Personal Awareness....

- Pleased to meet you!! At the moment we're looking at Personal Awareness and today we were looking at our faces. We started by looking closely at ourselves and our reflections in a mirror. We spoke about our facial features ie how many of each feature there were, what colour, what shape, what size and any differences. We discussed whether they were big or small [ie Mummy has bigger ears than Ethan - only just though lol]. We talked about their uses - teeth for chewing/biting, eyes to see, ears to listen- that kind of thing. Ethan actually knew alot more than I realised but he was amazed when I pointed out that we had eyelashes and spent ages touching mine. We also looked at what facial expressions we could make and had a go at guessing if we looked happy, sad, angry etc.

After this we painted our own reflections with happy or sad expressions onto paper mirrors. Above is Ethan with a happy face. He did really well with this as you can clearly see a smiley mouth, nose, eyes and yes, green hair. Don't all three year olds have green hair???

I had cut out some facial features such as eyes, nose, mouth, ears, eyebrows and Ethan painted them [I had to paint the eyes for him as they were a bit tricky] and once they'd dried he glued them onto plain oval face shapes I'd drawn on some paper and you can see that he got them in exactly the right places with no help from me. He even drew some hair and a beard on the one he's holding in the photo' above.

He also managed to do some cutting out today and did the best he's ever done using his little scissors with only the minimal of help. I had the outline of some shapes for him and he managed to cut out a recognisable square, circle, rectangle and triangle. He already knows all the basic shapes but it was a really good exercise in using scissors which is really tricky when you're little.

We're still looking at our Autumn project but I've had difficulty finding many resources that don't involve colouring/painting which are great but have a limited teaching ability. He's very much a kinesthetic and visual learner so it takes something quite hands on to keep his interest. Books on the seasons seem to be as rare as hens teeth. We're going on an Autumn walk with MKhen in Ocotober so with any luck we'll come back from that with some things we can use. Our trip to Willen Lake Park was good for talking about Autumn and looking at the leaves, trees and seeds [conkers, acorns] but not much to actually bring home and record. Trips out are great but until Ethan can actually draw recognisable things and write a few basic words recording them is going to be tricky. It will all come in time and he's really enjoying what we're doing at the moment.