Pencil Sketching

E and L learned some pencil sketching techniques from their great grandma who is visiting my parents this week.  L was especially interested, and they sat together for at least an hour just drawing and talking. They drew lakes, mountains and trees, and they made paper dolls.  L has continued to make more paper dolls at home.

E's waiting for me to get her more paper, not drawing on a book! lol

Their great grandma is an excellent artist, and my parents have several of her paintings hanging up in their living room. She showed us how just recently, she was showing another grandchild how draw rocks in a lake, and when she made a mistake and erased it, a new way to draw rocks dawned on her. She's been drawing for 70 years and she's still learning, not afraid to admit it, and she showed the girls her new technique. That was cool!

Birds and Thank You Notes

A few recent natural learning moments:

Birds
A few days ago, as E and I were snuggling in bed after having just woken up, she said, "Mom, are eagles nocturnal like owls?"  She was suddenly, for no apparent reason, interested in eagles and owls and asked me a ton of questions.  So we looked them up.  We read that eagles are raptors and hunt for their food, as opposed to scavengers who find dead things.  I told her how the Bald Eagle is a symbol of America.  On a website about owls, she recognized the Barn Owl and the Snowy Owl from the movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole.  We looked for a website that might have a game or something for kids to learn about birds.  Unfortunately, all we could find is one that used information about birds to teach spelling and reading.  She played on it for a few minutes and L enjoyed the puzzles on the site, but it wasn't really what we were looking for.  If anyone knows about a site for kids about birds, please share it!

From owlpages.com

Thank You Notes

Yesterday, we wrote thank you notes to family members and friends who had given us Hanukkah gifts.   E wrote the names on the fronts, wrote "thank you" and signed her name.  L decorated with pictures and glitter.  I wrote the words on a different piece of paper and E copied them.  By the third one, she wrote "thank" from memory, without looking at what I wrote and she was very excited about that.

 

Inventions

Today, E came and showed me pictures of some "machines" she had drawn. One was a "machine that would help people breath if they couldn't breath" and she showed me the air tank and the hose that went to the person's nose.

Then she showed me a picture of her machine to "help people get voices" if they couldn't talk. I had a harder time understanding this one, because my initial thought was that it would talk for the person, so I was asking her "how did the machine know what the person wanted to say?" But apparently I had it all wrong! I *think* it is a machine that actually *gives* people a voice if they can't talk.

Then she showed me a picture of a machine that would give people water. It also had a tank and a hose that went to the person. I asked her where the water came from and she said that "you just have to bring a big, huge bucket of water to fill up the tank." So I asked her where I would get the bucket of water, from the ocean? Or the river? Or the rain? She said the ocean, but then said "wait, you can't drink water from the ocean, can you?" and I told her no and told her about salt water dehydrating people.

Later, I got on youtube and found this while looking for oxygen tanks:

Respiratory Care- Oxygen E Tank

And this, because I was looking for videos on scuba diving tanks:

Turtle Necropolis
This one had video of dead turtles and their bones, so we talked about turtles for a while.
Then I found How To Use An Air Tank in Scuba Diving which talked about this different kinds of tanks.

That led to Nebulizers and we talked about asthma.

Then I found her videos of babies in the NICU using oxygen .

Which led to her wanting to see homebirth videos

Doing and Learning

Some new things E has been doing and learning:

She's drawing circles and recognizable pictures. Until a month or two ago, it was all scribbles. All of a sudden, the scribbles have turned into actual pictures of whales, dogs, horses, family memebers, houses, trees and other things. I still need her to tell me what they are, but once she does, I can see where she tried to put a nose here or a tree branch there. For a long time she would say she was drawing circles, but they were really lumpy and mishaped. I never said anything though, and never corrected her. Now she can draw really symetrical circles. She asked me to draw some squares and copied them, too. She's also doing up and down lines, kind of like an M over and over, and saying she's writing. She does it from left to right from the top to the bottom of the page- something I've never pointed out to her, but she's seen me do it that way when I write, of course.

She's also noticing that there are letters all around us and wanting to know what they say. She points out big ones especially, like the M on McDonald's and other letters on store front signs. She noticed the sign at our park that says "City of Tigard" and wanted me to tell her all the letters. She's also recognizing some letters and asking me to tell her the ones she doesn't know.

A few days ago, she asked me to write SIGMA, which is the name of her aunt's dog who we saw last week. She asked me to write it over and over- probably about 30 times- and say the letters as I wrote.

She always wants to count any stairs that we go up or down. She likes to count her steps too. There is a retainer wall on one side of our apartment building's parking lot. It's made out of concrete stones, about a foot long. I hold her hand while she walks on top of the wall. We've been doing that every time we go to that parking lot since we moved here. One day a few weeks ago, she wanted me to count the stones while she walked. There are 101 of them, and she had me walk back and forth with her and count them at least 10 times.