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!  
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Tot School ~ Little Sweetie ~ 13 months

Tot School

Little Sweetie is 13 months

While we do a lot, again, I don't have many pictures. I need to get my little camera and sit it next to me while I work with Little Sweetie.  I've been using Rick's SLR camera and while it's wonderful, it's big and a complete baby magnet! 

Here are the hightlighted things I had out for her this week

- Ball and basket ~ HUGE Hit. She really loves ball and is getting good at throwing!

- Laugh and Learn Piggy Bank - This is still one of her favorite toys. She can do all of it herself and plays with it often.

- Bowl, spoon and cup - She's getting good at feeding herself at meal time and enjoyed the pretend practice.

- Blue Bristle Blocks - Wasn't interested in playing with the few in the basket. She likes the big tub.

- Stacking Cups - She loves to play these with Turbo and by herself. She understands the nesting and tries to stack them.

- Baby Touch & feel books - this girl loves her books and will happily sit there while I read book after book.

We played ball a lot this week. Rolling, dunking, and a little bit of keep-a-way by Turbo.

Hanging out with Brother working on food matching. This climbing business is new to me as she is really very daring!

Family Calendar Time.  Little Sweetie really has the cruising down and goes after what she wants!



She is so excited when Turbo builds something for her to knock down.



This girl is into her ACCESSORIES!  She especially loves to use Turbo's (clean) underware as a bracelet.



Or a Hat.



Big smiles for her brother

Going after the chalk

Working together

Working on a drawing

Other Posts This week
~ See what Turbo did doing during Preschool Time
~ Check out our Calendar Time for this year

Head over to 1+1+1=1 to see what others are doing with their Tots!

Tot School ~ Little Sweetie!

Tot School

Little Sweetie ~ 13 months

I think this might be my first real Tot School post for Lil' Sweetie.  I'm not structured in my approach with her. We're just playing together and having fun. Alas, since we're playing together, I'm not taking many pictures. 

I'll start with her 'trays'.  They're not really trays, just pieces of felt that designate an area for the highlighted weekly toys.   We have little cars and a paper tube; Leapfrog Magnet letters; a chunky puzzle; pompoms and a tall container; spoon and bowl; nesting/stacking cups.

The things on the bottom shelf were a smash hit!  The things on the top were mostly unloved. The puzzle got some playtime, but not much.  I rotated their placement throughout the week, but it didn't help much.
These are all the pictures I took of her tray play.  Be assured we played with those stacking cups more times than I can count!

 

The thing she wants the most is Turbo's car. Just to make it interesting around here, Turbo is ultra-possessive of this car. Can you hear the crying from our house every day?  It's worth it to see her very excited face while playing with it.  (we're working on the sharing thing, I hear it can take awhile HA! any tips?)

She played with Playdough for the first time (*blush* didn't even think to give it to her earlier) You can see she really loved it. It is the perfect thing to occupy them both while I'm making dinner. 

We also did a lot of outside playing.  We're outside everyday ~ in our yard and often to a park.

Playing toss with brother.  She LOVES to play ball. 

Intently listening to the directions on how to play toss & catch.

Yep, I know it's not Christmas, but I found this in a box of old things I had for Turbo and had to squish her in it while I still could.  Her legs are bent and the back couldn't zipper all the way  - but doesn't she look cute?  The photo op went quickly down hill. 

Playing with the very old camera. She was able to get the strap on and off as well as crawl with it around her neck. (closely supervised). She really likes to do the things she sees her brother doing! Although it would be nice if she would emulate the walking sometime soon!

Tot School playing really helps ensure I get that focused time with Lil'Sweetie every day ~ Just for her and totally at her level.  I love the joy of just playing with her!!

Head over to 1+1+1=1 to see what others are doing with their Tots!

Bird Cards

Here they are!  If you're interested in using the bird cards we used during our Birds/Nests week, here's a link to the download.  I printed, laminated then cut them out.  If you don't have a laminator, print on cardstock or just plain paper. They won't be as sturdy, but hey, it will be good practice in teaching Practical Life skills that sometimes we have to be gentle with our activities.

