Thursday Thinking - Why do we do “tot school”?

(Don’t know what tot school is? Check it out here.) I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately. I’ve been trying to create a little more structure in my days with M, and giving more thought to planning tot school time.

And, sometimes, a little voice in my head says, “Why are you spending (*wasting*) your time on this? He’s only 2!" And it’s true that most of my “real-life friends” don’t do these things with their children (at least not in a planned or structured manner), and my mother didn’t with me. (And I like to think I turned out pretty OK. ;) )

I strongly believe that small children need certain things – love, attention, and affection top the list. Obviously they also need their physical needs to be met – good food, good rest, and exercise. And we are obligated to discipline them, help them learn to get along with others, and to discern right from wrong.

Developmentally, here’s what I think is important:

• Creative time - let them play with play-doh, paint, draw, whatever – just let them create something every day (or at least as often as possible).
• Free play time, completely child-directed.
• Outside time, as often as possible, regardless of the weather.
• Books, books, books, and more books, and time together with a parent to read them all.

Tot School for us started long before I even knew to call it that. It started by making library lists of things M wanted to know more about. I think airplanes were our first subject. Then came trucks, cars, bikes, anything with wheels. He is all boy. :)

Soon, autumn, my favorite time of year, was coming, and I wanted to share my love for it with M. Colored leaves lend themselves nicely to all kinds of crafts and art and so we added in a few activities along with books about the seasons.

Suddenly my mind was swimming with “themes” to learn about and I turned to the internet for help finding activities.

And, fyi, there’s a lot of info out there. Wow.

I was drawn into the world of crafty, artsy blogs of moms with toddlers and preschoolers; I learned what Montessori actually is; I found out that homeschooling moms are not weird, they actually really have their act together, and boy do they have a lot of resources they are willing to share!

Somewhere along the line I stumbled across the whole Tot School internet world. And I loved it. Making my own games and activities for my child really appealed to me.

{All the learning toys on the market appealed to me too, and I went through a not-very-discriminating period where I was buying anything “educational”. I eventually learned to be a bit more picky, but that’s another post for another time.}

At a very young age (less than 1 year old), M learned to recognize letters by constantly asking us to name his little foam bath letters for him. He has always been interested in the ABCs and finding new ABC activities for him has simply been a way of providing him with what he needs and wants to learn about.

I’m trying to follow his lead more in other areas too – if he’s interested in numbers and counting, I find ways to help him learn more about them. If he’s not interested then we turn to a completely different activity.

Preparing tot school activities is mostly a hobby for me, something I really enjoy doing. I enjoy doing it so much, actually, that I really need to remember it’s just a hobby, not a full time job! I must admit one of the top reasons we do planned tot school time is so I will spend one on one time with M, doing something other than playing with his matchbox cars and making car noises again and again and again. Because, honestly, that makes me crazy. And the last thing we need, any of us, is a crazy mama.

Tot school looks like a lot more than it is, I think. We mostly do it on Tuesday mornings, for maybe an hour. Then if he asks to do it on other days I usually have 2 or 3 activities picked out to give him.

I try, purposefully, to not do it all the time, because I do think the items I listed earlier are more important. I don’t want every little thing to be a teaching moment. In Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, David Elkind writes about how children play. While much of their play is truly work, in that they are learning something, sometimes it’s just play. Children need to play in order to work through emotions, feel in control of something (dinosaurs eating people is the current game my son enjoys controlling these days), and in order to simply relax and have fun.

If we try to turn everything into a lesson, they may give up on what they were doing – not work through the emotions (teddy being scared, etc), or simply feel that mom is always taking over and controlling every thing. Not a pleasant thought, right? It’s certainly not how I want to be seen through his eyes.

I don’t believe tot school is making M smarter than other children. You know, simply learning your ABCs at an early age doesn’t mean you are smarter. It simply means you learned it sooner than someone else!

I think most parents spend similar time with their children. We do tot school on purpose simply because that’s what works for us. I get distracted easily and I’m very task-oriented, which means I could easily forget to just sit and relax and have fun with my son if it weren’t planned and scheduled into our day!

Also, it gives me a chance to see how much M knows, what he’s interested in… it gives me a chance to simply know him better. He’s a great little guy to know! :)

Do you purposefully do tot school activities with your little one? Have you ever felt discouraged when someone doesn’t understand why you are doing this? How have you responded?

I hope you and your tots have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School

(M is 35 months old)

We've been talking about patterns for a while now and M apparently thinks it's a line up of any kind. He made these "patterans" this week and was so proud of them:

It was so cute, he listed off the patterns to me like this - circle, square, circle, circle, star, square... and on and on until he was at the end. Evidently we need to work on the idea of repeating objects in order for it to be a real pattern. And don't you like how we had to hang his lacing beads up on the window tie-back? "For decoration" of course. :)



