In my first post I described what our school room looked like and in this post I'll go into detail about my observations. Since this blog is mainly for me to record our progress, there will probably be more detail than anyone else wants to read about.
As I said before, our plan is to use the two hours while Bumblebee is taking his nap in the morning. However, on the morning of our first day, he slept late and Link was really wanting to get to work. I was taking the circle stencil downstairs and he wanted to come, so I let him. He traced a couple of circles, then just drew with his colored pencils. Then he chose the activity I knew he'd been wanting to do, the cutting.
Then Bumblebee woke up so we left. I should mention that I probably didn't start this out the best way. I told him before we went in that he could choose anything he wanted and, after I demonstrated it for him, he could do it by himself.
When we returned at 12:30, he chose the Land, Air and Water sorting cards. He seemed to understand. He got most of the way through the Air cards, but when he got to the bird flying over the water, he didn't know what to do with it. He chose land, he said because some things don't fly very high. (the other things did I guess). When he got to the grass, he was all done and put it away.
Then he asks for the cards that had the firetruck :) He saw me printing them out and knew that somewhere was a picture of a firetruck. So I directed him to the Association of Objects cards. I demonstrated one and he picked it up quickly. Each time he started with "I like ____ so I'll choose that". He didn't quite understand the control card and wanted to know where the rest of them were. (I didn't put them all out.) I think I'll add a few new ones soon.
Next he chose sweeping. He liked this one, but after sweeping up about half of the pom-poms he decided that using the broom was too hard and brought it to me. I encouraged him to keep practicing and he did a little. Then decided it was time to put them all back.
I was pleased that he seemed to like the pattern cards. I put one block out and he did the rest very carefully. I have an entire video of it. Then he decided to make his own thing. He hasn't been interested in making anything with these blocks in over a year.
Then it was time to paint. Link loves painting and has asked for it several times since we've moved. Notice the switch from left hand to right .
After that he didn't know what to do, so I suggested the tweezer activity. He picked up a few pom-poms with the tweezers, then tried putting one into the tweezers with his hands. Then he resorted to using his hands to put the pom-pom on the hole and pushed them down with the tweezers.
I also had to suggest the clothes pins. He liked it though and it was not too easy or too hard for him. He used both his left and right hands individually, and both hands sometimes. He was very proud as you can see.
After that he said he wanted to use the big rug. So he got it out and after a few tries, unrolled it. Then he asked me what he could do on it. So I chose hanging clothes. I put some things out that were too hard, I should have stuck to t-shirts.
Rolling up the rug was a little hard and messy, but he got it.
I was surprised he didn't choose the belt buckles sooner. He saw me making it and wanted to try it before I was even finished. He unbuckled them very easily and worked very hard at buckling them.
At 1:50 Bumblebee woke up. So once Link put the buckles away we left the school room. This seemed like a good time as he had completed most of the works on the shelves and would have probably been about finished anyways.
