The Weekly Review: Week 33

Website of the Week:

I browse the web looking for activity ideas a lot. I have about 30 open tabs in my browser at any given time. Often I have two copies of my web browser open with 30 tabs each. Consequently, the computer runs soooooo slowly and will occasionally pop up a message about how I'd better close the browser immediately because the computer is out of memory. Then I panic because I might lose all the tabs. "Oh, no! So many great ideas would disappear forever."

Then I discovered pinterest.com. It is like a virtual bulletin board. Members create boards around categories and they "pin" up pictures with links to the original websites and their comments. Pinterest has a whole category just for ideas other people have "pinned" with ideas for kids. The content is so deep. I could literally spend hours there.

I don't have a pinterest account myself. I desperately wanted one. Organization at my fingertips. Visual reminders of all the cool ideas. I was practically drooling. I requested an invite. I waited impatiently for several days and then I got one. Then I hit a stumbling block. In order to sign up, you -must- sign up through facebook or twitter. That was a big stumbling block for me. I don't want everything I "pin" automatically posted to my facebook account. I don't want pinterest to have access to my friends. It just made me nervous. So I didn't sign up. But I still think about it longingly.

Even if you don't want to sign up though, you should just check it out. It is gorgeous. And so many ideas in one place..... And they're already vetted by other people interested in the same topics.

The Weekly Obsession

If you're a regular reader of the blog, you've probably noticed that I've been on a huge activities-with-the-light-box kick (here, here, here, here). I sincerely apologize if I'm boring you to death. It's kind of the way I work. I get super excited about something and I do it a lot (remember the busy books?) until I get excited about something new and move on for a while. Stick with me and I'll get back to SLP, Apraxia, and other familiar topics soon enough. The kids are finally old enough that we are beginning to do regular "special projects" and it is wonderful. I expect that toddler/preschool activities will continued to be featured heavily for a while.

The Weekly Procrastination

As a certified SLP, I have to get a certain number of continuing education credits to maintain certification. There is no way for me to temporarily suspend certification while I am staying at home, so annual dues and continuing education credits are a must.

Our national organization requires 30 hours of continuing education every three years, or an average of 10 per year. Missouri requires 30 hours every two years. Sometimes the due date for national and state fall on the same year, sometimes not. I have decided that I just need to get 15 annually from now on and I'll always be current. (This is to avoid last year's debacle where I needed to get 30 hours in one month because having two under two pretty much killed all thoughts of continuing ed for 2-3 years).

I joined a pretty nice website (speechpathology.com) that has unlimited access to a nice library of courses for $99/year. I set a reminder in my iPhone calendar to let me know when I had only a month left to my membership. This week it let me know that the time has come. So now I need 13 more hours in the next three weeks.

Instead of hopping right on that, I did lots of light box activities with my children instead. I did mention that I occasionally (umm... often) procrastinate, right?

The Weekly Accomplishment

I sailed right through my husband's first extended business trip post kids. That felt nice. It was a shame that his homecoming consisted of us both realizing we had gotten sick while apart.

Ava this Week

Ava is learning the power of being dramatic and is attempting to determine how much she can use drama to manipulate those around her. Many times this week a scenario went this way:

1. Michael is playing with a toy.
2. Ava decides she would like the toy and attempts to grab it.
3. Michael, understandably resists.
4. Ava bursts into heartrending sobs and plaintively wails, "I want the ______."
5. Now, all of us are wise to the ploy (especially Michael) and so this gets her nowhere except possibly sent to her room until she calms down.
6. Therefore, hopefully, the behavior won't last long. In the meantime, it is definitely pitiful.

The Weekly Michael

When my husband told Michael that he'd be gone for a few days, Michael burst into tears. He was genuinely upset that his Daddy would be away. The next day, he asked his grandmother to help him make a "card" (a tiny yellow post-it, actually) to give to his Daddy when he came home and dictated the contents of the card. He brought it home and put it up on the refrigerator with a magnet. He couldn't keep it a surprise though. He told his Daddy all about the card that night on the phone. It was adorable.

Science on the Light Box: Oil and Colored Water

Light Box Science: Oil and Colored Water

I grabbed one light box and the translucent tray to go on top. I also got out some cooking oil, food coloring, and four 2 oz squeeze bottles filled about halfway with water and gathered the children around the light box on the kitchen floor.

I asked them what happens when you mix food coloring with water. They replied that the water gets colored. "True," I said. "So, water and food coloring mix well together?" They agreed. We then colored each of the four bottles a different color.

Then I poured enough oil into the tray to completely cover the bottom and let them touch and explore the texture of the oil. After a few minutes I asked them what they thought would happen when we put the colored water in the oil. They guessed that the oil would "get colored." I said said, "Let's see." I put a few drops in and we talked about how water and oil don't mix well and so the droplets of water stay suspended in the oil. Then I just let them play. They had so much fun.

They were tentative at first, getting the feel for the squeeze bottles (it was the first time we used them) but soon the tray began to fill with tiny droplets of colored water. It was quite pretty.

They discovered they could make their dots bigger by putting several drops in the same place and even blend colors by using two or more colors in the same dot.

We found we could make two dots side by side that were "friends" until one inevitably got too pushy and absorbed the other. That was a very cool effect and the kids reproduced it many times.

Finally, before cleaning up, I let them get their hands back in. Ava just enjoyed the sensory experience. Michael noticed he could disturb all the big dots and make them into itty bitty tiny ones and enjoyed destroying every big dot he could find.

Cleanup was as easy and rinsing the tray out and then using dishwashing liquid to get the oil residue out of the tray so it would be ready for the next experiment.

Light Table Fingerpainting and Prints

In honor of all the people stopping by from ohdeedoh.com to check out how we made our homemade light boxes, I'm doing a post about another activity we did on our boxes.

Light Table Fingerpainting and Prints

Our light boxes are made from plastic storage bins, so we can get messy on them without worrying about damaging them at all so we didn't need to start by protecting the table. I began by filling an ice cube tray with blue, yellow, red liquid tempera paints. Then we mixed green, purple, and orange as well. At that point I sat back and watched the kids explore finger painting on the light boxes. They began conservatively with one finger and small dots and smears. They worked up to multi-finger rainbows and two-handed smearing of the entire surface.

Then, to continue their interest in the project I taught them how to make prints by pressing pieces of white tagboard onto the light table and then peeling them back up. They loved it. They explored different color combinations and patterns and compared the results before deciding on their next experiment.

We didn't stop until we ran out of time and the kitchen was pretty much a disaster. However, as messy as it looked, the paint rinsed right off of the lids of the bins and out of the ice cube tray in about 5 minutes. Then I let everything dry and picked it all up at once. So the cleanup didn't take long at all.

As a side note, I have succeeded in getting Ava so used to painting that she now doesn't hesitate to dive into paint with her fingers as long as she has a towel nearby to frequently wipe her fingers with. Big sensory/OT success there.

You might also be interested in the following posts:

More Light Table Activities

Homemade Light Boxes

Salt Art

Busy Book / Quiet Book Chalkboard