Jump Out Like Ninjas! Sofi And Games

Is a new game Sofi and play. We hide in the closet and then "Jump out like injas." Am I teaching her bad things? I'm sure she still has no idea what a "Inja" is.

Another game Sofi likes is concentration - she can't play it with a full deck, but we used QuickCards from www.plaincards.com to make a deck of cards with various shapes on them. That was a fun process of me asking her: "What shape do you want on the next card?" And then either letting her choose an image from Google or drawing it in Gimp.

Tried to see if she could play a "Go Fish" variant with the same deck, and she sort of could, with much hand-holding (and revealed cards), but it seemed like it was stressing her out. She was biting her thumb and looking worried when I'd say to her, "Do you want to ask me if I have any squares?"

Now that she's talking in complete sentences and saying new constructions every day it's hard to tell what concepts well be too advanced for her. Frequently she'll say, "I want to play a new game!" And we'll try to make something up out of components from other games and it will almost always fall flat - she doesn't get the idea of rolling a die and moving that many spaces along a track (although she does love to roll dice just for the sake of rolling dice...hmm...maybe some kind of one-die craps?); she doesn't get the idea of "winning". One succesful game was just to pull Fisher-Price animals out of a bucket and put them in a "zoo."

I didn't realize how brilliant the "Melissa & Doug" wooden jigsaw puzzles really were until we got Sofi some other wooden jigsaw puzzles that were more photorealistic. The Melissa & Doug ones have big tabs and the things in the puzzle are carefully placed to overlap clearly across multiple pieces, so it's more obvious which pieces go together. Sofi can do Melissa & Doug ones but not the less abstract ones we got at the Seattle Zoo.

We ordered "Go Away Monster" and then decided not to play it with her - she doesn't even know what a monster is yet, as far as we know, so why ruin that?