Tot School!

We're Back! (Hopefully for more than just this week)

Wow, has life been busy, fun, interesting, and CRAZY! Bee and Yum are doing wonderfully and we are doing our best to squeeze in some sort of "tot school" activity each day. Whether that be going to a museum, sorting with our beads/pompoms, or baking.  The list goes on and on about some of the things we've done in the last month. Here are some pictures of what we've been up to. I won't say a lot about them but if you have any questions regarding what we are doing in the picture just ask and I'll tell you all about it!

Baking a Strawberry Blueberry Pie for the 4the of July

Bee and Daddy playing the recorder at Gymboree

Mommy and Bee making handprints for Father's Day

While hiking Bee found it necessary to clean the trail.

Bee also enjoys finding walking sticks while on a hike

Water Sensory activity with sponges

One to one correspondence with straws in ice cube tray

Stringing beads onto a pipe cleaner

Sorting. YAY!!! We're finally doing it!

More sorting. In this picture Bee realized he put a blue bead in the greens and was moving it.

Bee and Yum learning together.

At the museum they had a dinosaur exhibit

Yum learning through osmosis at Gymboree.

playing with magnets with daddy.

As I said above we are trying to squeeze in tot school experiences and activities everyday but it can be a challenge. Hope to be able to post again next week. Happy Schoolin'

Tot School (19 months)

~19 months.

This will be a summary of the past two weeks! I've been bad about taking pictures so a lot of what we did was not recorded on camera.  I did get a couple of some activities though so those will be what I highlight.  A lot of what we did is nothing new. We played with Pom Poms, Pipe Cleaners in a colander, Reading A LOT, and we are still trying to reinforce the letters A, B, and C before we move on to D, E, ...

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 This is part of our work with reinforcing the letters A, B, and C.  Bee continues to love painting with the Dot Markers.  I printed some coloring pages from First School and added the letters A, B, C on each one so Bee could dot the letters and we could make the sound or name the letter each time.  I also used printables from 1+1+1=1. to reinforce each letter individually. We have still been attempting to put together letter puzzles but Bee continues to be uninterested in them.  I think this next week we will attempt just matching the letters rather than trying to put them together as puzzles.

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 We've been practicing kicking a lot! Clearly Bee has decided that he would rather be a goalie and insists on throwing the soccer ball. He did finally kick it a couple of times.

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More work with our felt board this week. I decided to make a felt story for "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie" By Laura Numeroff.  In the right hand picture Bee is using the broom felt piece to sweep our couch! We also laid out our pieces as we read the story. : )

 This is our felt board activity for Fidgety Fish. I've shown this one before but Bee is just so excited in these pictures and so active I had to share them!

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We've also done several painting activities lately (more to be shown when I do our Easter post). But this was using leftover paint from a Bunny Craft we did. Bee loves painting and getting paint EVERYWHERE!

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In the last several weeks we've done a lot of singing activities with Bee. Many of them are adaptations from songs sang at Gymboree.  In this picture Bee is wearing his apron and rolling his arms to a Rolly Polly song.  It's lyrics are 

"Roly Poly, Roly Poly, Out, Out, Out. (Move arms out)

Roly Poly, Roly Poly, In, In, In. (Move arms in)

Roly Poly, Roly Poly, Touch your Nose. (Touch Nose)

Roly Poly, Roly Poly, Now lets Touch our Toes." (Touch Toes)

We've also been singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Row Row Row your Boat, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  Bee can do the movements to most of these although sometimes Twinkle Twinkle and Itsy Bitsy are interchanged. : )

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 My favorite photo in the past couple of weeks.  Bee "reading" his Playtime Peek-A-Boo book to our cats. Austin was more interested in licking the laundry basket but Tortilla was eager to listen. : )

Tot School (18 months)

~Bee is 18 months!

Another great week at Tot School. I feel like we are finally getting back into the swing of things. I've gotten around to cleaning again and to doing our hour of Tot School (focused play) at least four times a week. We play with the toys everyday just some days I'm more focused than others! But hey, independent play is good for kiddos too, right?!?!?  I've also learned that if I have new Tot School activities they should be done in the morning rather than the afternoon.  Bee is not interested in doing new activities in the afternoon. He looks at them, pretends to be interested for about... a minute, throws them, then says NO. It's so much fun! haha. Anyway, we have a lot of great pictures from this week so enjoy!


