Pre-pre-Christmas and an activity

I don't know about you, but we are now seriously starting to get ready for getting ready for Christmas. People complain a lot about how it's getting earlier and earlier and becoming too commercialised, and I totally get that. I do. But I just can't share the sentiment.

BRING ON THE HOLIDAYS! BRING 'EM AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE!

The pre-Christmas time, for me, is a big part of what makes the darker days and miserable weather more bearable. There is just so much to do! It's busy time, but busy with so many fun things. I've made a Christmas "bucket" list of all the things I want us to find time to do together this December - things like "make paperchains" and "teach Audrey Christmas songs" and "go out for a walk after dark to see all the lights".

This year she'll be just old enough to start to appreciate some of the fun - things like visiting the big garden centre by great Granddad and Nana Plummer's house with Granddad Steve and Granny Mel and running around in absolute amazement at all the Christmas trees and fairy lights and fibre optic polar bears.

There's something about doing these things with your child that makes it all so much brighter and more special. It's easier to over look the tackiness, the cheap plastic and battered edges, when you see how blown away they are and realise that all they're seeing is the magic.


Having said all that... I've no Christmas pics for you! The only decoration we have out so far is Audrey's special snow globe which Aunty Kate gave her last year - we got it out last week and talked about how Christmas was coming soon and set it on the chest of drawers by Audrey's bed. We're going to start the proper decorating times next week after our weekend away visiting yet more grandparents. And then, you can be sure, I'll be back with another Christmas post!

For now, here are some pics of an activity we were doing this morning. I took our big Ikea storage tray full of dry rice and pulses and buried some shiny foil chocolate wrappers in it. I gave Audrey a bucket with a small spade and a big paintbrush and told her they were the tools, then showed her how to delicately "excavate" the hidden gems and treasures (foil) and put them in the bucket. She had a really great time!

Note the hair in bunches, too. This morning she asked for pony tails, so I put her hair up and watched her instantly take it down again and then hand me the bobble - "Again! Again!" - a dozen or more times. I love playing with her hair, she's so beautiful. After her bath she handed me more hair ties, so I put bunches in and... she left them in! For ages! I just had to snap pics. How cute is this?

I love that this activity helps her learn colours and counting, as well as working the fine and gross motor skills and being a great sensory activity.

I hope you're having a good pre-pre-Christmas!

Learning Through Play

Audrey loves to play. She takes my hand and drags me over to her little table saying "Mama - play, play!"

Audrey has been very interested in counting lately - she counts just about everything she sees. She has the gist of the numbers up to 10, but usually misses out 2 and is somewhat hit-and-miss after 7. 7 is her favourite number, and will get counted many times - "five, sick, sennen, sennen, sennen, sennen... eight"

We do lots of different activities to help her understand the concept of quantity, that the numbers aren't just funny words like a nursery rhyme but actually relate to a certain quantity of whatever it is that we're counting.

I always save bottle tops because they are useful for so many learning games, so I came up with this counting activity:

First I pointed to each number in turn and named it. Then I showed her how to place the bottle tops on the circles, one at a time, saying the number as I placed each one. She soon got the idea!

She enjoyed putting the bottle tops down, but she also enjoyed taking them away one at a time which I hadn't expected. She seemed quite fasinated by the idea of taking enough away that each column looked the same as the one next to it. A great introduction to subtraction, there.

We've also been playing a colours game lately with some coloured buttons - I love these buttons! They're supposed to be for threading onto a string, which Audrey enjoys a lot, but we use them for so much more - counting, matching, colours, posting and other fine motor work... Definitely one of the most versatile toys we've bought.

Again with this one, I point to each paper plate and say the colour, then put one of the buttons on each plate and say the colours again as I go. Then I hand a button to her - "Where does this go? Can you find the one that matches? Where does the blue one go?"

Again, she gets the hang of this one pretty quickly. Her colours are coming on in leaps and bounds lately, and I'd like to do some colour matching with some more of the secondary and other colours like pink, purple, orange and brown.

Colour sorting is tiring work!

Silly Audrey.

What have you been up to?

What have we been up to lately? Well, a bit of this:

And a little of this:

A whole lot of this:

And endless amounts of this:

This winter is going to be pretty fabulous. I can already tell.