Dinosaur week

We spent all last week talking about dinosaurs. It started with me doing a muffin tin meal for Douglas and using our dino sandwich cutter. Below is what transpired and I must say Douglas loved it and I loved it too.
top L to R: dino food (fish crackers), dino nest/bed (noodles), dino sandwich,
bottom L to R: dino eggs (yogurt raisins), dino flower (strawberries), dino POOP (choc chips)

We then checked out several dino books from the library and made two dino crafts. Below is one that we'll keep. Those are clothespins and the idea is to match the shape on the clothespin to the shapes on the dino.

Shapes

I've decided to start weekly themes for Douglas. Through play and crafts I want to "teach" him things. The theme for this week is shapes. We are doing a different thing each day to learn the basic shapes. Today we read Douglas' shape book and then with masking tape we made a large square, circle, and triangle on the kitchen floor. Then we "drove" Lighting McQueen, Mater, and Filmore (all from the movie 'Cars') along the shapes. Douglas mainly just pushed the cars on the kitchen floor. However, I would have Mater and say "Mater wants to drive on the triangle, show him where that is" and he would do that. It was fun playing with him. He is into the characters from the movie Cars BIG time right now. He got the blue Lighting McQueen and Filmore for Easter and he already had red Lightening McQueen and Mater so all day yesterday and for most of today so far he's been pushing his cars around. Today is Tuesday which is our day for Muffin tin meals (see previous post). So I kept with our shape theme.Egg (circle), Milky way (square), grapes (circle), ham (cirlce attempt), cheese triangles, square crackers .

I thought the purpose of this muffin meal was in vain until at the end he held up a piece of cheese and said "look, triangle." So rewarding!

Crafts

I've started a couple new things with Douglas. We've started doing crafts. He loves them and so do I. A blog I found has ton of preschool type crafts and sometimes books that correspond to the craft. Last week we checked out a book on garbage trucks and then made a garbage truck. Douglas sponged painted on the cardboard I cut out. He enjoyed it. We talked about the squares, circles and triangle that made up the truck. He also made a cute flower with water colors and today we did the letter E. He colored the E while I cut out eggs from misc. paper. He also used an egg and bunny stamp on it.

This is something we will definitely continue. I've made a schedule of crafts to do this month with him and things to teach.

The other thing we started today is muffin tin meals. I saw it once and didn't thing of it much until I found this blog. Every Monday is "Muffin tin Monday". She puts out a theme and gears the meal toward that theme. It is put in a muffin tin. I thought it was such a cute, clever break from the ordinary. So we will start doing Muffin tin Tuesdays b/c I want to see what people do on Monday. The theme this week was Easter/spring. Here is Douglas' meal.

Starting at the top left: drink, peeps bird, "bird nest"/spaghetti, pistachio pudding with sprinkles, bunny face bread, lady bug apple

I perhaps had more fun putting together this meal than Douglas did eating it, nevertheless, he did enjoy it. I think he'll get more into it as we keep doing it.