Some repeated activities this week were:

 Playing with Pom Poms continues to be a favorite for Bee so naturally we have continued that at various times this week. This picture in particular shows a new way that we started playing with them. Putting them in our dump truck and dumping them out.

 The alphabet puzzle is now a regular for our tot school activities. We are working on recognizing the letters A and B. Bee recognizes the letter A about 80% of the time and the letter B about 60% of the time. He likes to call B, the letter C. So hopefully next week's focus on the letter C will help clear that up. : )

 This is how the floor puzzle looks in the end! Everything torn apart and all over the house. By the way, we lost the letter D, uh-oh!

Bee's starting to recognize shapes. He knows circle all the time but frequently calls triangles and squares circles as well. So we have been working on that. He has started saying triangle some of the time but doesn't really know what a triangle is. haha, I love early learning. : )

New Activities:

 This week we worked a lot of kicking! He's pretty much got it down but now that the weather is turning nice we will start kicking outside with bigger balls.

This was a new activity we tried from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  I've been wanting to see if this sort of activity would be interesting to Bee. He seemed interested for about five minutes and will put the colors in the correct places when I point to where the colors go but won't do it on his own yet. We've pulled it out a couple of times for five minutes or so and will continue to do so. Hopefully once he actually knows his colors this will be a more interesting activity for Bee.

 Bee really enjoys his lacing cards.  This is from a Dr. Seuss set that I got a while back. He can't hold the card on his own yet but he can get the string into the hole! Go BEE!!!

 With Easter just around the corner I found some barnyard Easter eggs in a bag (from last year) and decided to bring them out for Bee to do some matching. I pulled out three eggs (a chicken, a cow, and a pig).  Bee loved playing with these. They went for rides on his lion, were torn apart, a he tried putting them back together. We also worked on the names of the animals and what sounds they make.  Bee is very good with the chicken's "buk, buk" and half the time knows that a pig says "oink, oink". We still need to work on the cow's Moo though. For Ben most of the time a cow says Neigh.

 Bee is trying to push the egg halves together. This was difficult for him but with more practice he will get it. : )

 Another new activity we tried this week are the Alphabet Puzzles created by Homeschool Creations. Bee still shows no interest in puzzles. They all landed on the floor and instead we started reading a book upside down! (See photo below!) We will bring out the puzzles a couple more times and see if he becomes interested. If not, we'll wait a while and try when he's older.

 New book about going potty in a big boy toilet. Bee was very interested in "reading" the book himself. And yes It was upside down. When I switched it right side up he became uninterested!

Arts and Crafts from this week:

 We did a LOT of arts and crafts this week! In this picture we are making a birthday card from Grandpa Joe. It was of course late but still, Bee had a lot of fun making it.

The B craft this week involved making a Bee.

After a lot of work together we got the stripes on our Bee and added other letter B photos. This was great for reinforcing vocabulary. We also added on the stinger and antennae after this point. The craft idea is from Totally Tots and the extra B pictures are from Homeschool Creations.

 My favorite photo this week! Bee getting ready to PAINT! He was so excited. : )

 Bee is painting a piece of wood .

Bee is painting himself! He needed to be colorful too!

Bee needed both hands to paint with and more paper!

Bee drew his first circle! This purple ones are my examples and the tealish/blue one was Bee's. He loves circles and points them out whenever he sees so of course he is going to want to draw them too!

 Coloring a B coloring page also from Homeschool Creations. This coloring page is currently hanging up on our fridge and whenever Bee sees it he shouts "baby!" Not B (What exactly what I intended but hey, at least he's learning something!)

 This week we introduced dot markers for the first time. In this picture Bee is dotting the letter B on a ball. He did really well dotting the B's and saying "buh" while doing so. He also went crazy with just painting. This page was made by Carissa at 1+1+1=1.

This was Bee's first activity with the dot markers. It's a little hard to tell now but most of the dots were filled in. He didn't always make it on the dot but sure tried. Then of course, he went to painting all over! This printable is also from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

And Finally:

 This week we went bowling with some friends and had a great time.  In the above picture we created a barricade of chairs so Bee and his friend wouldn't keep running out that way! So naturally, Bee decided to sit on the chairs and Daddy sat with him!

In this picture Bee is getting help bowling from a friend and Daddy. Not to mention the nice little bowling thingy from the bowling alley. They are actually all watching the balls progress down the lane. ; )

Well, another great and busy week in our home. Hope you all had a great time with tot school as well!