Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! This week has been full of a lot of fun and DJ had his first experience Trick or Treating door-to-door in our neighborhood. He loved it! He received this Boo, Bunny book last year and has had me read it to him countless times over the past two weeks. So many times, he can now repeat the book word for word as he pretends to "read" it. That's a new thing of his lately, requesting his books to be read 2-3 times back to back and now that he counts to three, he makes a point to specify when he chooses a book, "read this...3 times".


Speaking of counting, DJ has been obsessed with numbers lately. I didn't get a picture of it but he selected the Red Rods again this week and put them in order on his own with no prompting from me. He can identify the first three rods as 1, 2 & 3 easily and we worked a bit on 4 & 5 this week. Identifying the rods as numbers is part of the Number Rods presentations, which are supposed to come after Red Rods, are the beginning of the math sequence AND aren't supposed to start until he's closer to 4 years old. He's not even 3. But I don't know how to hold him back so I'm just going with the flow and seeing what happens.


DJ also selected the Sound Cylinders again this week. It's been fun to see how he's come back to this task over and over again for months. Usually he just wants to identify the loudest and softest and doesn't want to match them. But this week he matched them all! He started off selecting one from the blue set and trying to match it to others in the blue set. So I helped by setting the blue box next to me, out of his reach, and pointing to the red set and saying, "Find the match". When he did, I handed him another blue. In the end he matched them all correctly.

And speaking of sounds, DJ has been singing A LOT. He makes up his own melodies and sings nonsense words. It's amazing to me because I have no musical sense at all, although I was taught to read music and can play by rote. We have been doing a Music & Movement class the past few months but the class was canceled last week and DJ wakes up every morning asking if we're going to music class today. I might need to find an alternative soon.


In the meantime, our weekly art class is continuing. This project was a HUGE hit for DJ this week. It's simply homemade play-dough with googly eyes and feathers. DJ loved placing the feathers and ended up with about a dozen feathers before he was done. Then, he removed all the feathers and placed them again. Then he did it again. I had a long work call at home after class and the entire time, DJ stood at his table, sliding feathers into play-dough. I love to see that level of concentration and repetition, no matter how simple the project.


This is another task DJ is repeating as often as possible. He's eating a lot of tuna these days simply because he loves to use the can opener. This is the first time that he has had the required hand strength to turn the handle himself and he was so excited, squealing "I'm doing it! I'm a big boy!"

That's a big theme of his. He's about to have his 3rd birthday so we've talked about how he's growing older and getting bigger. We've had to buy all new clothes recently, including new shoes so he's very aware that he's getting bigger. At the same time he's been very eager to do things he's not ready for, like using a real hammer or getting into my Montessori storage that is mostly advanced math materials. I tell him those are things he'll do, but when he gets bigger. The first time I said it, he waited about 20 minutes then came back and said, "I'm bigger now!" Oh my. Slow down, little man.


DJ also completed this 12 piece jigsaw puzzle alone for the first time. I was doing my work and he usually mostly plays with his cars while I work so I was surprised when I looked down and saw the puzzle half complete. Usually if he wanted to do a puzzle he would have pestered me to do it with him. Yay for independent work!!


And we continue to work on the sound games. This is the /b/ box we used this week. Most of our games are done in the car and we do a lot of different letters, but on the shelf I have only one letter at a time right now. It still hasn't really clicked for him what I'm trying to do and I think that's mainly because he's not really interested in it. There was a time he wanted to know what letters were called, which I know was more a desire for vocabulary than an interest in learning to read. But lately he's not even all that into letters. I'm hoping his renewed interest in books will spark an interest in letters soon.

In the meantime, here are a few more activities that he continues to enjoy: