Tot School – Sept. 27, 2009

M is 37 Months old

This week we began our autumn theme! I’m very excited about all the great activities and learning tools available with this theme.

We did a little normal school stuff too – that first…

We did our ABC train in the pocket chart again. Right away, when M saw me setting it up, he said, “I don’t want to do that, I didn’t do so good with it”. :( I told him that we were going to do it a different way this time and that he would do great. I sorted the train cars out on the floor by color, and then told M which letter we needed and which color group it was with. Each color had only 4 to 5 cards, so it was really simple for him to find the one we needed. He did great! His favorite part was after the train was put together. He grabbed two pencils and we pointed to each letter while we sang the ABC song. I’ve got to remember to always set him up for success while still challenging him. It went so much better this week and he felt much better about his abilities than he did last week.

I made some dots on colored paper for him and he drew lines to connect them and make simple shapes. The inspiration for this activity was this post. He did well with this and was excited to draw shapes, but we sure need to work on that tripod grasp a lot! Later in the day he cut his shapes out. :)

We did our weather chart, which has been sorely neglected the past few months:

M practiced his sawing. :) He lined up his blocks and sawed them apart, one by one (making all the appropriate chainsaw noises – you did know that’s a chainsaw, right?) : You can see we aren’t getting very far on the road to cleaning one thing up before starting another. Sigh.

For our autumn theme, we did a sort of circle time activity a few days this week. First, we talked about all four seasons, and what changes take place during each one. I found these great seasonal clothing cards at Montessori for Everyone, and we set them up on the pocket chart and talked about them. I plan to use these at some point for sorting too. I put different colored star stickers on the backs of these so when we sort them M will be able to tell if he sorted them all correctly on his own (blue star for summer, purple for winter, green for spring, orange for fall).

I found some fun seasonal clipart at Kizclub and we sorted them out onto colored paper. Green for spring, blue for summer, orange for fall, and red for winter. M did pretty well with this. He had a little trouble with summer and spring items, but in my opinion some of them were a little confusing.

M hung up fall window clings in his room:

We played our autumn tic tac toe game:

And we read some library books about autumn (see reviews here and here):

We learned this fun seasons song (click on image to go to web page):

And I taught M this little poem…

Two little eyes to look at God,

Two little ears to hear His word,

Two little lips to sing His praise,

Two little feet to walk His ways.

Two little hands to do His will,

and one little heart to love Him still.

I’m not sure who wrote this, it is in one of M’s baby books. I’m trying to bring something more about faith/religion into our time together on a more daily basis. We pray at mealtimes and bedtime, read Bible stories, and do our (somewhat sporadic) Sunday School lessons, but I feel he’s ready for more than that.

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots! Check here for more tot school ideas.

Have a beautiful day! :)

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! 

Go here for more Tot School ideas!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 13, 2009

Matthew is 36 months

It was another fun week in Tot School land. :)  I know it looks like we do a lot, but I want to stress that we normally spend about one hour “doing school” on Tuesday mornings, with only a couple more planned activities thrown in here and there if M asks for them on other days, which he normally does lately.  We try to spend time every day on an art project too, but other than that M’s time is spent mostly in self-directed play; normally I try to let the art project be very self-directed too.  Sometimes his free play time is with me or Daddy (and if it’s a definite learning-type activity I try to capture it with some pictures) and very often on his own, or with a friend.  Regardless of what it looks like we really don’t spend all our time on school! :)
Ok, now that that is out of the way… here’s what we did this week. :)
I showed M the new letter H file I put together for his ABC book.  I posted about this here and made it available for download. :)
First, He put helicopter and “H” foam stickers on the Hh templates:
He pretty much insisted on putting the stickers around the letters instead of on them. :)  Simple as this was, M absolutely loved doing it.
Then he practiced tracing the letters.  He wants to draw his letters so badly, so I included this activity in the file (you can see his tripod grasp is pretty non-existent, or was on this day anyway):
We played a tic tac toe game using Hard Hats and Hammers:

And we went through little pictures of things that begin with H.  I’ve found this is a one of the best activities to help him learn the sound a letter makes.  I always include this with our ABC book pages.  We say /h/ /h/ /h/ hammer, /h/ /h/ /h/ house, etc, stressing the initial sound as we look at each picture.  It’s fun and kind of turns into a chant of sorts.
We worked on the Heart pattern strips… he is just not getting the concept of repeating patterns.   Ah well, I need to remain patient and remember at 3 the important thing is lots of exposure to a concept and it will finally *click*. :)  Here’s the pattern strips after I re-did them the right way, ha:
Finally, he colored the shapes for the shape House.  He is so not into crayons.  If I had let him use markers I would’ve gotten a better response, I think.  He colored for a while, like this: then he wanted me to finish it.  I had him tell me which color to use for each part, then did it.  He enjoyed being the teacher. :)  Here is the shapes house all finished and put together:

After that we did a few more tot school activities – we used our counting mats to count with M&Ms. :)  We are still only going up to number 4 because he still is working on one to one correspondence and the idea that the last number you say is the number of items.

I created a little measuring activity for him.  I got the idea here, and altered it slightly.  M is really, really into tools lately and of course that includes what he calls his “measurers”, which is a tape measure and a square with a ruler on the side.  So I made this: (ignore the close up of my dirty carpet, please)

He loved this and I think it would’ve gone over even better if I had used something other than ribbon to measure.  But, that was all I could think of at the time.

