Tot School

M is 35 months old

I am finding myself wondering a lot lately if M knows I started a blog. He is constantly asking to do “school”! So much so that I’m having a hard time keeping up with him and finding new and interesting things for him to do. Thank goodness for all the other great blogs that link up to Tot School and their great ideas!

Here’s what we did this week:

We made a Cheerio bird feeder by stringing Cheerios onto a pipe cleaner and then forming it into a circle.

Then we hung it up in the tree outside M’s bedroom window:

It only took a couple of hours and there was a blue jay pecking away at it. It was completely stripped of Cheerios within a few days and we found the bare pipe cleaner on the ground. I’d call it a success, and we’ll definitely make one again.

I made a pattern with his blocks and he tried to copy it. He did pretty good, with just a slight mistake (can you see it?):

I created some cutting strips for him using stickers to help guide him. I got this great idea here. He knew exactly what to do and followed the lines almost perfectly. I knew he could cut well, but I didn’t expect him to do so well with this. He can cut a straight line no problem, apparently. I’m working on some new ones with wavy lines to give him a new challenge.

He also surprised me with this matching game:

You match up an enlarged detail of the birds to the full version (hope that makes sense). It is more challenging than a simple picture-to-picture match. But he caught on right away and did a great job!

We reviewed things that start with B from our ABC book:

And did a little Baseball Size Sorting from our ABC book too:

He is still loving the flannel board activities so we did one with numbers. It’s great for number recognition. I got the patterns and the idea from here.

Then we did Old MacDonald Had a Farm (patterns from here):

I left all the flannel board sets out and found him later playing with it this way:

It made me very happy to see this because I’ve been making felt sets for him since he was tiny (that’s how he learned his shapes, in fact), and it’s gratifying to see him finally enjoying them!

Hope you all had a great week of Tot School too!

For more ideas, see the 1+1+1=1 blog!

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! :)