Crazy Busy!

 If you do not know, we are in the middle of an adoption right now so between paperwork, craft fairs, and making items to sell so we can raise money for our adoption, and homeschooling our teenager, AND we watched our friend's 6 and 4 year old for about eight days while they were out of the country adopting two little boys, it has just been crazy busy around here. 

Finally, the day after Thanksgiving we finally got some things done.

Please excuse the PJs... one great thing about homeschooling is that it can be done at any time. This time it just happened to be right after dinner.

 We worked on coloring to help with those fine motor skills

 We worked with the dobbers

 and painting

 Then we moved to using our cards and following instructions.

I would show each of the cards one at a time before putting them on the table, and telling Veronika and Gavyn what each picture was of. Then I would hide all of them and ask them to give me a certain card. Once I knew they heard what I wanted them to give me, I would put it all on the table and repeat which card I wanted. 

We had to work on them not trying to give me all the cards at once and only one card, but they did well!

Next we worked on puzzles

 and blocks

and finished up with some music!

Some other things that we did that I did not get a picture of was a following directions game. I think we need to play this more often!! Because Veronika and Gavyn spent the first year of their life in an orphanage they never had anyone who would interact with them, so they did not learn how to mimic. 

This is an important skill in life, it helps teach a child to do many things so it is one we are working on. 

Normally a child who was raised in a family would just find joy in copying someone else, but a child who did not learn this was a game needs to have a reward for copying. 

I got out our gluten free crackers and each time Veronika and Gavyn would copy me they were rewarded with a cracker. 

I started off very simply, by patting my head, then patting the table, then waving, and clapping. I tried to do things with my face like blowing, but they are not ready for that and would not copy that. 

I know it will take time, but they will get that. It was great to see them copying me in other ways thou!

We read some books sang some songs and after of doing work for a little over an hour we were finished. I am so proud of them, and so amazed they can sit in one spot and do work for over an hour!! Look out world here they come!