Abby’s been doing very well with her coloring lately. She is still working on filling large areas with a crayon, but she’s getting better. It’s like she gets tired of coloring with the crayon after a little bit. I think it’s because she pushes too hard on it to get it to write, when a lighter touch might do better and be less exhausting.
Last night we worked with her preschool workbook. It’s a little booklet that they sell at Staples and school supply stores that has picture activities in it. There are some activities that ask you to count how many items there are on the page. Usually these are left as outlines for Abby to color. Other activities ask her to color or circle only a certain number of the overabundance of items on the page.
There are matching activities, too, and Abby is especially fond of these. The instructions will describe how items on one side of the page match the items on the other, and instruct Abby to draw a link connecting the matching items. She really likes these types of activities.
I tried to get her to do a sequencing activity last night, at which she does very well on the computer. But for whatever reason she had some difficulty on paper. And of course she didn’t want to fill in the solid color areas after she determined the correct color to complete the pattern.
Her freeform drawing is getting better, too. She has drawn a bunch of things on blank paper recently that are not just the usual blobs, but actually identifiable. I will have to snatch one of these soon for an office decoration.
We traced some numbers last night, and she did very good with the tracing, but not so great when she tried to write the numbers without a guide. This frustrated her, and so we didn’t get past the number 3. Hopefully, she’ll get a little better control and start doing these on her own, too.
I’m happy she enjoys these books, since it seems like she’s actually learning some things. She stuck a ton of letters to the bathroom walls last night and she was able to name all but a couple of them. As soon as she’s good enough at both the upper an lowercase letters, we’ll move her onward in the Hooked On Phonics kit that we got. She’s actually somewhat behind in the lessons, which is something we’ll have to work on soon.
