Activities Galore

Maddie's getting to the age where she soaks up everything -- her nightly activity routine has expanded to more use of the computer.  Cathy found a great website called Sheppard Software (click Link) with a ton of learning games.  The 'Color Game' really helped Madison with her mouse control (clicking and dragging objects on the screen), after a couple of runs through that game I noticed it really helped Madison on Coloring.com.  The letter game on Sheppard Software is another good one -- you click on a letter at the bottom of the screen and then it identifies the animal that begins with the letter you selected.  The next page takes it one step further and asks you to click on the animal that starts with the letter they select for you.  

We've stepped it up on Little D too.  We found this book helpful with Maddie when she was younger - now that he's pointing and making sounds (I think Dylan says 'ball' now, he will point at a ball and say 'ba'), this book allows him to soak up words to go with the pictures -- all it takes is constant repetition.  As he points at the pictures we repeat them -- followed by us asking him to point to the objects.  At this point I think luck plays a key role in Dylan selecting the object we say... but nonetheless it's fun to interact with your kids....  currently the ball, duck and baby pictures have his undivided attention.

Here's some of Maddie's latest work:

Mouse practice - Maddie has been sending pics from coloring.com to her family and friends.  There are tons of sites out there for coloring -- this one is just easy to remember for some reason.

Keyboard practice - Maddie can type her name by herself.  She's learning how to use the backspace button too!  As you can imagine, there are some typos from time-to-time.

Handwriting - We were doing dry erase flash cards for a few weeks when we decided to revisit the Kumon capital letter tracing book.  This time she breezed through it in under two weeks.  We found that the dry erase cards were a good way to teach Maddie her letters -- the only issue with them is it's tougher to keep good hand control.