Tot School – October 18, 2009

M is 37 months old

Well, this week M was recovering from having a horrible cold (I guess that’s all it was, but it was a bad one) and I was trying to not get sick, and hard at work keeping a migraine at bay for the first half of the week.  We are both feeling better now!  Whew!  But, unfortunately not many pictures were taken.  M did a lot of school on his own, with me lying on the couch, opening one eye now and then to make sure he was ok. :)  I’ve taken pictures of the shelf activities he did, but not many of them were taken when M was actually doing them.  Anyway…. here we go…

First, some apple activities… (excuse M’s half-dressed state, dressing was not a priority this week, sigh).  He sorted small and large apples into baskets with tongs:He loves any activity that includes tongs! 

An apple counting book that I downloaded from Childcareland : He did this on his own one day when I was napping (Daddy was home) – I couldn’t believe it.  He sat and put apples on all the pages from 1 to 10.  I will leave it out for next week so we can do it together and actually count. :)

Same / Different cards from prekinders with apples:I laminated these and put them in a container with a dry erase marker.  M must’ve done these 5 times this week and I didn’t get a single picture.  Some of these were difficult, but he did great!

Some fall-themed lacing cards:

 

An apple file folder game where he had to match up the combination of apples on the front of the pockets, from homeschoolshare:This is a great file folder game – M loved putting the apples in the pockets.

Pockets are apparently a big hit, because he loves this color-sorting file folder game too:I printed this from Homeschool Creations, and made pockets in a file folder with the color name cards.  There are several pictures of objects in various colors that are sorted into the pockets.  I made this a long time ago and M has definitely gotten his use out of it!

We did a fun counting activity with this printout.  I have discovered that adding a clipboard to any activity makes it a ton of fun. ;)  Here’s M taking off with the clipboard in hand to go count the windows in the kitchen:(Still in his jammies at noon, yes he is.)  We had a lot of fun walking around counting items in our home.  M colored over the pictures, then I helped him write the numbers in.  Here he is very seriously making a notation with his little pink crayon, hee hee:

 

I gathered up M’s foam uppercase letters, and some wooden lowercase letters, as well as some clipart from our ABC lapbooks.  M matched the lower and upper case letters, then we sorted the images by beginning sound.  M did great with this; I have to say I was pretty proud of him!  It helped that we only had 3 letters and sounds to work with.  I think he really enjoyed this and I plan to do it in the future as we add more letters to our lapbook collection.

 

M has been making up a lot of rhymes lately, he is really into it.  So we did this rhyming card activity: These can be printed from here.  There are several to choose from and I will be making more of these.  This was  a fun activity for M and he did very well.  I wrote the words on the back (mainly for my reference so I could give M the right words – bug, not beetle for example) and put red stars on one set and blue on the other so he can sort them out first.  The red group rhymes with cards from the blue group.

 

M also helped gather in the last of our carrot crop (goodness, there were a lot): And yes, he needed to be bundled up like that – it’s been snowing on and off all week, and in the 20’s. 

We also saw more of these guys: Gobble Gobble!

Hope you all had a fabulous week and are warmer than we are here!  Go here to see more Tot School posts!

Have a beautiful week! :)

Tot School – Sept. 20, 2009

This week we worked on how letters are formed (M constantly wants to draw letters) and the order of the ABCs.  He knows the song, but actually putting letters in order is another matter all together.

We used our pretty glass pebbles and cardstock letters (both from Dollar Tree!) to practice forming letters correctly.  We worked on as many letters as he wanted.  I told him to start at the top, bottom, or wherever, and how to form them as if he were going to actually write them. He really got into this and we did about 6 or 7 letters before he wanted to move on to something else.

I found some upper and lowercase letter stamps at Target and Michael’s (I think Michael’s had the lowercase) and I’ve been wracking my brain for a way to use them.  Finally, I made this little name card for M:You can see the stamps are pretty tiny, but he did a great job and seemed to know exactly what he was supposed to do:

We did an ABC train activity with our pocket chart.  I found the ABC cards here, and the idea for how to use them was from Little Hands, Big Work.  We sang the ABC song a couple of times, then we tried singing it very slowly and stopping at each letter; the idea was for him to find each letter and place it in the pocket chart.  Right away he became a little frustrated.  I think the way we had the cards lying on the floor was a little overwhelming for him.  It’s a shame that this turned out to not be fun for him because he was really, really looking forward to doing something with the train when he saw me cutting it out and laminating it.  I should have put more thought into this and separated them by color so I could give him hints to help find each one. 

We did a couple of letters:

But, in the end, I put them all in the pocket chart and we just had fun singing the song and pointing at each one. We did that several times. Then later in the day I found him with a pencil pointing to each letter and singing, and that made me feel much better!

We did a color shade activity.  I let him pick the color sets he wanted to do then I put out the darkest and lightest of each one.  We talked about dark, and darker than,  then about light, and lighter than. He was doing great with that, but then I set a medium tone out for each set and asked him which was lightest and which was darkest and he had a little trouble.We switched to talking about light, medium, and dark and he did better, but then he said “I don’t want to do this anymore”, so we put it away. :)

We did his transportation same/different cards, and he did fantastic.  He’s done these before, but this time I asked him why the different one was different and he was able to give me a clear answer each time.

(Oh, I love those baby hands!)

I also gave him some new cutting pages… he loves his scissors. (Sorry no pics!)

Later in the day I found him doing these little puzzles in his room:

And he’s been calling this little teddy bear his “baby” all week.  We’ve had a lot of friends with new babies lately and I think he’s got the baby bug. :)  Here I found him rocking his baby:      Gosh, I sure do love this little boy! 

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Have a beautiful day! :)