May 11: Popcicle Stick Game





                                                

                                                                    Making the "T" was his favorite.

I found the idea for this little game at Ramblings of a Crazy Woman blog.  I pasted Popsicle sticks on construction paper last night.  Today, I gave Ty 6 Popsicle sticks and his own piece of construction paper and asked him if he could make the same shape.  He wasn't really interested in playing until I pulled out the old reverse psychology:  "I bet it's too tricky for a three-year-old!" (Is this bad?!?)  After that he laughed and wanted to try. 

The first page was two sticks in a line and the second one was the letter "T" for Tysen.  He got those just fine, but after that he was more interested in just making his own shapes rather than copy the ones I'd done.  I don't know if this was just him playing around or if coping the shapes was difficult for him.  In playing around with the sticks he did make a pentagon, so I showed him that he'd done one without even copying it...he laughed. :) 



And then Ty came up with a variation on another game we sometimes play.  Tysen has a tendence to fall asleep on the way to pick up Koen from school so sometimes we try find letters he can recognize, busses, count certain color cars, etc.  Ty had been talking about rainbows, starting with which colors are not in the rainbow (have you ever thought of the rainbow in that respect?)  When I asked him if he knew what colors were in the rainbow he said, "Purple, blue, green, orange, and red."  Funny that he listed them in reverse order from usual (and missed yellow).  Since he last mentioned the color red, I suggested we count red cars today, but Ty wanted to count rainbow cars.  It took me a minute to figure out what he wanted to do.  First he found a red car, then an orange car, yellow bus, green truck, blue car, and we had a little trouble with purple but we saw a somewhat grey-purple car and a dark burgundy car so we're calling it good.  Creative guy!

I need to be a proud/impressed parent for a moment, too.  Yesterday while the boys were playing Ty started counting...1, 2, 3, 4...all the way to 22 (!) only missing number 16.  I had no idea he could count that high!  I'd heard him count up to 11 with no problem but the others were a surprise.  I told him is was so proud of him and impressed and asked if he'd do it again...of course, then my silly Ty started counting 1, 28, 13...and laughed.  Silly kid!