Lazy Maze Day

The summer is getting away from me.  We had a crazy few weeks at the end of June beginning of July, and it seems like everything has been a bit helter-skelter ever since.  Zoe has taken up speed-crawling in honor of the Olympics, and between chasing her, making meals, and facilitating outings to the pool, beach, zoo, etc. I haven't been having a lot of lazy summer days.   BUT (and I really shouldn't even type this), the nap schedule has become a bit more coordinated and her I am sitting down at the blog again.  

A few weeks ago as I sat staring blearily over my mug of coffee at the kids dumping and refilling and dumping and refilling the legos again and again and again, I found myself bored to the point of screaming.  There HAD to be something more engaging (for me at least) to do with the leggos than refill and dump the box for the 100th time.  I have been trying to think of activities to foster visual and spatial reasoning with Jonathan more lately and had been thinking he would enjoy the puzzle of solving a maze.  So as an introductory activity, I built a maze out of the red leggos on the green base pieces and explained to him that the goal was for the guy to follow the red roads to get to the donuts* at the end of the road.

I had to explain that there was no jumping allowed and I demonstrated to how to hop the leggo man along the road.  I demonstrated by hopping the leggo man along the road and making the wrong choice when I got to an intersection and having to re-trace my steps until I found the donuts.  It didn't take him long to pick up the idea.

He had fun and kept wanting new mazes. But with our modest leggo supply, there were really a quite limited number of mazes I could make and they were all pretty simple.  So I started drawing some on construction paper and they worked great.  It was MUCH easier to draw mazes where the guy follows along the line than the type where he goes in between the lines.  So we stuck with that method.

And in the afternoon I made a stack of them that kept him busy while I made dinner- success!!

*I was secretly hoping he would demand actual donuts when he solved the maze so we would have an excuse to go get some.  Sadly he did not demand donuts, so I was left craving them all day.