The Gumby's World series is a journal of how we spend our days with Gumby :)
This past week I re-organized Gumby's toy shelves by putting away things that she is not using and making what she does use (or would if she could easily get to it) more accessible. Gumby now has a new space for arts and crafts that is within her reach. It is still a little cluttered, but I hope to also be able to rotate some of the items to keep it new and interesting.
We also got a large plastic flower shaped plate to hold current projects and/or new items.
The rearranging resulted in a re-discovery of forgotten music items such as music shakers, piano and drums. We have been having fun making music and dancing! Putting her markers, crayons, glitter, window crayons, paper and coloring books where she can get to them has renewed her interest in art. This week we colored, drew - she is refining her own Mickey Mouse drawing - and created Valentine's Day cards for family members.
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| Gumby's Mee Mou (Mickey Mouse), drawn by herself |
We read books, built jigsaw puzzles, played with her Potato Heads, buried each other and built with pillows, played ball with her huge 24" ball (she kept laughing if we would bounce it on her head), ran around the island ... all favorite actives of hers! She was also able to get to her rubber ducks easier so we sorted them into squeaking and non-squeaking kinds.
Gumby also loves cooking and has since she was 7-8 months old or so. She loves mixing, dumping, pouring and tasting. This past week she helped me to make veggie paella, home made spaghetti sauce, veggie enchiladas and cookies. This time, she noticed the ingredients on the box of cookies showed that we needed eggs and water.
Another new and exciting thing she did was correctly read a book out loud to herself. I know she probably has the story memorized and is describing the pictures, but it was both accurate, adorable and exciting!
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| The book Gumby read aloud to herself |
Gumby loves having the TV on with either Mickey Mouse or Special Agent Oso, usually for company, background noise or ideas. Sometimes, I worry about having the TV on all of the time, but looking through this list of what we did last week, I guess we do things!
We definitely are not opposed to technology, Deeda and I both having degrees in Computer Science and we always partake in technology together. As such, Gumby is quite proficient at working our touch screen cell phones, Wii, and iPad. Her favorite thing to do on the phones is a sliding puzzle of Mickey and company. Who else? :) On the Wii, she likes to ski, race cars and shoot targets. Usually she watches myself or Deeda play, but sometimes will play herself. She does know how to take games out, put them back into the case, get a new game out of the case and load it into the Wii.
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| Skiing on Wii with Mamma |
On the iPad, she enjoys cooking food and rearranging furniture in a restaurant, puzzles, drawing, coloring, hopping frogs or just about anything else. Lately, her favorite game is this physics strategy/puzzle game called Cover Orange.
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Gumby Enjoying Cover Orange on the iPad with Deeda |
Gumby and I spend our days immersed in play. She is constantly learning what she wants, when she wants and how she wants without having to separate life experiences into subjects or play time versus learning time. It is all intermingled, inseparable and fun. We follow her interests wherever they lead and encourage her to explore her world. It is impossible to go through life, even one day, and not learn something - try it! All learning is valuable. Life is learning.
