Building Blocks for His Future

A couple months ago I made a trip to a local teacher's resource store and bought up some small items to jump start Jude's education. You might be thinking "what? he's only 21 months!" - but I don't mean hardcore things like rosetta stone to teach him multiple languages and stuff, I mean things that will get his senses working.

For example, I bought him a large roll of paper, crayons, some rhythm sticks, flash cards, etc. He immediately feel in love with the crayons and often times begs me to get the roll of paper down so he can make one doodle or another. Usually while he's doodling, I'll get right up next to him and start scribbling. He'll doodle while I draw pictures and label them, talk about the object, discuss the colors, relative size and all that good stuff. How much of this he's actually absorbing? I don't know.

The flash cards are an on and off hit, but when he's in cuddle mode, we can sit down and flip through those suckers like it's no one's business. He has his few that he identifies vocally, others that he'll point at an smile because he remembers them/likes them and other's he encourages me to just flip right past because he couldn't care less.

After we started getting bored with some of the same old projects, I decided I wanted to work with Jude on colors. A couple weeks ago I made a trip back to the same store and bought a bucket of colored farm animals. They come in red, blue, purple, orange, yellow and green. There are about 5 different animals - each in two different sizes (so, big pigs and little pigs). My main goal was to teach him the color of the animals and then teach him to identify these colors by sorting them into separate piles. He wasn't having it. He'd sort them into his own piles, toss them into the bucket and in general just play around. Considering these suckers weren't cheap, I was a bit disappointed and was about to give up on that particular task for a little while.

But then I realized his Duplo LEGOS are essentially the SAME thing. Bright solid colors. He loves them, so I thought we'd try it with them instead and it worked! I start a short tower of each color and hand him a block to sort. He still tries to just create big towers of various colors, but with a little coaxing ("that one is yellow Jude, where do the yellow blocks go?") he gets right back into it. Considering this is something we've only really been working on for about 2 weeks - and we had such little success in t he beginning, I'm so proud of how he's doing.

I'm currently trying to broaden this activity by getting him to sort other objects (blocks, cars, balls, etc) but that seems to need a bit more time.