Oh what a difference a day can make. Yesterday was just awful. I had started with a few activities for our x theme. None of them worked very well because my boys were bound and determined to break mommie’s spirit with their disobedience. I cried; they cried. This morning has been so much better. Not perfect, but way better with lots of tickles, laughter and love. In this post you will see my kids in two sets of clothes because some pictures were taken yesterday and some were taken today as we tried these activities again.
Right after breakfast I pulled out the tic tac toe board. They love this board. However, they don’t actually play the game. They just want to throw bean bags at any part of the board. So that’s just what we did for a while. Then when the energy level was starting to fall, I turned over each square and had the boys tell me what letter was on it. Next I let the boys spin each square and tell me what letter landed on the top. They just loved this because they got to move. I think yesterday failed because I had them sitting down and I was turning the squares. We got back up to throw more bean bags. Each time they were out of bean bags, they had to step farther back from the board. This gave them some practice with aiming their shots. Soon, I’ll be showing them how to play the game and knowing the difference between those Xs & Os will be important.
Yesterday, not today, we had a lesson in sharing. Lance decided that all the bean bags belonged to him. It was rather comical to see him try to pick all of them up in his arms and run away with them. Because Lance took them and ran, the game was put away and I had a talk with both boys about sharing. Apparently it sunk in because we had no issues with sharing today.
The other activity only used the letter X in a small part, but the activity was great for learning letters. I got the idea from No Time For Flashcards. I printed off some cars from the net, wrote the upper and lower case letters individually on the cars and laminated them. I made two roads using black cardstock and glueing the white stripes on. I also added a stripe at the top of each road, one saying Uppercase, the other saying Lowercase. Yesterday I took all 52 cars and I let them throw the cars in the air to shuffle them.
I think this wound them up.
Then I asked them to sit down. I asked each boy to identify the letter of the car that I was holding up. Then I let them drive it across the appropriate road. Well after 3 cars were down, the boys took off driving them around the room and ignored me completely. I got mad and so did they. They wanted to drive their cars and when I was insistent they come back Lance started trying to ripe the cards apart. So just like the other game, the game went away. Today when I got the alphabet road down, we only worked with four cars. After they identified them, I let them happily play, drive them over to the X marked on the floor in the kitchen and then drive them all around the house. We will use this over the summer and each time we will just work on a few letters at a time. When the fun of driving was dwindling, I let them take all 52 cars again and throw them in the air several times before we cleaned up.
I learned a few things from comparing both days. Sometimes a little action and movement can save an activity. Sometimes you just need to call a day a wash and save the learning for another day. Don’t call an activity a failure until you’ve tried it on several different days because everyone’s mood plays a part. My mercy for today is the renewed attitudes of everyone. May we give grace on the bad days and rejoice in the good. If today you are having a bad mommy day, take heart that each day is new.
Mercies Raining Down 