Sunday, December 5, 2010

Tot School ~ Christmas Fun, Letter Xx

~Smiley is currently 34 months old~
~Our little Lovebug is currently 14 months old~

Tot School

It's been a way too long since I last linked up to tot school. Things around here have been very busy. We continued to do our regular tot school activities, but I have just been too busy to blog about them. Here is what we've been up to this past week...

Learning Toys...

Smiley and I have been working on doing patterns a lot. He still likes to do the ABAB pattern. I sometimes try to introduce an ABCABC or AABAAB patterns, but he usually doesn't go for it...
Our pattern turned into a street eventually ;) The pictures below where taken on two different days and both times we ended up with a street...
Letter Xx
We worked on our RRSP Letter Xx activities... Smiley hasn't really been interested in any letter of the week, tot pack/preschool pack type of activities lately. He has no interest in coloring, matching, drawing etc. right now. I am really sad about this, because I love the cute activities other bloggers put together. However, I am taking his lead right now and will take a break from those activities for now and try some more "active" types of activities... I hope that in a few weeks he will be interested in our pretty, laminated work again :)






Flying his verse around the room was the highlight of the letter X lesson :)

CHRISTmas fun...

We have an advent calendar, and I put a little scroll in it for each day that has different activities on them that we do together as a family. Those can be very simple things, such as reading a Christmas story or drinking hot cocoa, or they can be a bit more elaborate. One day this week, we made a gingerbread house together. The kids loved this! It was really difficult for Smiley not to eat all the decorations ;)



On another day, we got to visit Santa :)

Sunday, October 31, 2010

TOT School ~ Halloween...

~Smiley is currently 33 months old~
~Lovebug is currently 13 months old~
Tot School

Halloween...
This week was mainly centered around Halloween. We talked about halloween, pumpkins and jack o' lanterns. I found these fun little halloween stamps at the target dollar section a while back and both kids really enjoyed playing with them...
Smiley transfered little jack o' lantern erasers into cupcake molds.

Our little lovebug had to try it too, of course. She did really well with this. I was quite impressed with her persistence :)

We traced halloween shapes with markers...

And used them with our orange playdough...

We practiced cutting a lot this week. Playdough works really well for cutting practice :)

We baked halloween cookies (as if there isn't already enough sugar this weekend ;)) Smiley had a blast. He loves baking with me!

I made orange frosting by adding pureed carrots. You can't really tell from this picture, but it turned out orange and you couldn't taste the carrots at all. At least the cookies now included the slightest trace of vitamins ;)

Later today, we will conclude our halloween theme with carving pumpkins and going trick or treating :)

Fine Motor Skills...
Our little lovebug loves any type of fine motor activity. Here she is putting pennies into cupcake molds.

I was very impressed that she was able to also put the pennies in a piggy bank. This was definitely a bit challenging, but she persisted and was able to fit quite a few pennies in the bank!

The fisher price stacker is another toy she enjoys right now :)

Fun...
We went to fly kites for the first time this week. We all had a blast.




We also played some golf...

and learned how to pitch...

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Tot School~Letter Ee, Fall

~Smiley is currently 33 months old~
~Lovebug is currently 12 months old~
Tot School
Letter Ee...
We covered the Letter Ee from Carisa's RRSP program, which we still love :) I was't a great photographer this week and I only have one picture to show... More next week!
Fall Theme...
Many activities this week were again centered around our fall theme.
We sorted leaves by color (they are from the Target dollar section). This is now too easy for Smiley and we did it in German to work on his German color knowledge. He actually knew all of the colors in German :) (We will need to work on grey, black etc next)
The little tot just worked on putting them in a bottle and getting them back out ;)
On another day, I added a number in the bowls and Smiley had to count out the correct number of leaves in the correct color.
We made a leaf pattern...

Learning Toys...
Our little lovebug worked on a farm animal puzzle. Still a bit trickey, but she gets the general idea ;)
We played A LOT with our little people zoo this week. Smiley is playing really imaginatively with his toys now. It's a lot of fun!
He still loves his cars from the Disney movie CARS. He calls them "name cars". Of course he knows all of their names by heart :) One afternoon, when I walked into his room, he had set up his cars on his train table...
He really enjoyed building towers. We recently got this tower set at a consignment sale. It's a huge hit around here with both kids! He totally gets the idea of stacking by size and that the hole needs to be on the bottom ;)
The scatterpillar game came out this week as well. This used to be a big hit with Smiley, but he had zero interest in it this week and only played for about 2 seconds...
Legos were a big favorite though. He built a helicopter (the tower below) and flew it around for two days ;)
Both kids enjoyed the tunnel :)
We worked on cutting along lines this week for the first time. Smiley did quite well with it. We will have to start doing this on a regular basis. Fortunately, it is part of Carisa's curriculum through the memory verse :)
We built a fort every single day this week! The kids LOVED LOVED LOVED this ;)