Tot School Re-Organization

I’ve been taking a break from Tot School posts the last few weeks, and honestly it’s felt good.  So good in fact, that I’ve been wondering if I should start them up again.  And then, I wonder what would be the point of my blog if I didn’t write about what we do in Tot School?  And then I re-read a lot of comments from previous TS posts and, well, I have to say comment-love is a powerful drug. ;) 

Do your school re-cap posts each week take you forever  to write??  I’ve saved a tremendous amount of energy and time by not writing these posts… it’s really amazing actually.   Maybe it’s just me, but one TS post will take me an entire evening to write.  All the photo editing, photo organizing, linking to other sites, blah blah blah.  If you have any tips on making this simpler, I’m all ears!  Maybe it’s just that I’m a born talker, er rambler. :)

I am in the middle of assessing and re-thinking how we spend our TS time and how I have it organized.  This post will most likely be a lot of thinking out loud and more rambling.  So, bear with me.  :) 

During my pre-Christmas blog break I created a “master list” spreadsheet of all our school items – anything we have that we use for school.  I tagged each item with a subject or skill area (or two), added notes, and a check  box to indicate whether or not it is an activity that M can do independently.  (Whether or not it’s something he enjoys doing independently is another matter altogether!)

So, here’s our new plan…

I’m going to set out 5 to 7 independent or minimal-mama-involvement activities for him each week, changing a few of them up during the week as he finishes the original ones (ie. cut and paste sheets).   Many of these will be things like his Melissa and Doug toys, fine motor skill projects, etc. 

We also re-organized his space with the shelving.  The little cupboard on the lower right houses all our games now, and we are having many fun evenings as a family because of this easy access.  There are matching games, homemade games, card games, board games, dominoes, bingo, Barrel of Monkeys… just lots of fun stuff! :)  The top of the right side holds M’s ABC book, his ABC lapbooks, all our flannelboard sets, a file folder with activities related to our current theme, and our current sensory bin (not all of this is in the pic, sorry).

On the left side, on the top are all his musical instruments (guitar to the side) and our songs and poems binder.

Then, on the shelves below this are his current activities.  I will most likely keep the pipecleaner letters and sand tray on there all the time.  Other than that, the activities on the shelves will be featured on my weekly TS post.  However, because these are things that M will be doing on his own mostly, photos will pretty much be hit or miss.  I’ll try to take pictures of the actual activities, but catching him doing it is another matter.

While we are talking about taking photos I should mention that I’ve decided to always ask M’s permission to take a picture of him doing our school things.  I think the poor kid feels a little pressured sometimes, or less important than the blog, when I’m constantly snapping pictures.  I’ve thought about this and I have to say I would not want someone taking my picture all the time as I’m trying to learn something new.  It’s so easy to forget to respect the fact that kids are little people with feelings too.  So, I’m working hard on this, and you may end up seeing fewer pics of M in my posts.

I’m also going to bring back our one morning a week that we spend about 1/2 hour together “doing” school.  We both used to love this time together.  But M was asking to “do school” all the time!  Hence, the activity shelves.  Yet, it’s not fair to M to set things out on the shelves for us to do together and then not find the time (right now!) to do them; not to mention it’s creating stress for me, what with running around trying to get chores done so I can do these things with M.

The other days I’m going to focus our time together on reading, music, sensory activities, baking, free-playing, art, and our fun science experiments.  Many of these will most likely have their own post if I post about them, and I’m not sure I’ll include them in my TS posts.  It would just be one more thing to link up to. 

We continue to enjoy our calendar and Bible Story time together every morning as well as our quick “morning message”, and I want to make our Bible story activities  a priority over any other schoolwork each week.  So if I have a craft or game or whatever, planned to go along with a Bible story we’ve read, and we only have 20 minutes that week to do school together, then that’s what we’ll end up doing!

