Exercising the Brain

Braylon was sick with a fever, cough, sneezing, and runny nose all weekend.  He didn't eat a thing yesterday, but has gotten his appetite back today and has no fever.  This, coupled with the weather, has left us inside watching movies for most of the past two days.  Even though Braylon was feeling better, we still couldn't go outside because it was raining again.  His toys don't entertain him that long and we weren't watching movies all morning again, so I decided to whip up a few games to play.  We also painted and played with his cars.  He got to exercise his brain, and it actually made the morning go by faster than if we had just watched a movie.  We had fun, too!

He has gotten a lot better with his painting.  The paint used to end up everywhere, BUT on the paper.

One of the games we played was matching brown, black and white objects into the correct spot on the egg carton.  He got this one down pretty quickly, since we've done it with all the rainbow colors before.  He knows all those but does not know brown, black, or white 100% yet.

You can see the wheels turnin' in that little brain :)  I love watching him think for himself and learn.

Next was math, my favorite subject.  He worked on number recognition and counting by placing the spoon on the card with the same amount of dots.  I think I expected too much on this one, but he started to get the concept and also was able to name the number he saw on the spoon.  I had to count the dots for him.

The wheels are turnin' again!  He said the number that was on the spoon.

Another activity we did was matching the uppercase letter to the lowercase using Easter eggs.  I ordered a bunch of these from Oriental Trading the other day, because there's so many things you can do with them, other than have an Easter egg hunt.  Braylon knows all the capital letters, but does not recognize its lowercase on the letters that look different than the uppercase.  For example, he can say "E" when he sees the capital, but doesn't know that "e" is also an "E."  Hopefully, this little activity will help.  He loved it, and even asked to do it again after I had put it away.