Tot School~ No School

~Smiley is currently 23 months old~

This was another week that we took off from tot school. My parents were still in town visiting and daddy was off from work (and will be for the next three weeks!).

Nena loving on her little granddaughter :)

Bath time is always a time for many tot school activities. Smiley loves pouring water from one bottle or cup into another...
I found a set of foam numbers and letters at Target (in the baby bath section) the other week and Smiley loves playing with them.

We spend lots and lots of time reading together every day. It's definitely one of Smiley's favorite activities :)

Smiley got a Spiderman memory game at a Christmas party. He's still a bit too young for the actual game, but we had fun sorting the cards by color. Here he is collecting all of the yellow ones...

Since daddy was off this week, we did a couple of special activities. One day, daddy took the kids to the zoo. On another day, we all went to Disneyland together. Smiley was in LOVE with all of the characters. He went up to all of them, giving them big hugs and kisses. It was the cutest thing ever!

And then we had some fun on the playground in toon town :)

Tot School~ Christmas Style

~ Smiley is currently 23 months old~

We're taking a bit of a break from our regular tot school during the month of December. We have so many friends and family staying with us this month that things are just to hectic to take time out of the day to engage in our tot school routine. However, this doesn't mean that there aren't tot school moments throughout the day. I was even able to capture some of them ;)

Learning Toys...

Smiley liked playing with his mailbox and saying the colors of the envelopes as he put them in the mailbox.

He's really interested in puzzles lately. We got out his alphabet puzzle quite a few times over the past two weeks. He really enjoys this. He says the letters as he looks for the correct space for it :)


Smiley got a fun little ball that lights up and had a blast throwing it around the house...

He played with play dough a couple of times...

We painted a Birthday Picture for his Nonno (my dad).

He played with his mega blocks many many times this week :)

He's getting quite good at building towers :)

Playing Wii Tennis with our friens. What a blast!

Christmas/Advent Fun...

Reading a Christmas book with daddy and enjoying the advent wreath :)

Hanging up window decorations with mommy. We even found Mickey Mouse ones :) Smiley is a big time Mickey Mouse fan these days.

St. Nikolaus... We had fun celebrating St. Nikolaus this year.

Smiley got a Little People Nativity scene from Nikolaus :) and we baked Graettima, a Swiss tradition on St. Nikolaus.

and we made a Nikolaus craft...

Smiley playing with his new nativity scene...

Tot School~ Thanksgiving

~Smiley is currently 22 months old~

I wasn't a very good photographer these past two weeks. For some reason, I never seem to have the camera handy when we're doing tot school. I have to try to work on that...

ABC's

Smiley surprised me these past two weeks. He picked the book "Dr. Seuss ABC" a few times in a row for his bedtime story, and after about a week of this he knew nearly the entire ABC. I was very impressed and decided to start reinforcing the letters during tot school. He knows almost all the upper case letters and most lower case letters, but I still thought it would be fun to start an ABC book...

So, this past week we worked on the letter Aa.



We also made a cover page for our ABC notebook that we found here: http://totallytots.homestead.com/ABC.HTML

The finished products:

We found the idea for the Aa craft at No Time for Flashcards...

Learning Toys

We played quite a bit with different learning toys/puzzles these past two weeks, but I only snapped pictures of Smiley working with this sorting toy.

Fall Theme

We continued our fall theme over the past two weeks, leading up to thanksgiving. Smiley enjoyed using the dot paint to make some hand turkeys...

I really liked the paper plate turkeys as seen on 1plus1plus1equals1 and wanted to try it with Smiley. He really enjoyed gluing the little paper squres on the paper plate. However, once I put paint on his hand, he freaked out and started screaming. I managed to get a quick handprint, before he pulled his hand away (hence the smeared fingers). I should have known that this craft may not be a good idea for Smiley. He really doesn't like it when his hands are dirty (he doesn't seem to mind a dirty face though). Oh well, we'll try again next year ;)

We got Smiley a little people Mayflower this year, and he enjoyed playing with it many times this week :)

Lastly, we spent several days with my husband's family in San Diego. We all had a great time just hanging out around the home and relaxing. By the way, Smiley got a hair cut a few days ago and my baby boy turned into a big boy! I can't believe that his short haircut aged him about 6 months!!!

Tot School

~Smiley is currently 22 months old~

We had a busy weekend last week and I didn't get a chance to write a post, so I decided to include the past two weeks of tot school in today's post :)

Learning Toys...

Smiley had fun playing with puzzles. These are actually too easy for Smiley now. I will have to look into puzzles that are a bit more challenging. Maybe for Christmas or his birthday :)



Smiley continues to like to play with his pegs. He usually lines them up or stacks them by color.

We had fun sorting our animals. He first sorted them by animal group...

...and then by color...

He always likes playing with his lacing beads. He particularly enjoys sorting them ;)

Farm Theme...

We finished our farm theme last week. We played quite a bit with the matching game from our farm tot book...

And we colored the different animals of our tot book.

Fall Theme...

We had fun making a collage for our fall theme.

And we baked a bunch of pumpkin muffins. Mmm....

Physical activity...

Smiley is a very energetic boy, so he needs lots and lots of time just running around and getting his energy out. He really likes playing with this tunnel from IKEA. It's great for indoors!

Life School...

We don't get snow in our area, so we were lucky that a park had trucked in quite a bit of snow for the kids to enjoy. It was Smiley's first time seeing snow and he had a blast playing in it!

He kept wanting to eat it though ;)

They also had a gigantic Titanic slide. Of course, daddy and Smiley had to check it out...

Looks pretty scary, doesn't it??

Here is what Smiley and daddy thought of it...