I like to leave it in a MS Word document so you can modify it for the birds in your area, but that means the formating can be off sometimes.  Please drop me an email or leave a comment if the file doesn't work perfectly for you.  (of course I'd love a comment either way!)

Download Bird cards 

While you're here, be sure to visit my giveaway! 

Birds & Nests Week

Turbo is 34 months

Sweet Pea is 8 months

Be sure to check out my very first GIVE-A-WAY! I know so many families will love this as we do.

This week was birds and Turbo loved learning about them!! 

Learning Aid: Bird Cards
Since the zoo cards were such a hit with Turbo, I decided to do a similar thing for bird week.   I selected 7 common birds to our area: Scrub Jay, Crow, Sparrow, Robin, Morning Dove, Mockingbird and Hummingbird; printed up picture cards and laminated them.  They really facilitated our activities and he was able to refer and play with them as he thought about it.

 We started each day with one of the birds. We talked about the bird, it's colors, the different body parts and how we thought the bird would talk/sing. Then we looked at some YouTube videos to see and hear the bird. I'll put some links to some videos we liked at the end of the post.

Sensory Tub: Bird Seed (of course!)
He loved swirlling the bird seed around the bowl. A cup, a funnel and he was lovin' it!

Build a Bird Nest
We gathered materials in our yard and mud from last weeks' sensory table and made our own birds nest. Turbo was again not very excited about touching the mud, so I helped him through the first stage. He enjoyed adding the twigs, leaves and bark to make it look real. Then we got out our rubber ducks and pretended it was their nest.

Math - Count the 'eggs'
Cupcake papers, muffin tin and playdough. Fun and super fast. I'd help him create a bunch of 'eggs' and then he'd put the correct number in each tin. Turbo asked for this several times during the week.

Patterns - I don't think he really grasps patterns yet, especially creating them. It's something high on my list to work with him. Do-A-Dot markers and some lacing beads.  He seemed to know exactly what I wanted him to do. He then turned the paper upside down and did the pattern the other way. Then he was done.   If you have any tips ~ please leave them as a comment!!

Songs and Music
We do circle time almost every day. We start with songs, then read a story, then do some songs again. Then it naturally transitions into an "activity" as I call our TotSchool.   We added "Two Little Blackbirds" to our songs this week and I cut some blackbirds and a hill out of felt so we could pretend to be Jack and Jill.  This was highly anticipated each morning.

Bird Feeder
I found one from the dollar store, but couldn't find a great place to hang it outside where we could see it well. So we used an old piece of baguette to make our own.  Turbo smoothed on peanut butter and sprinkled the bird seed.  We placed it on our patio table and got to see a lot of different birds come to partake.

Of course we sprinkled birdseed on our walks too.

Make a Bird
Got the idea from here to use a TP roll tube, paint, google eyes and construction paper to a make a cute little bird.  So fun!

Bird Seed Cookie
Cute idea from here to make a cookie to hang off a tree in the yard. It was not successful for us as it completely fell apart. Could be that I didn't have corn syrup so I used Molasses. Oh well, we had fun making it!

Letter of the Week ~ N n - Nest
Turbo was very perplexed that we were doing N instead of B this week. It was cute how he was always reminding me that 'birds' starts with a b.  As you may know, I use Confessions of a Homeschooler's Letter of the Week resources. It saves me a ton of time and are super cute.  We did the usual letter tracing, number sequencing, puzzle, letter sorting, cutting, do-a-dot pages etc. He enjoys these and it's nice to have similar activities from week to week.  Instead of cutting the color cards to make them matching puzzles, I placed them around the hearth and we called out a color and an action (purple & hop) - then do the action and race to get the card.

Additional Bird activities ~ We didn't get around to these, but they were on my idea list.
Bird Graphing
I was planning to do a bird graph to track the birds and quantities that we saw throughout the week. We just didn't get to it.  But we'll definitely do it the next time around.