Whew.  Did I cover everything I want to do?  This is one of those posts that are mainly for me – so I can go back and read about exactly what I want to do and remember my priorities!  Thanks for hanging on to the end. :)  Any suggestions for making things simpler are always welcome!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Dec. 27, 2009

M is 40 months old

Tot School was pretty much non-existent this past week, but we managed to get a few things in…
Snowflake matching:
I printed the snowflakes from here, cut them into cards and M tried matching them up in our pocket chart. He did pretty well with this considering some of them were pretty tricky.
No picture for this one, but I printed some snowman grid gameboards from here, and we took turns rolling a die, then putting that number of cotton balls on our game cards. We went top to bottom and left to right. Whoever filled their card first won.
M’s cousin S came over for the day on Tuesday and we made homemade playdough. I didn’t add any coloring (it was a little off-white due to the brownish vanilla I put in it), but we did add silver glitter and vanilla extract. Yum! And pretty! I set out a tray of goodies: There’s buttons, googley eyes, ribbons, pipecleaners, and various lids here.
And the kids had a great time making snowmen:
Aren’t they adorable? And if you’re wondering which child used the pipecleaners for super-long noses… well, that would be my child, hee hee. ;)
We also used up our green playdough that was getting a little old. We used cookie cutters, glass pebbles, colored pasta, buttons, and glitter glue to decorate them. M gave these to grandparents and godparents for Christmas.
On Christmas Eve we had about 8 inches of snow dumped on us. I grabbed a couple of buckets and M played (well over an hour) with real snow and his little cars on the kitchen floor.I’ve noticed that if I occupy him with this kind of thing, he is quite happy to play on his own as long as I’m sitting at the table, cooking, or just hanging out in the kitchen. We explored how snow melted into water and then we set it back outside. Saturday morning he remembered it and we brought it in and he played with the ice!
I hope you are all having a Merry Christmas (remember, Christmas has just begun - it lasts for 12 days!!!). :)
For more tot school, go here!

Tot School – December 6, 2009

M is 39 months old

 

This was a pretty easy and fun week for us.  I filled M’s shelves up with some Christmas-themed file folder games I made last year, a new puzzle, his ABC collage pages, and a couple of fun clothespin math activities.  We also had no less than 3 play dates and a day at our local community center’s creative play area.  And a big dinner at the in-laws to finish the week out.  Whew.  The busy season has begun I guess. :)

 

ABC Activities:

M can not get enough of cut and paste pages lately.  He is going through 2 letters per week in his ABC book and we’ll soon be done with the whole alphabet at this rate.  He always asks for his “cutting pages” first; I think he loves that he can do it completely on his own and has the routine down.  However, I’m not sure he’s really learning much about letter sounds from this activity, except when we take his book down and “read” it.  I’m thinking of starting up the letter lapbooks again after we finish our ABC book with the collages, because he really seemed to soak in a lot with the lapbook activities.   He’s still not interested in doing any letter crafts, so I’ll wait a while before trying that with him again.  Anyway… here are the collage pages he’s done in the past two weeks:

He also spent some time looking at the ABC Book and doing the tracing pages: See that tripod grasp?  He’s really come a long way with this lately.  I showed him how “real artists” hold their paintbrushes and told him it’s important to make those muscles really, really strong, and he totally got into it.  He always wants me to help him hold the paintbrush the right way and it’s carried over to activities like this!

 

We matched the capital letters on a gingerbread file folder game from here.  Next week this will be out again and we’ll match “baby” letters to the “mama” letters. When I made this I put magnets on the back of the letters and we do one half of the alphabet at a time on a cookie sheet.  We also take turns (I made a lot of mistakes that he had to correct ;) ), which makes it more fun and game-like for him.  He tells me a letter to find and then I have to find it and put it on the right spot, then I do the same for him.  If he is having trouble, it’s easy to tell him the color of the circle he needs, as a little help.

