Tot School!

M is 35 months old.

Whew, what a busy week! I’m having a hard time weeding out tot school photos, because I have about 30 of them! Here are the ones showing the most fun…

We played a game of “what’s different? / What’s the same?” with his toy cars one day. I’d put 3 of them together (2 vans and 1 racecar, or 2 blue cars and 1 red car), and he’d have to figure out which one was different and why the other 2 were the same. The tongs were his idea, not mine. :)

He did his name puzzles with milk jug lids. I finally got around to making ones that say “Mommy” and “Daddy” for him. He just loves these:

Pattern blocks and pattern cards:

He asked to do something with “baby” letters (lowercase), which had me very excited, because he hasn’t shown much interest in them, and has been a little confused. Calling them mama letters and baby letters has helped, silly as it seems. So, we grabbed his ABC poster (Dollar Tree), and his See and Spell letters, and matched them up. He did great with this:

Then we lined them up and sang the ABC song a couple of times. He thought it was neat that we could do that, I guess we’ve never done it before.

Then we got out the See and Spell boards and worked on them for a while.

Here’s an ABC uppercase and lowercase matching file folder game we did. We only did the first half of the alphabet and then he was ready to quit. You can find this here.

We did his favorite truck puzzle cards (Dollar Tree again!):

We bought some $1.00 animal flashcards from Target (2 sets) and used them for a matching game. I loved the pictures on these, and went back to buy the insect and American animals ones.

More matching – this time with his toy cars and a color wheel:

It quickly turned into a parking lot. :)

We played with our Target dollar spot marble run:

Sticker book:

We matched up ladybug designs on the flannel board:

Outside time – getting treasures out of a giant ice cube:

Blowing lots of bubbles right in Mommy’s face:

And playing with his new sand/water toy:

Whew! Hope you had a busy and FUN Tot School week too!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

ABC Book – Letter F

We have been concentrating on the letter F the last few days. Our library (and I’m sure all libraries have these books or similar ones) has a good selection of simple books about letters and their sounds. We read this one in particular:

It was OK, not the best plot ever, lol, but it did a good job of getting the /f/ sound across.

{If you are wondering why we aren’t going in alphabetical order with our ABC book, it’s because I am too lazy and I’m doing the easy ones first – consonants that normally only have one sound. And we skipped “D” because a small “d” is too similar to a small “b” and I don’t want M to get confused. He hasn’t quite gotten down the “big letter/ little letter” thing. (We call them mama letters and baby letters sometimes – it seems to help!)}
 
Links to the .pdf files for the activity pages are listed at the bottom of this post. If you download them and use them, I’d love to see pictures and hear what you’ve done with them! You don’t have to make an ABC book, you can use them to work on math skills, just for fun, or whatever!

I tried something new this time – instead of just using cardstock, I used a file folder and punched holes in it so it will fit into our binder. It works pretty well and I think I’ll continue to do this with the other letters. It’s nice to be able to take it out of the binder in one piece in order to work on it, instead of taking several pages out.
So here are some pictures of our F pages in our book:
First, our craft page (it’s certainly not original, but feathers are always fun!) – Feathers for F of course:

Then we had a pocket full of things that begin with F:

And then we had a pocket of F songs. The pocket is downloadable at the bottom of this post, and the songs came from the DLTK site, which I love and use quite often. You can find the songs here.

I made a miniature fishes in the fishbowl counting game with a spinner:

A pocket of Flowers to color (these are laminated so M can color them over and over again with his Crayola Window Markers):
And finally, some Frogs to sort by size – Big, Medium, and Small:
M loved the frogs. I guess I forgot to take a picture of him sorting them. His favorite part was naming the “f” pictures and coloring the flowers. He was really interested in the fishbowl game, but lost interest pretty quickly. He didn’t seem interested in the songs, but a couple of days later he started asking me to sing them for him again and now he is singing them himself!

Here are the links to the various files. I’ve listed them separately in case there is only one or two that you would like to use:

Fishbowl game and pocket
Frog Size sorting: frogs, mats, and pocket
Color the Flowers: cards and pocket
F Songs: pocket only
The links to the songs are:
Letter F Song
Do You Know the Flower Man?
A Fishy or a Frog
Enjoy!
Have a beautiful day! :)

ABC Book - letter B

We have started making an ABC book.

I had this idea of creating a couple of lapbook-type pages of activities for each letter. We did B first. This was actually done a few weeks ago, but I waited to blog about it because I wanted to make all the activities available to print if you would like to use them too!

I'll give you the links to the .pdf files as I go through the page elements. Just click on the the picture of each activity (this does not include the letter craft picture) and you will be taken to the download page.

I hope this is as fun for you as it has been for us! Please use them for whatever you like; you don't have to make an ABC book like ours if you don't want to, but you could use them to make your own lap books or just for tot school activities. If you do, let me know, I'd love to see what you've done!


First, we did our letter craft, and glued buttons onto our Bb's. The templates for these are found here.


Here's a shot of the following activity pages:


The first pocket on the upper left is "Things that Start with B". We looked through these and named each one making sure to hear the /b/ sound at the beginning. (I also used some of the printables found here.)


Next we had the "Color the Bulldozers" pocket. M enjoyed this the most. I had each one labeled with a color to use, and the print was in that color (ex. red). M was able to see which color to use and did it all on his own. He was very proud (so was Mommy). The next time I will laminate these and let him use his window markers to color them. That way we can clean them off and he can color them over and over.
Next up is "counting baby birds":

And finally, "baseball size sorting":

{All of the pages are cardstock and here's a little tip:
*Place clear packaging tape along the side of the pages (fold it over so half of the strip of tape is on the front and half is on the back) before punching holes in it; this will make the pages much stronger and you won't have to worry about it tearing out of your 3-ring binder.*}

These activities were a fun way to practice other skills (colors, sizes, counting, etc.) while talking about the letter B and it's sound. It was a lot of fun! Letter F is up next!

Have a Beautiful day! :)