Thinking Skills

Both Caleb and Hannah struggle with everyday thinking skills. It is different than not listening or following through type of things we had with our first set of kids. No, my guess would be we are dealing with either adoption, lack of early stimulus, or malnutrition issues; all blog entries by themselves

So I am constantly looking for ways to reinforce skills that cause them to think about why and how something works, or cause and effect type things.

So you can imagine I was excited to find these tanagrams and the dollar store. We covered the key cards with clear shelf paper to help them last longer and we were off.

I basically had to build Hannah's for her, but is great to work on big, medium and little concepts. We also are still working on top and bottom relationships as well as upside-down. So who care who actually puts it together, she felt great success anyways.

I let Caleb go alone on this and asked him to try it all by himself. He struggled a little at first, then really went at it. The idea of using all the pieces caused him to rethink the way he had them out. Also turning things so they would work better. Moving gently, so as not to make it all break apart was also hard for him. Caleb also like to settle for just close enough, and I pushed him to do his best to make it just like the picture, and he was finding real satisfaction in having and exact match.

So we go lots of thinking going on, with them just thinking we are having fun!! Us tricky moms!! Well they are asking to play lots now, I guess it won't make me sad to see them work on these needed skills.

Anyone have any other fun ideas to work on those thinking skills?