 

Counting

We played this fun clothespin counting game with Christmas tags, ribbons, and foam stickers:

And we counted lots of things throughout the week in our everyday normal routine.  He is really doing well with counting and I love seeing him light up when he really “gets” something!

 

Patterns

We played another file folder game from here.  In this one M had to match patterns to create mittens: The right side piece of each mitten attaches with velcro.  He did great with this, which I knew he would (he was able to do it last year), but I added in a step where he had to describe the design to me - “a green rectangle above a blue circle” – as he found each mitten to match.

 

We also played a mitten matching game from the November issue of our High Five magazine.  Each mitten has a multi-colored design on it.  We played this Memory-style with the cards face down:

 

And we made ABAB patterns with some cardstock Christmas lights I made, using clothespins and yarn to string them up:

 

Colors

M did some color mixing with water in jars: He’s been asking to make colored ice cubes lately, which was something we did quite often over the summer.  He wants to use them in his bath.  Seriously, this kid comes up with some funny (but fun!) ideas sometimes.  So I decided to add a color mixing lesson in.  He loves using pipettes, so this is always fun.   Then he had fun dripping the water onto paper towels:

 

We did another file folder game.  This one was from here (also made last year).  I made the stockings into pockets and M loved fitting the candy canes into the matching stocking. 

 

Fine Motor Skills

Several of the above activities involved the use of fine motor skills (almost all of them, actually), but I also surprised M with a new (Dollar Tree) Mickey Mouse Puzzle.  He’s been putting his 24 piece floor puzzle together with no problem lately, so I wanted to see how he’d do with a 25 piece small puzzle.  He had it done in no time – all by himself!  He knew to look for pieces that had a little bit of whatever image he was looking for, and didn’t need any help at all.  I’ve asked for some puzzles for him for Christmas from relatives, and I’m interested to see how he does with a 50 piece one.  Needless to say I have bought out all the 25 piece ones at Dollar Tree. :) 

 

Music

We sang a lot this week and played instruments.  I have a binder of songs that I’ve put together for M and he has a small bin of instruments.  It’s more noise than anything, but it’s a lot of fun and he loves it.  There are no pics; I’ll have to do a separate post about it sometime!

M received a guitar for his 3rd birthday and this is how he likes to play it: Hee hee.   He asked me to get it for him a lot this week, and loves experimenting with the different sounds he can make with it.  We also listened to a lot of Christmas music – grown up and kid kinds. ;)  I have to be diligent about playing cds in our home because since he was born I haven’t listened to much music.  We never listen to the radio and I feel like I am always craving peace and quiet.  It’s been nice to have music back in our day, it can do so much to brighten our moods!

Creative Play

M has been dying to build a maze lately, but wanted help.  So this is what we did Friday morning:

He’s helping the Christmas Angel from his nativity set find her way out here. :)

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots!  Go here to see more tot school posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Nov. 15, 2009

M is 38 months old

We have had an odd couple of weeks.  Two weeks ago I suddenly felt burned out and apparently M was too – we were both kind of blah all week and did almost no tot school.  It was a rough week, so I didn’t bother to post even the few things we did manage to do. 

This past week M has had a pretty bad cold and we were home every. single. day. all. day. long.  On top of cabin fever I also had 3 very short nights in a row because M would start coughing so badly, and I’d get up to try to help, but mostly just held him and comforted him.  It’s sweet, isn’t it, how big boys turn back into cuddly babies in the middle of the night? :)  But 4 hours of sleep a night had me beat.  Thankfully I’ve had some free time this weekend and I’m feeling human again. :)

Not that this is about me… but just to forewarn you that this post may be, I don’t know, a bit nutty. :)

We did our ABC train in the pocket chart: 

We matched fur to animals with this file folder game:

 

Played with this bear dress up puzzle from the Target dollar spot:

 

He did some Bob the Builder truck name puzzles with flat glass marbles (definitely the hit of the week):

 

M worked with his build-a-letter homemade set, and was much more into it this time than he was originally.  It may have helped that I only set out a few letters.

