Workbooks?

For B's second birthday, my Aunt gave him several workbooks and a cool flaps book.  We had played with the scissors related one earlier (My First Book Of Cutting) when he first started using scissors, but pretty much put them on the shelf to wait until he showed some interest.

Oddly, this week I feel like we're doing a little "school" time every day or so, completely at his initiative.  I have no need to rush this and feel like he is learning plenty at MDO.  However, if he wants to play with them then I'm all for that too.  He first happened on to My First Book Of Tracing  which literally is all about tracing between two objects.  The path gets progressively more complicated and the scenarios a bit more interesting, but it remains drawing a line following the path from one object to the next.  He has done about half of them and seems to like it.  His grip on the pencil is not right, and I've tried to help a bit, but again am trying to be relatively relaxed and helpful without making this stressful or too much like work.

Today, he happened on to Let's Color!  This book is more interesting to me, but he wasn't particularly interested in following the instructions, although we did try.  The first several pages have the little artist draw on existing pictures (ex. adding seeds to the strawberry).  The remainder have the child color in the area(s) in a picture that are white.  It "recommends" colors to be used and it seems the goal is to help them learn to stay within the lines and just fill the white spaces.  We very much did not do that.  He did get some color on the white spaces, but plenty elsewhere too.  He also was not persuaded that anything needed to be colors other than blue.  He went through the entire book with blue crayon and I'm not sure the intended lesson got across, but he had a good time.

My personal favorite, however, is an Elmo sticker book (that of course I don't have a link to).  I bought it at Barnes & Noble last fall to take on the air plane to STL.  All the pages are slick such that stickers can easily be added and removed.  There are at least 8 pages of stickers and each page is divided up to correspond to the pages in the book. (There are TONS of stickers). The stickers for a given page are tied to a theme-- school, food, animals, etc...  There are little activities with the stickers for a given page.  Sometimes, you are matching the sticker to the appropriate "shadow" or grayed out thing on the page that is the same shape.  Other times, it is more decorating a room or something free form.  At times, it is part of a more explicit learning activity, such as grouping all the green foods or adding enough apples to get to a given number.  Last fall, he just pretty much was slapping any stickers on whatever surface he fancied.  Now, he is carefully lining them up with the proper shadow on the indicated page.  It is tons of fun and of course I love stickers:)

I don't know where all this is going, but thought it was an interesting developmental moment.  I am glad we had the books around so that he was able to happen on to them when he was ready.  I'm still not really a workbook/flashcard kind of parent for kids this age.  That said, for the moment we're having a great time and I'm glad to do it if he is interested as I admit I was the nerdy kid that kinda loved workbook pages way back when.

Ps. In more exciting news, B would want me to share that he got new Toy Story sheets and a blanket today.  He loves them!  He has been telling everyone we've talked to.  SO adorable!

P.P.S. Those are affiliate links as usual so if you buy something from Amazon via those links I get a small percentage of the sale, just fyi.