Avery Developing her Fine Motor Skills

I'll be the first person to tell you that I am TERRIBLE about teaching Avery things. I generally have the attitude of "she'll learn it eventually and there's no reason to push her." As a result, Avery didn't learn her colors until about 2 months ago. She said that everything was orange. Not kidding. Troy and I finally were like, "ummmmm, what's her deal?" And then we realized it was because we weren't making a real effort to sit down and teach her.

I'm not above bribing. Every day, after lunch and dinner, Avery sat down at the table with Troy or me and we learned colors. With M&Ms. That's right. She was allowed to eat the candy if she got the color right. We gave her good incentive. And then she was constantly like, "can we do chocolate colors?" It took about 2 weeks of daily effort, but she now knows almost all her colors. The main ones anyways. She has a really hard time with things like gray, teal (or any shade of that kooky teal/green/aquamarine color) and marigold (where there's a fine line between orange and yellow).

She knows about half of her letters, but again, we aren't really pushing it. Like at all.

She recently got SUPER interested in coloring and drawing pictures. I could not be more proud of her tripod grasp on a pen or marker. It's gorgeous. She colors for at least an hour a day. Here are some of her pictures:

Her VERY first smiley face!

Look at that detail:

She colored this whole picture by herself:

I love how she colors the letters at the bottom. She notices the weirdest details to color. Most kids would color the dress and focus on the main part of the picture. Not Avery. She colors the spines of the books and the architecture in the background:

I helped color some of the blocks on the left side, but she colored the rest of this one too:

I just love it. She is actually out of pictures in her coloring book now, so I have to go get another book for her to start on. In addition, I want to get a handwriting book that is similar to Handwriting Without Tears especially since her grasp and control is so good! Here are few free downloadable pages if you are interested in how the program works. The program teaches numbers and letters using basic rules and funny directions for kids to learn the proper way to write. It starts with easy concepts first, like horizontal and vertical lines. So letters like E, F, L, T, and I are first. Once they master certain skills, it goes to other letters that are curved like C and O. Then it combines the 2 concepts for other letters like D, P, B, and G. You get the idea.

So anyways. Hopefully we can get some of those books and some blank lined paper to practice. As a side note, we enrolled Avery in preschool for the fall, starting August 26, 2014. She'll be going on tuesdays and thursday all day. Troy and I were really impressed with the school when we took a tour. The FIRST GRADERS were diagramming sentences and doing basic algebra (4 + X = 7) and Troy almost started crying. We were both like "ummmmm, what?!?!? We didn't diagram sentences until middle or high school." Crazy.