 

We pulled out our counting mats and he counted with some skittles that were left over from his Halloween stash:

 

I found some very inexpensive plastic canvas stars at Walmart and M “sewed” it with a length of yarn and a plastic needle.  He really liked this activity!  It seems fine motor skill activities are always favorites around here. :)

 

I gave him a cardboard tube with numbers written on it randomly and some number stickers and he matched them up.  We did this once before with letters; for some reason he loved doing it with letters, but wasn’t that interested in the number tube.

 

The Target dollar spot also had these enormous blocks.  M is totally into blocks lately and I knew he would love these!

(See the t-shirt on the floor there?  They make awesome soft hankies for sore little noses that won’t stop running!)

 

We have been talking about animals in autumn, mainly raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, owls, and bats.  We checked out several good books from the library, and I found a Your Big Backyard magazine on the sale cart there for 10 cents, from October of 2008.  It was full of great information about animals.  On top of talking about squirrels and owls, it had a section that talked about how some animals have fur and skin that helps them hide.  M was totally interested in that part: It also had a cute mini-book to make that had M decide what animal would be on the next page by looking at a small part of the animal on the page before: It also had mazes, games, great fact pages… I could go on and on.  I have heard of Your Big Backyard, but I had no idea it was such an awesome magazine.  We loved it! 

 

M also did a raccoon craft using shapes: He did a great job with it and had a lot of fun sorting the shapes out first.  Anything with googley eyes and/or glue is sure to be fun. :)

Last year, pre-blog, I made these stick puppets for M: I brought them out again and he had fun learning this cute rhyme:

One little owl when the moon was new,

Along came another owl and then there were two!

Two little owls perched high in a tree,

Along came another owl and then there were three!

Three little owls flew to the barn door,

Along came another owl and then there were four!

Four little owls lined up side by side,

Along came another owl and then there were five!

Five little owls called “Hoo, hoo, hoo”, then they

flapped their wings and away they flew!

I can’t remember where I first found this poem, sorry!  M loves it and we did this several times.

He really liked it so much (he’s very into poems lately, and loves having visuals for them), I made some squirrel stick puppets and we learned another poem.  The clip art for the squirrels was taken from classroomclipart.com, a new site for me.  I love free clipart!

5 Little Squirrels

The first little squirrel said, “I want to play!”

The second little squirrel said, “Let’s find nuts today!”

The third little squirrel said, “Yes, nuts are good!”

The fourth little squirrel said, “They’re my favorite food!”

The fifth little squirrel said, “Let’s climb this tree,

and crack our nuts… one, two three!”  (CLAP 3 TIMES)

 

We played our autumn matching game several times:

 

We also played a fun game that was came in our High Five magazine October issue.  It’s called Gathering Nuts and I turned it into a file folder game (just laminated it onto a file folder).  It’s a basic counting game, and M had a lot of fun with this one.  He and Daddy played it every chance they got.

 

I also pulled out another game I made last year (also pre-blog) with squirrels and acorns.  M matched the acorn numbers to the  squirrels.  I’m sure there are other things we could do with these; I need to think about that some more.  Suggestions?

 

M played a pinecone race game.  I intended to set a timer for this, but forgot, so it wasn’t much of a race really, but M enjoyed it enough that he did it on his own several other times throughout the week.  First I had him carry pinecones in a ladle from one end of the living room to the other and dump them in a basket.  This was much too easy, so we switched to a large spoon:

Lots of fun was had! :) 

And, this is super-duper late, but I have to show you him in his Halloween costume: Complete with winter hat and winter coat on underneath everything.

Is it just me, or is he really cute? ;)  Maybe it’s just that mustache, hee hee. :)

Sorry I was all over the place in this post!  I’m going to try organizing our activities by skills for our tot school posts.  Obviously I’m not starting that today, but I do plan to start doing it soon! :)

For more tot school posts go here!

