybe I should just print out a Google map of our neighborhood, then we could take it with us on walks to the park, and trace how we got there.

Last week we did a lot of sewing. Sewing on plastic canvas with our art friends, sewing with needle and thread on a marked line, sewing on paper (I’m just the mom, I’m not in charge here.) Then Monday she showed me you could sew through your clothes with pine needles.

I really need to draw her a cloth doll to sew (possibly turn) and stuff. I’m sure she could do it. I guess it would be simplest to start with felt. Felt and not turning, or cloth and turning. Hmm.

I got this idea from MaryAnn Kohl’s Math Arts, although I think the math connection is pretty weak it sounded like fun from a sensory perspective. The version in the book was more involved, but what we did was paint with glue and then sprinkle spices over the glue. Then there was a lot of spice layering, and then we were making ‘mudge’ according to Rebecca. Mudge being a paste of white glue and aromatic spices apparently. Although I was not deemed competent to make mudge, maybe someday if I practiced enough, but I was just making spudge. Which was fine with me. I don’t care what you call an art activity if it lasts for almost two hours, which this did!

So find those five year old spices in the back of your pantry, put them in jars with shaker tops if they aren’t already, and some paint brushes and watered down white glue. It may look like, uh, awful, but it smells really nice. Ours is hanging on the kitchen wall for Rebecca to sniff. I think we’ll do this with our artfriends on Friday.

There are a lot of fine motor activities going on around our house right now.

Here is Rebecca taking all the pins out of one of my pin cushions (is it a cute pin cushion, say a cupcake, that I made myself, no, it is a boring old standard tomato thing…) and sticking them all in a line in a block of styrofoam. She found the block of styrofoam, I gave her the pins, she created the activity. When she got tired of sticking the pins in a line we started stringing rubber bands on them to make an instrument. All because when she finds blocks of styrofoam I have to come up with something for her to do with them, otherwise they end up as a pile of styrofoam snow, which since I have a little bit of a plastic phobia I can’t stand! In this case the end was delayed, but not completely averted.

And here is Rebecca wiring up a breadboard to light an LED. You know, I’ve never ever wondered until just now why they were called breadboards, and I’ve been using the things for 20 years. Luckily I have the internet! Apparently early prototyping boards were often bread cutting boards with nails banged into them. Huh. I wonder if someone made that up? Anyway.

Since our house is blessed with plenty of electronic prototyping bits I thought it would be a fun fine motor activity to stick wires into a breadboard, and what to do other than light an LED? I colored on the breadboard first with permanent marker, trying to show by color which of the holes were connected to each other, then talked her through hooking up the resistor, LED, jumper wires and battery. We talked about how there needs to be a circle for electricity to flow, and if you break the circle by pulling out any of the wires the electricity will stop flowing. And we talked about how you can make yourself part of the current circle, and how that can hurt you. And of course even though it’s simple as pie the circuit didn’t work the first time, so we had to debug it with the multimeter, tracking it down to the battery not being all the way in the battery holder. Somewhere in the debugging we got out another resistor, so we also got to see how the LEDs got dimmer with a higher resistance resistor, and she also wanted to light both LEDs we had, so we talked about how they could both be part of the circle in parallel… But she’s three, really it was mostly motivation for supervised sticking of wires into little holes.

I have been trying to find time to post this all week! Oy!

I finished my halloween candy hiding witch ball, and I like it. The red imp is coming along too. If you stick a rectangular mini-candy bar the wrapper sticks out her mouth, but I’ve decided that’s just fine. I think the square ones will fit in better, but I don’t have any, and I’m not buying any candy to see or I will eat it!

Since we had a witch finished we worked on /w/ activities. Over two separate days actually, and I still never got to making a big W sheet for our alphabet binder. Rebecca didn’t want to, so we’ll just move on without it. W-whatever.

We wrote W’s with soap on the mirror, then w-washed them off.

We did some w-walrus walking (on your arms, dragging your legs like a tail), and some w-wheelbarrow walking (on your arms with mom holding up your feet).

We w-wiped plant leaves with water to clean the dust off. We didn’t stick with this for very long!

We worked with wire and wire cutters to make a wire sculpture in a styrofoam block, wrapping (not /w/) them around markers and pencils to make twisty springs.

We got our DickBlick order, (yay new paint!) so we got to spray liquid watercolors on paper. Also, duh, “cleans up with water” does NOT mean washable! It means you can clean your brushes with soap and water, you don’t need mineral spirits or turpentine. That was for our tempera paint, now I’m going to have to figure out whether I can make it washable with some kind of soap or not. But, the colors are MUCH nicer, and the washable paint has turned many of her shirts into ‘art shirts’ anyway, so maybe we’ve just graduated to student tempera.

Rebecca drew W’s to make w-waves using w-white crayon on blue paper, and we did a couple ‘w’ worksheets.

Also this was our first week of co-op preschool, crazy times! I think it’s going to be great.