If you give Diego a heart to weave...

Do you ever feel like you live in a Laura Numeroff book? The plan this day was to weave with a heart like we saw here at the Adventures of Bear. Things went as planned for a couple of minutes......

until Diego decided that the strips of paper would make great letters so he ask for tape.

When he taped the letters together, he remember that we were going to decorate for Valentines day and he asked to tape the letters to the cabinets......

then to the fridge. You can image how my kitchen and bedroom AND living room looked after this.

Update on French

I am very proud to say that Diego has mastered his colors, numbers, and the words for please, thank you, hello, and good-bye in French. We rented a Brainy Baby video and I was surprised how much French we were both able to learn. He will now randomly say a color in French and after we count something in Spanish we always recount it in French. I am very encouraged.

Next on the agenda: Some of my blogging friends have directed me toward some great websites and even classes in my area. (Merci!) Because of time constraints we are going to continue renting videos from the library and visiting websites for now. I have tried to check out some simple vocabulary books but the French pronunciation is SO difficult for me. I am used to the word sounding like it is spelled like in Spanish. I am hoping to get Diego (and possibly me) into some sort of class this summer when we have more time.

Other news: I am taking a break from the weekly "Toys" post for a couple of weeks. Right now the boys spend 90% of there time playing with playdoh and various blocks. I will let you know when I will be back.

Valentines Math

We have been working on A LOT of math lately since Diego has been showing so much interest in numbers. Here are a couple of activities that we did this week.

Ok, so I got a little carried away on the stickers here. The plan was for Diego to hunt for and then count the number of the different types of hearts on the card (just little the Christmas Tree we did for Christmas.) Since I put too many stickers, it was a little difficult for him to count them all with out losing his place. We ended up using it more as an I-Spy kind of activity. It was still fun and I put it on a piece of foam so we can use it again next year.

I made these pattern sheets with heart stickers. (Can you tell that I got a great deal on 1000 Valentines stickers?) Diego has a hard time with patterns. The next time I make it I will make just one type of pattern at a time and repeat it many times.

My little Dino-boy

Mateo has developed a great love of all things dinosaurs lately. He even wants to sleep with his hard plastic dinosaurs. (Yes, I know that can be dangerous. I sneak in and remove them when he falls asleep.) While Diego was at school the other day, Mateo and I had some rare time alone. He, of course, wanted to play with his dinosaurs. I took the opportunity to take some pictures of my little Dino-boy.

Valentine's Cards

We just started making our Valentine's cards and Diego wanted to make a book. I cut out a large red heart and several small white hearts and stapled them along the back.

(I have no idea why some pictures are right side up and some are sideways since I took them all the same way.)

Here is the front cover. We added "Te quiero" or "I love you!" Diego can already identify this written phrase because I draw a picture and write "Te quiero" on a note in his lunchbox for preschool.

Next I wrote the name of all of our family members on each page and Diego drew their pictures.

Diego told me that you can't see my face because I am looking the other way.

Papi has a large head because he just ate a hot dog.

Mateo. That is his hair above his head. Mateo is very "chiquito" (little).

Our dog Nacho.

We had one page left over so I asked Diego what else he loved. Of course, he said Transformers and robots. I planned to give this card to someone but I am definitely keeping it. We are going to have to make a couple more for the grandparents.

Free Printable Bingo

Today I was not inspired by any of my kids' toys enough to talk about them. I decided instead to share a fun printable BINGO game that I found that we have had a TON of fun playing. A few weeks ago I talked about the game ZINGO that Diego received for Christmas. It continues to be a big hit so I went looking for more Zingo-ish games. I found these printables at DLTK's website. You can choose from several themes (holidays, animales, letters, cartoon caracters, etc.) and customize your own Bingo game. I love the flexibility of this game because you can choose to make it more or less difficult by altering the number of squares on the game card. This would also be wonderful for teaching vocabulary in a second language. I do not have a colored printer so I printed mine in black and white and decorated them with marker.

Here is a Bingo card and the game pieces. We are working on identifying lower case letter so this Valentine's theme game worked perfectly.

I wanted the game boards to last longer so I glued them to a sheet of construction paper. My little helper (Diego) colored the second one. He insisted that the flowers should be blue.

Here is another game with a winter theme that I printed off.
If you posted about a game or toy that you would like to share, feel free to link-up!

Dinosaurios

Before his third birthday, we took our dino-crazed son to see a large anomatronic dinosaur exhibit and it was a big hit. We had a weeked of lovely weather recently so we decided to return now that Mateo is bigger and very much into dinosaurs himself. As you will see below he was not that thrilled.

A year ago Diego would never have done this. First of all, he would have been scared of the dinosaur and he would have been too shy since lots of people were standing there staring. He has grown up so much over the last year.
I have to admit that that dinosaur IS scary looking. I took the picture fast so that I wouldn't torture him for to long. He seemed to like some of the dinosaurs, but from a distance.