Edible Bird Nest 
I found this cute little recipe for a rice crispy edible birds nest.  We still might do these this week as I have some leftover Peeps and jellybeans from Easter.

Egg Carton Bird Feeder
Can't find the idea link, but it's basically attaching some twine to the corners of the bottom half of an egg carton, filling the carton with bird seed and hanging it in your yard.

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Funny picture of the week
I've mentioned before that Turbo is obsessed with types of cars. He knows them all! He's always checking out cars to see what kind they are. He asks everyone that comes around "What car do you have". He has no concept that one kind might be 'nicer' than another. Here he's 'shining' his bike and tells me "Mommy, I'm cleaning my Jaguar".  I just about died laughing - so unexpected! 

Some good YOUTUBE Videos I remembered to bookmark while we were watching.
Scrub Jay's Taking a Bath (Turbo's favorite!)
Western Scrub Jay
Scrub jay Sings
Cackle of Scrub Jay

Crow Cawing
Northern Mockingbird Calling

Ok, I have to go to bed.  I'll post my Bird Card learning aid as a file to download this week. If you'd like me to email you when I post it, just leave me a comment below.

Tot School

We did a partial Tot School week last week since we had a playdate every day.  Playdates are always interesting. Some days Turbo plays with the other child and other days he just wants to do his own thing.  Mostly during park playdates or with shy kids he tends to go his own way. When we're at home or when he's with older kids (12-18 months older), he plays much more interactivly with them.   It's very interesting to watch the transition from parallel play to interactive play.  Of course Mommy is his biggest playmate right now, and that's just fine with me. The time will quickly come that I'm just the taxi, so for now, I'll enjoy the attention from him!

Cow Milking ~ As a follow up to our Farm Animal week, we 'milked a cow' using a latex glove.  Just fill a glove with water, tie at the top, prick a little pin hole in the tip of a finger, then squeeze like you're milking a cow. FUN!  This made it real for him and he thought this was a very fun and silly activity. Thanks to my friend Sarah for the gloves!!

Do you remember our sensory table from last week - it was dirt.  Well, it rained and I forgot to cover it. So this week we had....MUD!  Turbo didn't love it.  No mud pies for us. He just used the barn to scoop and pour a bit - then asked to wash his hands. 

Speaking of scooping and pouring, he asked for his dried beans again.  Let me tell you they still work! I get at least 30 minutes - if not 45- of mostly quiet while he plays.  I *heart* dried beans!!

Basket Play ~ I brought down a laundry basket to add to our day. It's always fun to see what he'll do with it. This time he was the band.  I tried to sing along with him - only to be told "Don't sing. You are the story teacher. I'm the song teacher"  HA!

Have I posted about his Strider Running Bike?  I saw this first on a review Carisa did last year and made a note this would be a great Christmas gift for Turbo.  Rick's parents bought it for him and we've had it since February. It is AWESOME!! He rides it every day, all the time! You'd think I'd have a better picture of him balancing, but no. He's usually riding while I'm doing chores and such, so this the picture I have.  I have no idea where his other sock or his pants went.   He gets going quite fast and is able to balance for several seconds without putting his feet down and it's usually just to give himself more momentum.  I've been very impressed at the quality of the bike and how much he loves it.  

Cutting
We're doing a lot of cutting practice. In addition to cutting paper, he cut playdough into small pieces. He still struggles a bit with keeping the scissors in the correct position. I like that it challenges him and yet he still asks to do it. 

Balancing
We're putting things on our head and trying to balance them for a few seconds.  He just likes to goof around with this activity right now. It's actually a lot of fun, good practice and a great opportunity for us to get silly with each other!

That's about it for Tot School last week. This week we're doing 'BIRDS and Nests.  I have some more resources to share so stay tuned for next week's post!


SNEAK PEEK ~  I have a GIVE-A-WAY coming at the end of this week! It's going to be about a Super Cool product I recently found. (hint!).