Five Senses: Touch

For the next few weeks we'll be focusing our little lessons on the five senses. I started with touch, because Charlie and Lily have definite aversions to certain textures when it comes to touching and eating and I want to work on that. We read a few of our touch and feel books, like That's Not My Bear and Baby Einstein Touch and Feel Farm Animals and learned the names of the different textures. We also played with a lot of pasta!

We started with dried penne. I gave Charlie and Lily some pasta in a big container, along with some measuring cup scoops and some smaller containers and showed them how to transfer the pasta from one container to the other with both their hands and the scoops. Lily really enjoyed this activity. She was pretty good with the scoops!
Later in the week I boiled the pasta, buried some Mickey and Sesame Street figurines beneath the noodles and showed Charlie and Lily how to dig them out. (Actually, I only buried Goofy, but Lily decided her other figures looked lonely and she added Ernie, Cookie Monster and Elmo to the pasta.) Charlie HATED this activity. He poked one finger into the pasta, made a terrible face and refused to touch it again. So more work is needed there! Lily touched the pasta enough to rescue her friends, but basically moved the noodles one at a time instead of digging in them.

For art we did ice cube painting. I froze some washable paint and water in a cupcake tin, then gave the colorful cubes to Charlie and Lily to paint with. Charlie really liked this activity and got pretty into it. Lily wasn't too thrilled with the cold - she sort of pushed the cubes, or circles I guess, around with one finger and then got annoyed when she got paint on her hands. Lily has fallen in love with the Cookie Monster and Elmo dolls we bought her and Charlie at Sesame Place. She carries them around, talks to them, hugs them, and plays with them all the time. Here they are joining Charlie and Lily for a tea party, complete with Teddy Grahams.

Elmo and Cookie also join us for meals. When I say, "It's time for breakfast/lunch/dinner" Lily runs and grabs Cookie and Elmo and puts them in "their" seat at the table. At first just Elmo joined us, but now Cookie dines with us as well. This provides a slight problem at dinner, when both Joe and I want to join Charlie and Lily at the table and Elmo and Cookie's seat is actually MY seat...