(faint)
While I am realistic in knowing that he will be behind his peers in most areas I also see how fast he learns things. His memorization, and retention of that knowledge, is beyond comprehension. By the age of 3.5 he recognized all the uppercase letters of the alphabet and their sounds. Shortly after that he showed me that he could count to 15. A few months later I discovered that he new all his colors: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, black, brown & white. He has also learned to recognize the lowercase letters/sounds and recognizes his written name and his siblings written names.
Move over Einstein!!
While browsing the internet for school-related activities and supplies I came across The Fishing Pond , a school supply store about 30 minutes from home. I looked over their website and found many MANY things I wanted. (Did you hear my bank account trembling?) I narrowed down my list to the must-haves, waved goodbye to the soon-to-be-Kindergartener as he headed off on his way to preschool this afternoon, jumped in my van and high-tailed it to the supply store.
What a wonderful place. I must say, I got giddy when I walked through the doors and saw all the fun, educational activities that surrounded me. (I swear I felt my debit card tremble again.)
However, I am nothing if not disciplined. (yeah right!!) I stuck to my list of must-haves quite well.
The *Memory Matching* game is going to be used to teach Andrew how to classify items into groups, like: all animals in one group, all foods in another, etc.
The *Opposites* puzzle will help him learn opposites. (now there's a no-brainer!)
The *Snap Cubes* will help him learn sorting (by color), sequencing (red, blue, red, blue, red, etc), counting and hone his fine motor skills as he has to snap & un-snap those little buggers.
The two foreign-looking objects at the bottom of the picture are not large Gummy Bears. They are called Grotto Grips. They fit over a pencil and direct your fingers to their proper placement on said pencil. Andrew has major problems in this area and I'm hoping that these will do the trick.
Even if none of these things do what I intend for them to do (kinda like my kids) I think we'll have plenty of fun playing with them anyway.
