Tot School ~ Letter K and more

Turbo is 33 months

Sweet Pea is 7 months

What a fun week we had! It was such lovely weather, so we spent more time outside and less time on Tot School this week again. But there's rain-a-comin' so we wanted to enjoy the sun while it was here.

I'm getting better having my camera handy!! YEA! So we actually have some pictures this week. 

SENSORY TUB:  Turbo's favorite activity by far this week!  I hid a bunch of keys - luggage, old house keys and toy keys. I also put in some key chains for fun.  The one you can see is an adorable keychain from Tupperware that's a replica shape sorter.

Letter Art: We used an idea from notimeforflashcards.com for our K letter art.  Turbo thought this was tons of fun. However, I realized this was the first time I actually cut up his art. I've cut around his art before, but never actually cut it up.  He saw me cut it and got his feelings hurt when I crumpled the extra and put it in the recycle. Mommy felt SOOOO bad!!!  All was forgiven when he saw he got to glue the pieces.

Easter Egg hunts - He loved this! I would hid them in difficult places and give him hints to reinforce 'over, under, behind, above, beside, around, near, closer, too far etc.'    He knows these pretty well, but I learned he gets 'behind' and 'in front' mixed up sometimes.

Household Life:  Turbo has a couple routine jobs he does around the house. He removes the lint from the dryer while I'm folding the loads and he helps me unload the dishwasher. He surprised me by asking to take pictures after we unloaded the dishwasher. Awww!

Practical Life:  We've been working on independent dressing/undressing a lot this week. I didn't get any pictures of our TotSchool time on this, but here's Turbo doing some 'independent study'. HA!

Another 'independent study' was when he started pouring water back and forth from my very large cup into his small cup. I was very impressed that he stopped at the right time when pouring into the smaller cup. He stopped the water right at the little inside line. Guess all that previous water pouring work really helped!
Letter Activities ~ This week was letter K and we did a bunch of the pre-made activities from Confessions of a Homeschooler. Aren't they just adorable! We didn't do as many as I'd hoped because I didn't have a laminator and the thin, flimsy pieces of paper weren't working for us.  So I ordered a laminator WOOHOOO!! I can't wait to do our Letter Activities next week.

Awwww, such as sweet big brother.

Art Projects:  In addition to our Collage Box, we did our new Do-A-Dot makers. These are a huge hit around here.  Turbo's favorite part is working on color blending. He loves to stamp red, then cover all the red with yellow. He shouts ORANGE Mommy - I made ORANGE!

Fine Motor Skills:  We worked with Playdough this week. One of the Moms in our Moms Club gave us this awesome toy. It seriously keeps him busy for close to an hour.

Music ~ As usual, we played the guitar, sang and played the keyboard all week.  I'm seriously considering some violin lessons for him when he turns 3. They don't do guitar until 5.  My hesitation is that I don't want to smother his passion with structure if he's not ready. However, I want to follow and expand on his interests..... 

Science ~ Sink and float. We mostly did this last week, but he asked for it again on Monday. 

Other Activities this week:
Check out the evolving Collage Box Art

~ ~ ~ Tiny Tot School ~ ~ ~

Ok, not really, but isn't she getting so cute!  I love that she's a part of our story and play times. She's so easy going and mellow.  Her latest thing is shaking her head no. Turbo and I laugh like crazy when she gets going. The two kids are very sweet together. Turbo is really gentle and tender with her. He brings her all his soft toys and makes sure that all the hard toys are out of her reach. He got worried and 'corrected' me the first time I gave her his wooden blocks. Yep, that's a protective big brother!  We haven't seen much jealously from either of them about time, attention or toys. Hopefully that will continue as Sweet Pea gets more mobile!

Next week is Farms & Animals; Letter A  _ OK, I've changed it already. My playgroup is going to the zoo on Monday, so we're swapping weeks.  Next week will be zoo instead!  I can't wait!

Tot School - Letter G g

Turbo is 31 months; Sweet Pea is 6 months

We've had so much fun this past month. I must say that with this time off, I'm a bit out of practice in having my camera near by. So I didn't get as many pictures as I'd like.

G is for Grocery Store - again, sorry about the lack of pictures!
- Cut pictures from the Safeway ad and glued them onto a list
- 'shopped' at our pretend grocery store using our play kitchen food & pennies
- Field trip to Safeway!  His first time loose in the grocery store.  All things considered, he did great!  The most fun was the produce department. He helped me pick the produce, put it in a bag and then weigh each bag before tossing it into the cart. Typically I have Sweet Pea in her car seat in the basket of the cart. Obviously that wouldn't work this trip! So I had her in a front carrier. It limited my mobility a bit in chasing Turbo when needed, but other than a minor apple pile tumble, we didn't cause too much damage.   There were so many learning opportunities at the store - Scales, weight, vegetables, fruits, quantity, etc.  The next time I'll leave Sweet Pea with Rick so Turbo and I can do list shopping and more.

Glitter - Lots of texture here and it was fun to draw letters and shapes in it too.

G g matching - Turbo placed all the G g correctly, but when it was time to glue them, he lost interest in sorting.

Shapes with fingers - Surprising, this was a harder for him than I expected. The easiest is the triangle. We're making circles with our arms as it's challenging for him to make them with his fingers.

