Which One Is Different?

(29 Months)

I was looking through a couple of my baby/toddler activity books (The Toddler's Busy Book and The Encyclopedia of Infant and Toddler Activities) this afternoon, and noticed that I marked several pages of great ideas that we just haven't gotten around to yet.  During nap time today, I decided to construct two of the activities from the books.

The first one is - can you find the one that is different?  I made the strips of card stock double-sided of the same degree of difficulty (so that they can flip it over and continue working if their sibling needed more time).  The top strip has easy-to-spot different stickers.  The middle strip has one sticker turned upside down.  The bottom strip has very tiny bubble bee stickers with one sticker facing the other way.

 When I invited Wild One over to play a sticker game, he came running to the table (as you can see, he never actually sat down).  I asked him to look at the group of stickers and to let me know if he can find one sticker that is different.  He excitedly said "Big Bird".  We moved directly to the next harder level, and I asked him the same question.  Wild One pointed to the upside down Elmo and said, "this one".  I asked him why he thought that one was different and he said it was upside down.  We moved to the last strip, and as I was saying to Grandpa that we may need to recycle this activity into our cutting tray, Wild One pointed to the correct bubble bee and said, "that one!"  I asked him why, and he said that it was turned that way.  Ok, it's going to the cutting tray.

I'm glad that at least he liked this activity, even though it was very short-lived.  He would quickly spot the different sticker, then run around and come back to the table.  He'd put just his knee on his chair, scan and identify the contrasting sticker and run around again.  Where do they get their energy?