Ring toss, stickers, and bubbles.

Had an extraordinary day thrift-store shopping this week.  Don't know if I mentioned it previously or not, but I absolutely HATE new games.  Where they were once created of metal or wood with glass marbles (that enabled me to break the glass door on my parents' bookcase), the new ones have cheap cardboard boards and plastic "marbles".  I say this after buying a new "Hi-Ho Cherry-O" game that *I* broke within minutes. 


Picked up chinese checkers, parcheesi, monopoly junior and an extra-large version of JAX. 


Got a few other things that I didn't have ... like basters (think tub toys) and spaghetti measuring devices (think bubble wands).  Also got a few rubber finger puppets that Astrid can use in the tub and a ring-toss game. 

There's no one in this household who doesn't need to improve on the ring-toss game, so I (temporarily ... until we improve) left it in the main living room. 


Astrid is spending more time playing independently now and I was a bit torn on whether I should interfere with her.  Each day she's here, I leave a sticker exercise for her.

She's not old enough to have the coordination for perfection, but I find it necessary (to feed MY internal OCD tendencies) to point out that the mitten stickers are more appropriate for the child's hands than the tree branches. 

Of course she has no experience with mittens, so I'm back to the "which comes first?" argument. 

I think tomorrow's session will include a lesson on how our country's mathematical choice is the Arabic base 10 and how we have no other numbers besides 0 through 9.  She's fond of reciting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, twelve".    Paying attention to her independent play, I also noticed that she's confused regarding some alphabetic symbols.  At first, I didn't want to interfere with her notions, but now feel that (as her teacher) I should gently point out these mistakes.

It doesn't look like I could handle an unschooling situation well.