Have a beautiful week! :)

Tot School – Nov. 1, 2009

{M is 38 months old}

I am going to start with some of our activity shelves from this week: 

M loves doing anything with a dry-erase marker and/or a clipboard.  Who knew it would be so easy to get him interested in something?

I found a rhyming match page here.  M drew a line from the items on the left to the rhyming match on the right:Then we used the same card to match beginning sounds.  We talked about the distinction between words that have the same sound at the beginning and words that rhyme.  These are not easy concepts for a 3 year old to understand, and I think I probably should’ve used this page for just one or the other concept, not both.

He did another visual discrimination card where he first circled the tallest item in each row, then circled the shortest item in each row.  These were also found here.

He also did some same / different cards with sports balls and fruit: These were pretty easy for M – he simply circled the “different” object in each group.  He loves doing things like this and I like to include something I know will be easy for him.  A little ego-boost never hurt anyone. ;)  These were also found here.  Also, just a note… I found these mini dry-erase markers at Target; they are a bit shorter than a normal-size crayon and I’ve noticed they really encourage him to use a proper tripod grasp when drawing with them.  We’ll be using these more from now on.

I grabbed the very last “Make Your Own Monster” kit at the Target Dollar Spot, and put it on a shelf for M.  He was not as interested in this as I expected him to be.  He was acting very silly about it, and once he discovered the glitter glue, well, that was it.  All he wanted to do was put glitter glue everywhere. :)He made two monsters (we call them “silly creatures” because monsters are a bit much for him lately): 

Our theme for the week was pumpkins, and our letter was P.   M created the P pages for his ABC book:You can read more about it in this post.

I put 4 cardstock pumpkins in an activity box for him along with a glue stick and some shapes cut from yellow construction paper.  I printed the shapes from Making Learning Fun.  M decided to work on this project without me, and without asking for any directions (it was supposed to be for creating jack-o-lanterns).  I found him like this: Just haphazardly gluing shapes to the pumpkins. :)  So, we talked about the shapes, and we talked about the different sizes of the pumpkins – tall, thin, short, wide, small and large.  I showed him how to use the shapes to make a jack-o-lantern, but he decided to do his own thing.  That’s ok, I’m really trying to make this more fun for him than anything else.  And he learned more this way than he probably would’ve if he’d done it the *planned* way.  Here’s how they turned out:

He did a pumpkin shadow match activity:The inspiration for this idea came from this post at Izzie, Mac & Me.  He really enjoyed this one – it was just challenging enough, but still easy enough for him to do with no help.

We read a fun poem with pictures: I found the poem online and just copied it into a Word document with some pumpkin pictures I created from an online coloring page.  (I know this poem was on someone’s blog; unfortunately I just copied it right then and forgot to save the blog url to my handy dandy idea spreadsheet.  If you had this on your blog, let me know so I can link to it!)

We also did the always fun “Five Little Pumpkins” poem with the flannel board.

We baked yum, yum, yummy pumpkin muffins: They were heavenly.  I wish you could all have one!

More P activities….

M practiced Pouring to a line:

And we played the Penny Drop Game: This was definitely the “hit” of the week.  I posted more about this game here!

We read The Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Steven Kroll. and looked through some pumpkin life cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone. (Sorry no pics of ours!)  We put them in order and went through them a couple of times.

We learned some new pumpkin and halloween poems, but most of them were flops, ha.  The one M did like was “Pumpkin, Pumpkin” from childfun.com:

Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Sitting on a wall. (child sits)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Tip and fall. (child tips over)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Rolling down the street. (child rolls around on floor)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Trick or Treat!!!

We also did a couple of pumpkin and Halloween crafts…
M made a pumpkin mosaic:

And we made a tea light holder together, using red and yellow tissue paper:

 

That’s it for us! 

For more Tot School posts go here.

Have a beautiful day! :)