Cutting and Number Recognition

My mother-in-law gave Arin a new high chair. Today was the first day that we used it. It is awesome. Before, Arin would stand on a chair at the table and do her crafts. Now, with this high chair, she can sit and see the table and also be close to the table. Thanks Grandma Peterson!

I've not done much scissor practice with Arin. In fact, I think we've done exactly no scissor practice. Several months ago, before Arin was even two, I had been using some scissors and laid them down. Of course, Arin came behind me and found the scissors and she decided to give them a try. She had on a brand new dress (first time she had worn the dress). She was trying to use the scissors, but it didn't work out so well. She ended up with a nice big hole in her brand new dress. So that was enough to deter me from allowing her to use scissors.

However, she is bigger now - two and a half! So I thought we'd give it a try again. I saw this activity on Chasing Cheerios. At first, I had to supervise pretty closely with Arin cutting the paint chips apart, but soon she was able to do it on her own. And loving it!

Today, I was looking on A Listmaker's Life blog, where I found this activity for number recognition. Ok, so her game was much cuter with little bunnies, but I wanted to use our paint chips for more than one thing, so that's what we did. The original game was for number recognition of 11-20. Arin can count to 30, but doesn't seem to recognize any numbers other than the single digits (1-9). So I numbered the paint chips 1-20 (didn't want it to be discouraging if she couldn't recognize any of the numbers). On four of the paint chips, I wrote the word hop. I wish I would have written the word clap instead. Arin was running a fever yesterday, so I didn't want her to do a bunch of bouncing today. I wanted her to still take it easy. So whenever the 'hop' cards were drawn, I just had her clap, which proved to be super fun. Anyways, first we played the game where Arin turned over all of the cards (one at a time) and said what the number was. If she got it right, it went into her pile (face up), if she got it wrong, it went back face down into the play pile. Next, I turned 3-5 cards over face up and put them in a row in front of Arin. Then, I asked her to find a specific card. "Where's the 15?" etc. She did fantastic with this, with only making a couple of errors, which surprised me because she wasn't so good at naming them herself. Finally, we played the first game again, taking turns turning over the cards. This time she was much, much better at naming the numbers herself with little or no help.

I figured we'd save this game and play it again another day. Arin had other ideas. She had so much fun cutting the cards that she asked to use the scissors again, which I let her. She shredded the cards, which was ok, because it kept her entertained for quite a while.