Felt Fruit

I have fallen in love with making felt fruit for Bee and Yum.  In three days, working mainly during nap and an hour or two in the evening after bedtime for Bee I have created these!

There are 10 strawberries, 4 blueberries, 3 orange wedges, 2 tomato slices, half a lemon and a whole pineapple. Click the fruit to see my patterns/inspiration.

There are so many more to do.  I plan to continue with fruit for now then branch out into vegetables and try my luck shortly after with lunches, dinners, and other things of interest. Like muffins, pies, cakes, etc...

P.S: I'm having a ton of fun making these and looking forward to doing so many more. If you have any ideas, please share. : )

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 (17 months)

This post will be covering tot school from March 3-12. We did not get to do our post last weekend due to heading for a vacation.  We also did not do many tot school activities from the 13-19 due to the vacation.

Bee has been showing more interest lately in the alphabet so we pulled out our alphabet foam puzzle and have begun singing the song more frequently. Randomly Bee will just start saying letter names so we have begun focusing on one letter a week similar to other tot schoolers out there.

Another outing we went to the park and practiced our running, climbing, swinging, and sliding. Along with all the vocabulary associated with the park. We walked to the park and along the way and learned new vocabulary like fence and stop sign.

This week we also continued playing with our Pom Poms (an activity Bee enjoys a lot)! The first day we played with them for 45 minutes! It was incredible. : ) We practiced picking them up, dumping them out, sweeping them, picking them out of the broom, scooping them with different sized spoons and pouring them from many different containers.

  

More pictures from a different day with the Pom Poms. like I said, he really enjoys these! :)

As mentioned we started introducing a letter a week or so with Bee and doing some sort of craft associated to it to make an Alphabet Book for Bee.  This week's letter was A. We went through the slide show on Starfall. Bee really enjoys this website and playing the letter games with mommy. There is a lot of mommy help with this website but he seems to really enjoy it. We have learned to recognize the letter A (although he calls other letters A all the time too) and we also reinforced vocabulary for apple and alligator.  This letter A took a lot of mommy help to place the pieces in kind of the right areas but he still had fun doing it so that is all that matters. This idea I got from fellow bloggers (here are their sites.) Mommy Life in Maine and Totally Tots.

A favorite activity of mine is cooking so naturally it's something I like to do with Bee as often as I can. These are really simple snickerdoodle cookies with no sugar or shortening in the dough (only sugar on the outside). They are also delicious and Bee had a great time sprinkling cinnamon sugar on the dough and rolling them in the cinnamon sugar. The recipe came from Food.com. 

This week we brought out the felt board again to continue with some old learning and introduce a new idea from a fellow blogger. Camp Slop made a fish tank themed felt activity in conjunction with Dr. Seuss and I loved the idea so I adopted it and brought it into our room.  To the left Bee is putting all the fish on top of each other. We also try sorting colored squares with our felt board but obviously still need a lot of help with that. : ) Although Bee is VERY proud and claps for himself whenever he matched any of the squares. Color doesn't really matter yet to him. Oh well, as long as he's having fun!

This is a favorite of mine from this week. Bee was crawling through his play tent/tunnel. He kept trying to hide from me!

Tot School

~ Bee is 17 months old.

Tot School:

This week has been a little challenging in the realm of tot school. We have both had colds and early on in the week I lost my voice! The end of the week we were visited by my parents which was very helpful in terms of Bee but also a challenge to keep tot school going normal. We were however able to incorporate some tot school activities this week and several life learning activities.

We were hoping this week to start our transportation tot pack. This was the only time we were able to actually use it this week. Bee is matching vehicles. This is not an activity he can complete independently but with a lot of prompting we were able to match all our cards.

Bee is working on putting blocks and shapes back into it's container.  He is pretty good at getting the circles into the lid sorter but has a rough time with several of the other shapes.

Bee "reading" a book! He loves books and I am so thankful for this!!

This week we had a fair amount of snow in the area so Bee and I spent a lot of time staring out the window and saying his version of "snow".

Daddy and Bee had a great time this week cooking together.  They made Cheerio treats with M&Ms on top!  This recipe was inspired by Chasing Cheerios.

Out of the House:

This weekend we went to Gymboree with the grandparents. In this picture Mommy and Bee are climbing across the monkey bars.

This is Grandma Ellen and Bee at Gymboree. During Gymboree there is a part where the children play with maracas and bang them when the music plays and stop when the music stops.  Bee always gets really excited for this part of Gymboree and is starting to get really good at "freezing" during the non-music portion.

Finally, Bee's favorite part of Gymboree is the bubbles. He knows how to say bubbles and tries every time to grab them between his fingers. This is great for fine motor and so much fun for the tots!

This is by far my favorite picture from the week! Bee is walking away from the window where he was watching the snow and just looked so cute!

As always, we had an awesome week attempting tot school and hopefully will get more into this week!