Art Together

Lolo asked for some more photos on the blog..particularly she wanted photos of Stanley and Wheeler doing art projects at their table. Here are a few from Halima's daily emails.








Capturing photo with the toy camera of their lions.

Rain

Stanley and Wheeler enjoyed the rain that came...

 Completing for puddle jumping...

Playing with Wheeler

We met with Sam and Brenna a week ago on Saturday night. I'm just forwarding the link to Wheeler's blog...
Wheeler's Blog

The routine

We often don't capture pictures of the routine things. April and Eric posted some routine pictures on their blog, so I decided to copy them and post a few pictures of things that just seem so routine right now.

The boys and Halima after reading together

Stanley is not keen on the stroller when he is home with us, but he runs to the stroller after breakfast with Halima. He knows that it means they get to go on a big adventures. They go on walks without the stroller, but to go to the Big Park, it requires the stroller. If Halima turns left, the two boys now says, 'No small park, go big park!!'. They know the big park is to the right.

Below they appear to be in an elevator, I think probably in the library.

The boys on the way to an adventure.

Sliding together

At the zoo

Papa Doug and LoLo joined us at the zoo this weekend.

Categories

Stanley is very inquisitive lately. He loves to ask, "what daddy doing?" or "what you doing?" or  "what is it?" or "What that?". The other night, he held up his toy car from Ikea and asked me "What this made of?" I started to explain that the bottom was made of wood. It seemed logical to me.
I started to explain that wood came from trees and suggested that we go find other things made of wood from trees. This is where I realized that I was in trouble. What is wood? We walked around and it made complete sense to Stanley that his toy kitchen (similar color wood to the car wood color) was also made of wood. He also agreed that the kitchen chairs (slightly different color) were also wood. Then I showed him the dark wood table and said this was also wood but from a different type of tree. At first he didn't believe me, but I kept at it with our wood doors etc. And he realized that a plastic truck he has was not wood.

I was wondering if he was just looking at brown things and thinking they were wood. So, I tried to see where it all broke apart. I pointed to painted wood. He was adamant that this was not wood. I tried to explain it was painted, but after a bit we needed to go to bed. I'm pretty sure he still thinks I was joking about the white wood being made from trees.

In my method to try to teach more about wood, I suggested that maybe wood has a different sound when you knock on it. I've never knocked on the wood items in our house before and it turns out that they all has a different sound. That definitely wasn't a very good classification method--though I learned something.

At this age Stanley likes to put things in categories. He loves to line things up (all of the apples or all of the animals). This got Steve and I thinking a bit more about categories. Colors or exact replicas are easy to classify. But, when it comes to categories, they can be difficult. This must be extremely hard for machine learning. How would you code up a computer to recognize if something in a picture is made of wood versus plastic? So far that I can tell, we must know it mostly by instinct, but that must be learned over time.

Pictures lately

Here are a few pictures of Stanley over the course of the last few weeks. He is so independent lately and he just loves to tell stories to us. Often interspersed with comments about how the hippo at the zoo moved his ear or some other tidbit like that. 

Stanley taught Deli the board for stump.

Proper English way of eating

Wheeler and Stanley creating their art

On a side note, it is so much fun to watch Wheeler and Stanley together. They always run to each other, give big hugs and then talk, laugh and play away the day. Stanley is very sad when Wheeler is not around during the day.

Games

Last week, we went over to Uncle Flounder's house. Understandably, he doesn't have any kids toys. So, Stanley made himself home trying all and every board game at the house. Unfortunately for all of us we ended up cleaning up lots of cards till we hit upon Blokus. Stanley enjoyed playing Blokus with Flounder, which meant talking about shapes and colors and putting them on the board and then taking them off. Stanley played it for 20 minutes till we had to go. (He could have gone on for a while longer).