Then we practiced scissor skills by cutting out large shapes drawn on construction paper:He did so well with this, we saved the shapes to show to Daddy later.  I wish I would’ve taken a picture of them all cut out.   
He loves this little paperclip color match game.  He just recently became very good at doing this and is enjoying his new found skill.  He wanted to do this again another day but lost interest pretty quickly.  So I grabbed the bag of paper clips and gave him a new challenge – paper clip chains: I’m noticing this kid does not smile much for pictures.  Please believe me, though, when I tell you he enjoyed an activity. :)

He practiced spooning the pretty, pretty glass pebbles from a glass dish into an ice cube tray:

We did our fantastic movement cards again and got a little exercise in.  I am thinking of making this a daily activity.

Another day he was itching to do some hammering, so I gave him a large piece of styrofoam that came in a package we received and a baggie full of golf tees.  This kept him busy on and off for most of the day.  The next day he took the golf tees (“nails”) out with his pliers – I was impressed he thought of this – I sure hadn’t. then as I was doing laundry he decided to saw it.  The boy is all about tools these days.  This is what awaited me after the laundry: It was a mess.  But I was not too bent out of shape about it – he had thoroughly enjoyed himself, and the amount of time it kept him occupied was definitely worth the 10 minutes or so of cleaning and vacuuming I had to do. 
I’ve been trying to have a small activity set up for him to do independently around 4:00 pm when Daddy is not yet home but dinner needs to be cooked.  This week we tried stenciling with our do-a-dot painters:I really need to pull together some more activities for this purpose – any ideas?  Nothing too complicated to set up and something he can do by himself.  You know how it is when that time of day rolls around…
Here’s my favorite picture of the week.  M’s cousin S came over and she is a crafty kind of girl.  They crafted all day.  She has been dying to make a sunshine guy like M made a long time ago.  They both made new ones and then posed with them for me: Aren’t they sweet? And the kids are nice too.  ;)  Hee hee.
For more great tot school ideas, go here!  Sorry for so much rambling this week! :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 6, 2009

M is 36 months old.

Tot School is just becoming more and more fun (for both of us) as we go along. This week M kept saying “That was fun!”, “I’m having fun!”, and various similar exclamations at random times. I hope he meant it and wasn’t just trying to talk himself into it!

In winter we were in the routine of doing something with the sensory tub almost every day. I’d let him pick lentils, rice, noodles, or whatever each day and he’d basically play with his little cars or little people in it while I had a little Mama-quiet-time in the mornings. You know, time to pray, read, actually put two thoughts together in a row, or simply sit and stare at the wall. :)

For some reason I never tried hiding things in the tub for him. This post from Jolanthe made me change my mind. So I grabbed his letters from his See and Spell and hid them in some rice. There wasn’t enough rice, so I mixed the lentils and pasta in too. Who says the sensory tub should only have one sensory experience in it at a time?

This is how he started – looking for the letters:
But it quickly turned into this:
I guess old habits die hard. We did get a lot of rice and lentils and noodles on the floor, but it was vacuuming day anyway, so I wasn’t too worried. Plus, it’s always fun to give him the dustbuster and make him vacuum with it. The dustbuster could keep this kid occupied all day if the battery didn’t run out. :)
I made up some new activity bags over the weekend; I was really excited about them. First, sandpaper and yarn (I’ve seen this on a lot of blogs, but first read about it in The Toddler’s Busy Book, by Trish Kufner).
It was not a big hit at all; apparently it was very boring:
So, we did a little scissor practice. I’m still trying to figure out where I first found these pages to print. I need to print out some that are a little more difficult, because M did these perfectly this time! He just loves cutting!
Then we did this little book from the Mailbox (June issue, I believe). It is a book about a seed that gets planted, then sprouts, grows a stem, gets leaves, and finally flowers into a sunflower. On each page M had to pick the correct picture to glue on, depending on the stage of the plant. He did fine with this, but wasn’t really “into” it, and didn’t want to color it.
Next we played checkers. Rather, we tried to play checkers. I know, I know, this is way too advanced for him and I was way too impatient to keep explaining it to him. BUT he has been asking for a checkers game since he saw a picture of one in a magazine.
This is how far we got before we both gave up:
Another activity bag I made up for him was these foam shapes. I cut slits in them and you can fit them together to create… well a bunch of shapes that fit together. :)
He loved this activity, although it didn’t really turn out like I hoped it would. I think the slits should’ve been shorter.
Another activity bag I made him was this “Silly Critter” game from the most recent issue of our High-Five magazine. I put magnets on the back and we used a pan to match up heads, bodies, and legs to make “silly critters”. We both liked this one!

We used our animal flashcards from Target for a matching game with M’s little zoo animals:

He did his name puzzles with milk jug lids (always a favorite!):
This is our newest addition to the flannel board – 10 in the Bed (found here):
He LOVED it and did it several times that evening with Daddy. Again, I have to get a post done about how great the flannel board is and all the things we do with it. Soon, I hope!
We read this GREAT book – Clap Your Hands, by Lorinda Cauley . It has activities on every page that the child (and the mama) can act out. It is a huge hit!
Then, in keeping with the actions theme, we did these movement cards* from Sparklebox. I put them in our pocket chart and M turned each one over, then we did whatever it said. They are fantastic – there are ones for balance that you do standing in one place; some you do while “traveling”, like skipping; and some you do on the floor, like rolling like a pencil or somersaulting. (There were others, but they were a little advanced; I only printed the ones I knew would be fun for M.) I was hot by the time we finished and even a little bit sweaty I am embarrassed to say, hee hee. These will definitely give you your exercise for the day!
Here’s M at the end of his somersault (I did NOT do a somersault), I love the goofy expression on his face!
For more great Tot School ideas, go here.
Have a beautiful day! :)
*I got the idea to do movement cards like this in the pocket chart from somebody’s blog and I wish I could remember who!! If it was you, please let me know and I’ll add your link. I decided to use the movement cards from Sparklebox, but there were some others available too, and they were linked on the other blog, so I’d like to share them!!