Structures

We've been doing from the Structures lesson and inspired by it for a few days.  We started at my parents house with my nephew.  I'll be honest, I couldn't figure out how to fold the Strong Shapes, except for the cylinder.  I tried but after nearly a week of very little sleep (thanks to Littlest's sudden need to be rocked to sleep and hold my hand all night) my brain just wasn't functioning at it's highest capacity.

I gave my nephew a few of the letter cards and he did his best to twist the pipe cleaners into the same shapes.  Obviously sinuous letters like S were easy but he had a harder time with some of the others.  Miss M wasn't interested in participating at this time and I didn't push it.

We did use the pictures to create the shapes with straws and pipe cleaners.  Miss M enjoyed figuring this out, although it was a bit over Littlest's head.  We turned the triangle into a necklace, which caught her attention, though.

I talked with my nephew about which shape was the strongest (he guessed a square).  I think it would have been a good idea for me to elaborate on this by showing pictures of buildings with triangular elements, as well as bridges.  We spent some time building the strongest structures we could with his blocks (unfortunately, no pictures).

When we finally got home from our long car ride, the girls wanted something to do so I had them build with their blocks.  Of course, they chose to build castles for their princesses.  I think they did an amazing job.  I did help them with spacing their pillars and we talked about how if they wanted it to stand up, the base of each block had to be completely on top of the one below it, not hanging off.

Another activity was more shape-related than structures but it worked on their fine motor skills.  Thanks to Mother Goose Time, I have a plethora of foam shape pieces and at least two nice sets of tweezers.  I dumped the shapes on the floor, gave them each a set of tweezers and containers (because sharing is not a strong skill right now) and let them have it.  It actually kept them occupied for about five minutes.  Miss M chose to only pick up pink shapes while Littlest seemed drawn to the tiniest ones.