We did a little toothpick and styrofoam activity, pushing the toothpicks in and then putting beads on. I tried the whole pattern thing with him again, seeing if he could copy my pattern. He did, and then he added his own little touch:Then some pipe cleaners got in on the action. This activity kept him busy for quite a while:
We did a little squeezing-water-out-of-a-sponge-with-a-garlic-press activity (That's it's official name). I think I got this idea from The Wonder Years, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
He did his foam ABC puzzle. Hammering the letters in never gets old.We did a dinosaur matching game (file folder game found here):
And we lined up color cards by shade, lightest to darkest:
He did his name puzzle:
And he worked on this little wipe-off mat we found (dollar spot at Target, I love it!) - We picked a letter then I went through and named all the objects for him and he circled the ones that started with that letter's sound. He did great. And he actually circled things, which I didn't know he could do. Yay for fine moter skills! :)
He spent about an hour playing with play-doh, he was very into it!
He worked outside on his car. He's really into fixing things lately (pretend of course). :)
One day he had to have a Superman mask. He doesn't even know who Superman is, but he got a little Superman action figure at a garage sale and I told him a little bit about him. So we went online to see if there was a mask we could print out. No superman, but I found a cute site that has a lot of animal masks - all printable for free! He decided to be a frog! :)
That's my boy!

For more Tot School ideas, visit 1+1+1=1!

Ribbit. Have a beautiful day!

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! :)

Tot School

Matthew is 34 months old

*I have to apologize again this week for our lack of modesty. No, M doesn't ALWAYS wear just underwear and a t-shirt. I do make him dress to go out or to the store. But at home inside this is what he wants, and I'm just not prepared to make a big deal out of it. *

Every day this week M has asked to "play school". He is just really into it lately. I know a big part of it is getting to spend one on one time with me... I have a hard time balancing all the things that need to be done in a day and I'm thankful for Tot School because it helps me schedule in time just for M. It's good for both of us!

This week we hunted for items for our nature basket. We have a tiny green apple that fell into our yard from the neighbor's tree, a bunch of oak leaves with tiny acorns in the middle, a rock that he dug up, a little mushroom, and a piece of bark:

We did a lot of drawing with sidewalk chalk. His drawing has really taken off in the last couple of weeks - it actually looks like what he says it is. This is so amazing to me. Here he drew a football and a fire engine:

I'm sorry I just can't remember whose blog I saw this on, but it was not my original idea - I made an old potato salad bucket into a piggy for him and he loves feeding it his pretend food. He makes all the appropriate piggy noises too. It's pretty funny to listen to. :)

We got the feltboard out after putting it away a month or two ago and then completely forgetting about it. It's a good thing because it was like having a new toy. We did the "5 Green and Speckled Frogs" song and he really got into making the frogs jump into the pool and then taking them off the board. We did this over and over again.

We sorted some color cards that I printed out and laminated from here. Each card has an object on it (ex. purple flower) and I made pockets on a file folder of the different colors. We took turns picking a card and then putting it in the right pocket. I've found making things into a game like this where we take turns, or close our eyes, or something along those lines, helps him become more interested in some activities.

We did some of these ABC puzzle cards that I got from the dollar store. He wasn't into this so much so it didn't last very long. He hasn't gotten the small letters figured out yet, and something about this frustrates him.

We used tongs to put these cute erasers into an ice cube tray.

Then we sorted them into 3 piles. He wanted to use the tongs for this too.

My favorite thing was something I didn't get a picture of. We had a nice rain shower on Tuesday and he wanted to open the window and raise the screen, and we put our hands out and felt the rain and talked about it. He loved this and so did I. :)

Hope you all had a great week too! For more Tot School posts visit 1+1+1=1.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School

(Matthew is 34 months)

My first Tot School post! I have read Carisa's blog daily for over a year now and it has been incredibly inspiring to me. I've been doing what she calls "tot school" with M for quite a long time, and one of the decision makers about whether or not to start my own blog was the fact that I was just so darn excited to be able to share what we do for our tot school time together.

Warning: my son has taken to wearing just his underwear around the house lately, so please excuse the lack of modesty. :)

We played with blocks a lot, building houses for his little action figures. He has really been into blocks lately, which I love to see.

We did these little wooden puzzles together:
We did our foam number puzzle. He hammers the numbers in while I tell him what they are. He really is not into numbers right now, so I keep trying to get him interested. Usually anything involving a hammer will catch his attention. We got this idea from Carisa, who does it with her tot with a foam ABC puzzle.
We worked with our Melissa and Doug Lacing Bead set. I tried showing him how to make a square, circle, square, circle pattern, but again... he was not all that interested. He did learn the word "cylinder" though!

We worked with our pattern blocks for a while. I have the magnetic kind and we put the pattern cards on a cookie sheet to do them. He stayed with this activity longer this time than he has in the past. He loved doing the helicopter, the robot, and the wagon. And he learned the word "rombus". It's so cute to hear him say words like "rombus" and "cylinder". :)

He stuck some car stickers on the little crate he keeps his matchbox-style cars in. I take the sticky part around the stickers off the page for him - it seems to help him get the stickers off a little more easily. Towards the end both he and I were covered in stickers. :)

We also played a lot of bingo. This is a picture of him playing it yet again with Daddy, giving me a break from all the bingo (we really have been playing it a lot). I printed the set out from this site, and we use buttons for markers. It's great for learning to take turns, counting, and to develop vocabulary.
That's it for this week. For more tot school ideas visit here!

Have a beautiful day! :)