Homemade Things That Go Puzzle

For Tot School last week, I wanted to do something special with the Things That Go book pages that Noah glued together last week. I hadn't yet assembled it into a book, and every time Noah saw the pages, he wanted to study the vehicles and do more gluing. I didn't think the pages would be as interesting to him once the book was put together, so I decided to make the whole thing into a puzzle. I printed out another set of vehicles, and Noah helped me laminate them (using my new laminator!), then I cut them out and put little velcro pieces on the back of them. I glued the pages of the book to a file folder and put little velcro pieces on those vehicles. Viola - Noah had his own custom-made puzzle. He was so excited by it, but he was initially a little frustrated by the velcro. It was his first time using velcro, and he didn't like that the puzzle pieces didn't lay flat. He did the puzzle once, pulled all the pieces off and put them back in the bag, then took them out and did it a second time.

Not everything we did last week got such a great reaction, as you can see from last week's pictures. I printed out and laminated a new color matching game as a way to work on color identification. Noah was really confused by it because you're supposed to put the cards into piles according to color. Everything else we've ever done with cards involves finding the matching pictures, and there were no matching pictures in this game. I'll try it with him again in a week or two, and he might have a better reaction. 

Another thing that I thought it would be fun to do with color was to make cars of different colors (color a car blue, color a car orange... and talk about the colors). I gave Noah all the orange crayons and pencils and asked him to color the car orange, but there was no way he was going to color, because a few of the orange crayons still had the paper labels on them. Peeling off the labels is much more important than coloring!

Noah knows almost all his letters now! He can't verbalize all of them, but he an identify them when asked. He is crazy about letters!