Tot School – March 14, 2010

M is 41 months old.

I’ve been giving this some thought, and in the ongoing struggle to find balance, I’ve decided to limit my tot school posts to every other week, or two per month. We’ll see how it goes… bear with me!
We’ve been taking it very easy on “school” stuff lately. We’ve had beautiful weather and have just been enjoying the magic of being 3 years old. :) Here’s a bit of what we have done…
FINE MOTOR SKILLS:
M just loves cutting pages, so I created some quick shape ones for him. He cuts out the shapes then finds the same sized “blank” spot on the second page. To add a bit of excitement this time I had him use tape instead of a glue stick. He LOVED it! He definitely needs more practice with the tape, so we’ll be doing more of these!
A backpack of lacing buttons, animal shapes, spools, and little discs, from our toy lending library (still loving that we have one of these!).

Placing marbles on the suction cups of the back of a dinosaur-shaped bath-gripper-thingy.
LARGE MOTOR SKILLS:
Playing in the jump-o-lene with cousin S. Do you like his cheesy smile?
A great find at Dollar Tree – a target game with sticky balls so we can work on our aim.
A huge foam USA map mat (the kind that has foam squares that lock together). He stands on Minnesota and jumps to Florida a lot because that’s where Grandma and Grandpa currently are. :)
LITERACY SKILLS:
I set up M’s ABC train cards in the pocket chart, leaving a few out. We went through the ABCs until we came to a blank spot. Then he decided which letter was missing and found it in the pile on the floor. He did great with this, and it was fun to switch the game up a little bit from what we normally do!
SENSORY: The sensory bin has been full of very hard and very soft things. You can mainly see the soft things in the picture – cotton balls and pom poms. There are also small and large glass pebbles, glass marbles, and some plastic crystals, along with a scoop and a couple of small containers.
SCIENCE:
We found this cute book at the library:
Bird Talk, by Ann Jonas. Basically it tells a little bird story using only “memory phrases”. These phrases are what people who study birds use to remember the various sounds that birds make. For example, a chickadee says “chick a dee dee dee”. A robin says, “cheerily cheer-up, cheerily cheer-up”, etc. It’s a cute book and we have a lot of birds around, so we’ve really enjoyed it. I found this fantastic website, enature.com, and we were able to look up and listen to the actual bird sounds… it was a lot of fun and we were surprised at how accurate some of the memory phrases were, and a little bewildered about how they came up with some others. ;) I really need to spend some time exploring that site, it looks like a great resource!!
Go here to see more Tot School posts!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Books of the Week – March 13, 2010

Alistair’s Elephant by Marilyn Sadler was our favorite book this week. Sorry the picture above is blurry. I couldn’t find a picture on Amazon or pretty much anywhere else. It’s a cute book about a serious little boy who has an elephant follow him home from the zoo. All he is worried about is getting rid of this silly elephant so he can get back to his normal, neat and hard-working life. :) M’s favorite part, which he has talked about non-stop, is when Alistair thinks it’s raining and it’s just the elephant showering him with his trunk. Really, how can you not know an elephant is following you home? :) Apparently there are more Alistair books and we are definitely going to look for them.

A good, non-fiction book this week was Close, Closer, Closest by Shelley Rotner. Each page of this book has 3 pictures of an object (strawberries, comic book, peacock feathers and lots more). The first picture is what you normally see, the second picture is a close up and the 3rd picture is a magnification of a small area of the object. It’s really a neat book and M has asked for it several times.
For more good kids’ books, click on the button at the top of the page and check out the blog carnival at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns!
Have a beautiful day! :)