Couldn’t wait to share these. This many pix is an experiment.

Let me know if these are too much (Teena) and clutter up your modem– I’ll still do pix if you want, but maybe not so many in one post?

I didn’t think to get out the camera until the second activity, but you can see what we’ve got started.

This is Natasha’s sweetly pleased with herself look. (I think she got it from my “I’m pleased but don’t know what to say” look)

I set the kids’ table inside the baby-pen to keep all the pre-school stuff from the baby (they started with playing with beans), and the mess contained (they have to clean up each project before getting a new one).

Elisha was *really* not this pleased to be locked out.

Though he did show a remarkable (and basically new) interest in sitting still and listening to stories. We got all the way through Going on a Bear Hunt for the first time. It was like he recognized his regular source of entertainment (Melody) was unavailible, and “Well, I guess this is entertainment too.” The cutest part was when he would repeat “Uh-oh!” at that part of the story.

So this is good for Elisha too. I’m a little nervous that it might create a (new) “mom entertains me” mentality, but we’ll wait and see.

They played with dried beans first– scooping, spooning and pouring with different-sized containers and spoons– then got the lovely practice of detail-work getting all the loose beans re-collected. Natasha practiced with her little broom.

After that I brought out the big beads that have been out-of-reach for a while and suggested they match beads by color.

Then we did playdough with some letter-cutters I got from Dad’s school’s stuff-dump last night. One advantage of this over magnetic letters is that you don’t run out of the letters you need– you can just make more 🙂 .

This was also the first word the girls got the sound-it-out figured out on. The blending of sounds has been a concept just beyond them every time we tried before. They both “got it” at the same time, which was sweet, since Melody’s feeling (being) increasingly left behind in some things.

And then here they all are in rubber boots outside– probably no one is in boots that actually fit, but the novelty-factor beat out any discomfort. (Natasha requested they be brought out of the garage to wear in the wet grass.)

So there you go. First day. Not even done yet.

Not sure how far or long this will go– but (especially!) getting a specific space figured out has made it more likely to carry on.