Money Play - Turbo loves playing with coins. He typically carries them around, puts them in his 'purse' or plays with them in his Cozy Coupe Car. This day he was dropping them in the bottle - figuring out the quarters didn't fit, so he stacked them on the top. 

Sensory
Foam Peanuts

Flour 

Same / Different Cards

Box Guitar - if you've been around here awhile, you'll know that Turbo loves music! His piano has been his prized toy every day and I thought he'd like a guitar. I saw this on a crafting site that I can't find again. :0(  Get yourself a kleenex box, a paper towel tube and some large rubber bands. I used a felt bar as the bridge, but you can use a dowel, pencil, pen (with the point/ink part removed) or maybe even a straw - it just needs to hold the bands up a bit.  Cut a hole the size of your tube in the side of the box. Paint everything. Assemble and play.  I suggest reinforcing the top of the box on the side where you cut the hole. The rubber bands made it collapse a bit after a few days.

Real Guitar - His new favorite toy.  I will post a video of his first day playing it. This kid's a natural I tell ya.

Here's a picture of him at Toys R Us last november. This is right next to the train table and a bunch of other toys available for the kids to play. This is what he wanted to do.

Rainy Day Fun - we had a lot of storms the past 4 weeks. In fact it hailed so much one day, the ground was white!

Hammer and Ice ~ This kid loves to eat ice.  While potty training we needed to give him A LOT of liquids. This was one of the ways I kept him very well hydrated. He gets to smash the ice into edible pieces. He thinks this is terrific, so we've done it several more times. 

Have I lost you all yet? I didn't realize this was turning into a marathon post! Guess that's what happens when you don't post for a month.  While we did so much more, I just don't have pictures of most it. 

Letter of the Week - R r

R is a terrific gross motor letter! We had so much fun pretending to be rockets, rabbits, robots and more at every chance.

Playing Ring Toss

The Rock Maze at our local amusement park

Rolling and Running were even more fun for R week.

We worked on Rainbow patterns.

We matched shades of rainbow colors

Coloring with rainbow colors

Rainbow puzzle- this was the left over scraps from a different rainbow activity I attempted, but didn't go as planned. I was putting these in our scrap paper pile, and realized this would be a terrific rainbow example for coloring and a puzzle for him to put in the correct order. He liked it too!

Leaf Rubbings - Turbo liked this more than I anticipated!

We wore red and especially our Red Rocket jammies. The best wearing red was on Friday before bed, Turbo was helping me sort the clothes from the dryer. He thoguth Daddy's red underware were very cool. This is what I found after putting Sweet Pea to bed. Yep, took of pants and diaper to wear Daddy's underware. Oh my, I'm still laughing about that.

We made and played with Rainbow Rice. I posted a tutorial for you earlier this week.

Ate 'r' things. This was a rice cake with peanut butter and raisins. We also ate ravioli.

We practiced Rhyming cards from Kidssoup.com

Few other things we did, but no pictures:
- We attempted to make a rainbow rice covered R, but Turbo insisted on using a glue stick. So, the process was fun, but the outcome was a slightly sticky R with slightly sticky rice all over the counter. I wish I had a picture because it was very funny!
- Watched rocket videos on YouTube.
- Reviewed our R poster from Kidssoup.com
- We talked about R things like recycling, reindeer, robots, rain, and routines.

I am so happy to be back doing letters of the week. However, we're going to take off again until the new year. We have a very full next two weeks with other activities and we'll be doing some traveling over the holiday.  It's going to be so much fun!

Letter of the Week - T t

 Letter Learning! - T t

week of 9/13/09

This was a busy week with all of our activities starting.  Our mornings are full each day with playgroups, MOPS, music class or Mommy & Me preschool. Then we have lunch and nap.  There's so many things I wanted to do for T t week, but the afternoons are always for playing outside, so we squeeze in what we can before nap and after dinner.

T is for Trains, Teddy Bears and Trees

Train:  Turbo loves paperclips, so I thought this would be a fun craft for us. I cut an empty paper towel roll in half for the train cars (found that much easier than trying to get every little tiny piece of TP off the TP rolls.) The smoke stack is a clothespin. Since we didn't have black paint, I used my broad tip Sharpie and colored it. (Didn't want my son loose with a sharpie).

We also played with our trains/tracks and then pretended to be trains.  Super fun!!  Turbo loves these pretend activities where Mommy gets silly with him.  We laugh and laugh.

Teddy Bear & Trees: 

Since I didn't have craft paper, I used our local newspaper to cover the cereal boxes. While it's not the most attractive, I remind myself it's the process not the product that counts right now.  Better to do the activity than wait for the perfect supplies! I cut the bear shape out of a kitchen sponge to be our stamp and he stamped away.  Mostly he rubbed the stamp on the boxes (HA!) Stamping is a skill we'll work on more.  We had a lot of fun making this T!


Reading Corner: We gathered some  teddy bears and got ready for circle time.  We acted out:
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, reach up high
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, wink one eye,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, slap your knees,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, sit down please.

After the rhyme, we read -Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall. Then pretend to be a Tree and got our paper leaves and have them fall all around us. Turbo loved this!! (see pics above)

T is for MESS!  We traced T t into shaving cream. So messy and so much fun!