Tot School (22 months)

 Another post! YAY!! I finally got organized and bought some boxes for tot school! These are the activities for the next couple of weeks. : )

 We have opening jars and using a screwdriver to screw screws, Prewriting skills, ABC box, blocks, and matching/cooking. We also have football, soccer and bubbles for outdoor play. Below are pictures of Bee using the boxes. : )

Pre-writing skills

Matching pictures to the kitchen objects.

Playing with felt food after his matching.

Placing pom-poms on the letters A B and C.

We've also done a lot of outdoor things in the last month... Below are some pictures. 

Setting up a tent with Daddy for backyard camping.

Kayaking with mommy.

Reading a book while at a baseball game.  Sorry the picture isn't rotated.

Walking with our family. Bee wasn't interested in a family picture.

Yum getting in his "school" time too with tummy time.

This last picture is my favorite from this week. I wanted a nice picture with Bee. He didn't.... : )





As always, Check out what other kiddos are doing around the world at...

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 (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!