Tot School (19 months)

~ Bee is 19 months!

 This week has been a very productive one as far as tot school is concerned! Which is a miracle considering we went to Six Flags too!  In these two pictures Bee is playing with his new cutting toy by Melisa and Doug. I found this brand new at a consignment sale and am so happy I bought it. Bee LOVES cutting the food and pretending to eat it! He's been really into pretend play lately which is a HUGE developmental milestone!

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 This is Bee's latest Sensory Bin! Right now it is mainly Easter things but will eventually be turned into the Spring Bin.  As you can see Bee had a great time making an absolute MESS of my living room. He liked scooping out the eggs, opening them, pulling out all the grass, getting in the bin, throwing the grass, finding all the animal hidden in the bin, and finally (in the end) helping Mommy pick up every piece of grass on our SHAG carpet!

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 I feel this week we've finally made some progress on a number or different skills! Bee has FINALLY started stacking his circles, octagons, and squares on different pegs some of the times! He doesn't do it all the time yet but he is definitely getting there so we've been making an effort to play with his stacker a lot and I'm making a huge effort to really use a lot of helpful vocabulary for him while we're doing it.  He's also started stacking his blocks on his own during his independent play. He's been able to stack blocks for a long time but not until recently would just do it without prompting. So that is pretty cool!

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 As mentioned we've been making a lot of progress this week.  That includes in the area of our felt board.  With Humpty Dumpty, Fidgety Fish/Ocean Friends/ and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Bee is now able to grab the correct pieces from a pile (most of the time) when we are reading about that piece in the story.  He then either plays with it a little bit (as seen above in the right hand picture where he is sweeping the mouse) or puts it immediately on the felt board.

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Finally this week we've been working a lot on different shapes. I realized the other day Bee knows not only circle but also heart, star, and triangle/rectangle (sometimes).  This knowledge came unexpectedly when Bee pointed to shapes on my clothing and told me they were hearts and stars. AND HE WAS RIGHT!! So naturally I decided it's time to really work with him on shapes! So I made a tot pack which I will blog about separately.  In this picture Bee and Daddy are talking about shapes before Daddy left for work. It is my favorite from this week!

As always, check out what other tots are doing in their tot schools!

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.

Hello again, and as usual I'm running a little on posting what we've done this past week with tot school. That said we has a very unstructured tot school week. With the first week of spring-like weather we've been spending a LOT of time outside and that means I've been slacking with tot school! We did still manage to get quite a bit done though and this is our week (including this morning!)

To start off, last week I finished making Bee's new wall display. It is a yard stick with clothespins glued on and each letter of his name on a clothespin.  This way he can show off the work we've been working on without it cluttering up my counters and tables!  This was the work from two weeks ago, letter B. And our old cake that we made for Dr. Seuss' Birthday. : )

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 Some more painting this week! We started with three squeezes and ended with color everywhere!

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 We've been working a lot with plants lately which you can see at my mid-week post for the HSV Garden Challenge. This idea for cleaning house plants with water and q-tips came from this great blog. I must say Bee was much more interested in putting the Q-tips in the water but did eventually get the hang of actually helping mommy clean/dust the dirty plant.

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 This is an alphabet worksheet created by 1+1+1=1.  Bee really enjoys these worksheets and does a great job making the sounds when he pushes the marker on the letters!

 Bee's weekly Alphabet craft is a crab for the letter C. We are very loosely working in the Alphabet. Bee is still not really understanding that each letter is different so we will just keep plugging on and when he starts understanding better go back over the beginning letters!

And finally our display wall for this week!

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 Our ocean felt board has evolved to become the Fidgety Fish felt board with our Ocean Friends. Fidgety Fish is one of Ben's favorite stories. It was written by Ruth Galloway and is really cute so when we read the story we move our ocean friends onto our felt board ocean.

 Bee's favorite way to play is to dump all our friends off and on the felt board! I need more felt board ideas too if anybody has any homemade stories or ideas I could use.

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 I've seen on several blogs in the past couple of weeks kiddos putting pipe cleaners into a colander. This was a first day doing this activity. Bee at first was a little confused by trying to get them in the little holes then after some demonstrations he went right on putting one in and pulling it out! He did have a great time working on his fine motor skills.

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 running to the swings

 being pushed on the swings

 practicing walking up the stairs!!! (rather than crawling)

 watching a friend's baseball practice.

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 We still work on practicing life skills. In this picture Bee is practicing setting his high chair tray! He put the tray, fork, and milk up all on his own! I'm so proud!! : )

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This is my favorite picture of the week! Bee and Mickey are picking up blocks from the floor. Mickey even helped to put them in the box! Mickey has become somewhat of a favorite this week. : )