Tot School

LilSweetie is 24 months 

(During this TotSchool)

She plays so well by herself and is undemanding of my attention for the most part. Actually she takes it further and really prefers to do it herself - story reading, project work, playing with toys.  "Do it myself - Mommy go over 'dare" is almost her mantra. On the other side, Turbo prefers to have my time and attention every minute of the day. He wants to do his school work on my lap (mostly a 'no') and considers me his primary playmate. Too many nights I've put the kids to bed and realized LilSweetie's only 1:1 time with me was story and lullaby before bed. Can someone say Mommy guilt!

So I'm especially grateful to do Totschool with LilSweetie as it's ensuring she gets my focused time. She, now,  understands we do 'school' together and we're both enjoying this time tremendously.

We're using Carisa's TotSchool Printables combined with tray activities.

Since we're doing most things together, I don't have tons of pictures - plus I forget to take them.

This was our first weeks of TotSchool, so I kept the trays to a minimum and used these for two weeks to get a sense of what she really enjoyed, how she'd respond to a toy she'd mastered and what she didn't prefer or seem to understand.

Here's where I keep her trays.

Sorting. She didn't care to do it at all.  Maybe I should have put a picture on the bottom of each container. Even after a week of just playing with the items, when I encouraged her to put the Monkeys here and the Turtles there, she wasn't interested.  Next time I'll change it up and make it more simple for her.

Lacing Snake. She enjoyed this at first and chose it several times. By the next week, she had started to pass it up.

Puzzle. She played with this shape puzzle significantly more than I anticipated.  I imagined it would be easy and boring for her, but no. She chose it almost every day for two weeks.


In/Out/Open/Close.  HUGE HIT. She played with this often for the entire two weeks. She'd lay out the cups and put a ball on top. She'd open the container, put in the balls while counting them, then close it up.

Color Wheel.  This was a completely new concept for her. She'd not worked with clothespins before nor done color matching. She enjoyed this and chose it several times.

 

Lots of drawing on the whiteboard. She does great with the pens so I leave them out for her.

Playdough!

Much more stuff, but seriously inserting a picture to blogger from picasa webalbum is getting frustrating because of some technical problems. I've been trying to post this for almost a week and so I have to just move on.  Darn blogger - I love you and you frustrate me!

Learn more about TotSchool here!  
<a href="http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/TotSchool.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Tot School" src="http://i688.photobucket.com/albums/vv250/carisafrank/Blog%20Buttons/totschool150.jpg"/></a>