Color Themes - Black and White

Xander is 16.5 Months

Since we have completed all of our individual Color Themes, I decided to devote a week to black and white.

We started with a bin of black and white objects.  It included some toy zebras, penguins, and a cow.  It also had black and white wooden balls and some ping pong balls.  I threw in some of the pieces from his Space Toob.  Also, his bean bags made a perfect addition.  However, this was probably the bin he has played with least of all of them we have done during our color themes.  He did enjoy throwing the bean bags back into the bin, as well as balancing them on his head.

We used black markers with a white background on his Crayola Dry Erase Activity Center, as well as colored with white crayon on black paper.

One of the biggest addition to this week's Tot School time was a set of 3 part cards I made him of black and white things.  I have read a lot about Montessori 3 Part Cards, but we have never actually used any.  Because he is so young, we do cannot really use them in the normal fashion, but I thought it might be good for vocabulary building and word recognition.  I am so glad we tried it, because Xander absolutely LOVED them.  I set him in my lap, showed him each card, and put it in our pocket chart.  He immediately wanted to do it again, and then enjoyed pointing to the picture of the word I said.  (For cow he would point and "moo" every time, it was adorable).  I was impressed at how well he did.  He could point to them all consistently, except for penguin.  What also surprised me was how often he would go pull out the pocket chart and complain to me until I set it up to go through the cards with him, sometimes wanting to do them two or three times a day.

If you think your little one would enjoy this activity, you can download our Black and White 3 Part Cards here.

Of course, we also did some of our regular Tot School activities.  We read a ton of books, watched our Your Child Can Read DVDs, and did our Little Reader  and Little Math.

I also decided we needed to get back to working on perfect pitch.  Xander still gets exposure through his Your Baby Can Discover DVDs and Trebellina, but we haven't been working on the actual piano lately.  This week we decided to get back into the swing of things.  I showed him the flash cards that we got with Trebellina and then I used his finger to touch the corresponding note.  He enjoyed the activity so much, wanting to go through the cards again and again.  I was surprised that he liked going through the flash cards much more than just randomly hitting the keys.  He liked the activity so much, I was even able to use playing the piano as an incentive to come in from playing outside.

Since we are still doing color themes, one of his trays is taken up by the black and white bin.  His second tray was his Velcro block.  He did much better at putting them on than last time, but much prefers me to put all the discs on so that he can take them off.

The next tray was the cow from the Melissa and Doug Lace and Trace Animals Farm.  Even though I know he is not ready for lacing on his own yet, I found it super cheap at a consignment sale and decided to try it out.  He can't get the lace into the hole by himself, but he likes pulling it through once I line it up.  He would periodically grab the cow and bring it to me.  Sorry the pictures are a bit awkward, I couldn't let go of the cow.

For one of his trays I always try to do a puzzle.  He is not actually ready to do puzzles on his own, but loves to do them with me.  We will slowly transition into him doing them without help.  This week's puzzle was the Melissa and Doug Zoo Mix N' Match Peg Puzzle.  He enjoyed having the pegs to hold, and wanted to sit in my lap and do the puzzle together almost every day.