Brown bear, brown bear...

Jacob's current favourite game is getting all his people and animals out, and lining them up, or standing them in a circle so they can play the 'hokey-cokey' (which is just too cute for words).

But when he's had enough of that, he gets bored and grumpy and sad pretty quickly.  I feel like I should be 'doing' more varied things with him, although if he wants to spend an hour constructing a precarious line of figures across the living room floor, all trying to pull a camel out of the mud, then who am I to suggest he should be doing something more productive?

We're getting right into the questioning stage, and his thirst for knowledge is already testing our intelligence.  This week's gems have included:

"Mummy, who knows what happened to toast?"
"Mummy, who knows what's in Quorn pieces?"
"Daddy, what's a website?"

Today he set up his own activity of matching animals: he got out a set of animal magnets, went and got out his tray of animals, lay out the magnets, and began searching through the animals for matching ones to lay down on top.  All unprompted.  As it turned out, we only had a few animals which matched the ones on the magnets, so it was a short-lived game, and he wanted to do more matching.

Casting around for inspiration, I grabbed our 'Brown bear, brown bear' book, and challenged him to find five Things of the same colour for each animal.  Results as follows:

Brown bear 

 Red bird

 Yellow duck

 Blue horse

 Green frog

 Purple cat

 White dog

Black sheep

(He ran out of steam when we got to Goldfish, so we'll have to save that for another day)

He had a great time, he was so inventive with the objects he found for each colour, and it killed half an hour of a freezing cold, rainy day.  It made me think that I should have some Montessori-type activities or similar out and available for Jacob to work with, when the mood strikes him.

A while ago, I bought the Toddler's Busy Book, which I really need to unearth for days like this.  I'll be back to report more on what takes his fancy, any suggestions for similar activities will be gratefully received ;)