Sunday, July 26, 2009

Tot School

Tot School

Matthew is 34 months old



It seems like we did a lot of Tot School this week. I mentioned in an earlier post that we are trying to pare down our summer activities, and one of the happy results has been more time to spend on Tot School, which both M and I love.

We spent a lot of time reading the July issue of his High-Five magazine (put out by Highlights for preschool children) and playing with these fun dominoes that came with it:

M made "lilypads" on the pond, which we normally call our living room floor, and jumped from one to another like a frog. At least that is what he said he was doing. :)

We went away last weekend and spent some time in our camper. Here he is making his little whiteboard (we keep it there) into a matching game. It has the alphabet printed around it and he is using magnetic letters to match them. He came up with this on his own. I was so proud!
We did our little clip game. (Sorry for the huge up close picture, not sure what I was thinking with that one.) It seems activities that take me 2 minutes to put together, like this one, are his favorites. He wants to do this all the time. The ones that I spend hours on are the ones he's never interested in. {sigh} There's a lesson in there somewhere for me...
We did a new feltboard poem - 5 Little Seashells- which I downloaded from The Mailbox. He is really into the feltboard lately, which makes me very happy.
We matched color shades using paint samples I pilfered from Walmart. ;)
He practiced fine motor skills putting paper clips onto matching strips of cardstock:

He worked on these cards I printed up and laminated from here. They are transportation same/different cards. One picture is a little different and you are supposed to circle it. He did this no problem. I wasn't sure if he would "get it", but I needn't have worried. By the way, we use Crayola's Window Markers for anything we write on that's been laminated. They work so much better than dry erase markers. And when you wipe them clean they look like new again.
He did some transportation Melissa and Doug puzzles. They are wooden 12 piece puzzles and he does them completely on his own.

We sang songs from our songbook, and made music with our instruments. This is a very noisy, pretty un-musical-sounding, activity when you actually do it, but it sure is fun!
I put together another quick ABC matching game one afternoon. We took the foam letters out of our ABC puzzle and matched them up with some ABC flashcards (I'm not a big fan of flashcards, but these were a gift and M loves them). That's it for this week. I'm trying to pull together some new activities for this coming week. Hope you all had a great week too!

For more Tot School ideas go to 1+1+1=1!
Have a beautiful day! :)

12 comments:

  1. You did tons of cool alphabet stuff! Way to go on a full Tot School week. I just love Melissa and Doug toys.

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  2. WOW - you did have a busy tot-school week :D Thanks for stopping by mine btw :D
    Cx

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  3. What a great week. Thanks for the tip about using window markers instead of dry erase markers on laminated stuff. I will have to try that out.

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  4. I really love all that you did this week. I am getting some great ideas for learning activities I want to make for my Jack when he's a bit older!! Thanks for sharing!

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  5. I love the lily pads in the pond! What a creative little one :)

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  6. Thank you so much for the Mailb*x and Pr*kinders links, those will come in handy for AG as she gets older! And, thanks for the washable marker tip!

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  7. ha ha, we do Tot School in our camper too! And I like the close ups - well I like pics, so I love them all! Looks like it was a fun week!

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  8. What a great week!! I like the lilypads...Emily would enjoy that.

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  9. Great week! It's so neat when our tots come out with their own learning activities and creative solutions and we happen to be there to observe and capture it. Thanks for sharing.

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  10. Thanks for the tip on the window markers.
    Also, love the felt board activity. Mine love those types of things too.

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  11. Fantastic! I am curious, did you have to teach your son how to do puzzles? Or is it something they just pick up?

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  12. I think it's just a matter of doing puzzles with them several times and eventually they pick up how to do them. There were some puzzles he just wasn't interested in, but when we found some that were vehicles, he really wanted to do them, lol. He is all boy. So maybe finding some that are of things they are interested in is the trick.

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