Seeking Imperfection

I've been following along with the Unplugged Projects, just not posting them during my little bloggy hiatus. I'll have to post what we were up to for rough, hot, and cylinder later. This past week the theme was insect.

Paige is like her mom and isn't too keen on lots of bugs. So we went more of the cutsie route, and made a caterpillar project I saw on No Time for Flashcards. Paige seemed to really enjoy this. She helped me use a cup to trace the circles, and tried doing that for the first time. She also tried to help me cut out the circles, although I generally had to finish the cutting for her. She was able to make the P for her name, and then her A came out like an H, so I made a little curve on the top to turn it into an A. She made the I, and together we made the G. She made the line down for the E, and then I told her where to put the the other lines to finish the E. She also drew the smilie face on the caterpillar. She helped me put the glue on the backs and place the circles on the background. I do admit to a little bit of perfectionism, turning the circles the right way so you could read the letters - but I tried not to put in too much more of my input! LOL She also picked out the different colors for the different circles. My pictures of this project came out pretty bad - I'll have to try and take a better picture of the finished project, maybe in some natural light.


Later, I pushed past my perfectionism to try my hand at making a game. It is more or less my idea, but with a little inspiration from this fishing game and a paper plate alphabet caterpillar from here. I cut out a lot more circles, and made an alphabet and number game. I made a caterpillar face on one circle, and then made a capital letter of the alphabet on each circle, so you could make a giant alphabet caterpillar. Then I made another one, using the lowercase letters of the alphabet. I made the uppercase and lowercase letters the same color, so that she could match the uppercase and lowercase ones, and it would be sort of "self-correcting" that way because the colors would match, as would the letters.

For the number caterpillars, I made one that had a number 1-10 on each circle, and then one that had the number word one - ten on each circle. I also made sure the number word that matched the number were the same color, just like the letters. Then I showed her what I'd made, and how the letters and numbers matched, etc. So far she's enjoyed playing with the uppercase letter caterpillar. She likes to put out the letters and we come up with words that start with the different letters. Last time she put them away she made sure the P was on top - for Paige, of course. It'll be interesting to see how she likes these games as time goes on.

A few pictures of the uppercase game:





I was thinking that maybe someday I could make this into a magnetic game with a fishing pole too - we'll see if I ever get that far.

Amusingly enough, as I've been typing this, Paige has been watching Charlie and Lola on DVD. She started yelling, "Mom, there's a ladybug on the tv!" She showed me, and sure enough, an actual ladybug was crawling around the tv screen, so we took a peek at it. It nearly gave Paige a heart attack when it spread it's wings and flew off - I don't think she was expecting that! So much for being completely unplugged around here - apparently even our insects are plugged in!