Coloring themselves

It took a bit to get started this morning. It was another of those mornings where they just really didn't want to do their chores, so they'd get distracted cleaning up their toys by starting to play with them, so it took probably 2 hours for them to actually get everything cleaned up.

On today's adventure walk, they decided that we were hunting for thieves who would use robotic bees to look for things to steal. They would find little notes and information along the way, especially at any houses in our neighborhood that are up for sell, that would give tips on how to trap the thieves. And of course, they all had to take turns telling me what the notes said. Kids have really good imaginations sometimes.

I got an email today that talked about how a three year-old, almost four year-old (the age W is right now) can begin to understand that those lines and markings in books and papers actually form words and numbers. I'm thinking they're being conservative on their estimations, since when we do learning time, W is pretty good at knowing almost all his letters and can recognize numbers up to 100 already, although sometimes he needs some help remembering that 91 is ninety-one, not nine-one. And I really kind of assume that my kids are about average intellectually, so it's not some amazing thing that he can do that. B did teach himself how to read before he started Kindergarten though. But D still doesn't know quite all of the letters and he starts Kindergarten next week. So kids all develop and learn at different rates.

For art time today, I took some construction plan paper (I don't know if there's a formal term for it...they're just big sheets of paper that are about 3 feet long and 2 feet wide) and had each of the kids lie on them while I traced the outlines of their bodies and then let them color them. They all kept wanting me to come see how they colored theirs, and they all did things differently. Although if they saw something someone else was doing that they thought was pretty cool, they'd do that too. After D put 8 pairs of eyes on himself, the rest of them decided that maybe theirs needed eyes too. It was pretty funny. H keeps taking his picture and lying down by it. He thinks it's pretty cool to have a picture as big as he is. Since B and D are both a bit too long for the paper, they both bent their legs and came up with pictures that look like they're jumping. I was going to just let their legs be cut off, but they wanted to have their whole bodies on there, and that's what we came up with.

So another slow start, but an ultimately successful day.