Yesterday wrapped up the end of “T Week”.

Adam was slightly more interested in practicing writing this week.

One of his favorite activities was doing Tangrams (pretty impressive “T” word, no?). He actually just called it his “shapes puzzles”. I will point out though, that five of the seven shapes used in Tangrams are triangles, and so that totally works.

The other two shapes are a square and the “tricky” parallelogram (Adam refers to it that way because sometimes he would have to flip it over to make it fit the way he needed it to).

Adam also did a color-by-number picture for the first time this week. I colored the key on the bottom of the page, so that he knew which color went with which number, before I gave it to him.

I think he did an awesome job. Having the numbers as guides made him try to stay inside the lines more the he normally does. If he did cross over in to another number’s area by mistake though, he was quick to apologize “sorry number five!”

Then there was a turtle counting activity where he had to match the number on a card to the number of turtles on a separate sheet. This was fun to watch. I had the turtles all out of order to make it a little harder for him. He would pick a number, then count the turtles on the cards until he found the right one. It was especially funny when he would realize there were more turtles than the number in his hand. He would get so excited counting up to the number, thinking it might be the right one, then when he realized he had counted to his goal and there were still more turtles left, he’d give a very exasperated sigh before moving on to the next card and counting again.

When I brought out the cards the next day though, he took a different approach. Instead of counting each set of turtles to see if they matched the number in his hand, he would count the turtles, then sort through the numbers to find the right one – much more efficient (and he came up with it all on his own).

Adam also did some work with patterns and sorting. I had him sort these turtles and teddy bears, by animal and color. Then I made up some patterns with them and had him complete them.

The next day we worked with a set of just teddy bears. Adam told me he wanted to make a rainbow pattern with them, so I let him.

If you noticed that Adam’s rainbow has two purples – he’ll be quick to tell you it is not a mistake. The rainbow goes, “red, ornange, lellow, green, blue, in-a-go, and violet too”, and since we didn’t have indigo and violet bears, he just made do with double purple.

Once his rainbow pattern was complete he used the bears to do some more counting.

Adam woke up each day asking if he could do school and I loved seeing how excited he got about it each of the activities. In addition to what I have pictures of, we also talked about the life cycle of a turtle (“Turtles come from eggs, but Luke came from the hospitable”), did some tiger and turkey projects, and learned another bible verse (“Thou shall not steal, that means don’t take things that aren’t yours”), among other things.

One of the worksheets he did had rows of trees that were different heights. I asked him to find the tallest tree in each row (it was “T” week after all). He asked me if he could find the shortest tree in each row instead, “I really like short trees, to why I am short!”.

There was also an art failure involving an unattended three-year-old and a stamp pad of ink. Adam ended up with very, very blue hands. Thankfully it was washable and came off easily in the bath. That didn’t stop Adam from giving me a reproachful look and saying, “I need to tell Mabel and Papa about this”.

Thanks for ratting me out little dude.