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!

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!