Last week before we went on vacation we spent time talking about how each of us are special.  Every child is special and different, but with identical twins it can be harder to find those differences but even more important.  As part of our self-awareness focus, I really wanted to highlight what each girl likes and how they are different so here are some of the activities we did .  And while I chose this focus because of the girls being twins, really I think the activities are things everyone can do, especially amongst siblings or friends.

We actually kicked off our differences day with the Creation Sculpture from our “God Made Everything” focus.  This was a nice segue from God making everything to God making us and making us each different.  We looked at how our sculptures were different just like how people are.

My Name is…

Part of what makes us special is our name so we decorated these wooden letters I picked up at Michaels.  We then hung their names up on the door of their room to mark their special place.  The girls loved painting their letters, which was a lot like the crosses we made at Easter time.

Favorite Things–Rank Order

Zoe’s pyramid of favorite things. She chose art as her favorite.

And this is Mia’s pyramid. She chose swimming as her favorite.

This activity came from the additional resources provided by  The Complete Daily Curriculum by Pam Schiller and Pat Phipps.  This book really is great if you are doing activities with your preschoolers at home.  You can find the worksheets here. We colored the pictures and then cut out the cards to put them in order and glue them on the pyramid.

Rank order activities are hard, even adults have trouble with them.  In order to make it easier I would put just two cards out and have Mia or Zoe choose between those two.  I asked “What would you pick if you could only do one thing?”  Their answer went to the top of the line.  Then we compared the card not chosen and a new one.  If the new card was picked, we then put it up against the card before it.  Eventually we were able to get the cards in order of preference and then glued them onto the pyramid.

It was so much fun to see what order the girls put the activities in and what they prefer.  I found the differences in their pyramid fascinating and it gave us a lot to talk about as a family.

Venn Diagram

Alright, this was clearly the teacher in me coming out to have the girls make a venn diagram about themselves.  But it really was fun and interesting.

I just took a large sheet of construction paper and divided it into thirds–one column for Zoe, one of Mia, and the middle one of both Zoe and Mia.  Then we talked about different things to see what they had in common and what was different.  I’ll be honest, it was hard to find the differences.  The girls like a lot of the same things and also are typical three-year-olds who like whatever answer they would hear.  So one would answer and the other would say “Me too.”  But we eventually found things that are different and the same.

I think it would be interesting to do this again later down the road to see how they have changed and grown.