Tot School ~ Special Arrival

~Smiley is currently 20 months old~

We had a fun tot school this past week with a big highlight on Saturday :)

Ocean Theme...
I really wanted to make a the ocean animals tot book for Smiley, but didn't have a laminator until recently, so I decided to extend our ocean theme a little bit :)

Here Smiley is playing with an ocean felt board. He really enjoyed this activity.



We then spent a few days on our ocean animals lap book. You can find it here. Smiley had a great time working on this!

Coloring the different ocean animals:

Looking at the finished ocean animal tot book...

Matching animals...

Numbers...

Vocabulary...

Here is the entire tot book...

As I had the laminator out already, I decided to also make a fun file folder game. I found this on totally tots! I decided to not glue the anemone in the file folder just yet...

Fine Motor Skills...

We haven't played with our pom poms in a long time, and this week I decided to bring them back out. Smiley had a blast and played with them for a good 30 minutes.

Sticking tooth picks in a parmesan shaker. Another old favorite :)

Blocks. Always a great activity!

Playdough...

More pom pom fun!

Finding all the yellow ones...

And then all the red ones... He loved doing this :)

Numbers...

Art...
We incorporated our ocean theme into our art activities this week :)

Life School...

The highlight of the week occured yesterday (Saturday, September 26) when Smiley welcomed a little sister. She's doing great :)

And a few hours ago, we all drove home. We're so in love with our family of four!!! Life couldn't be any better and we feel extremely blessed!

If you would like to read what other mom's did for tot school this week, please visit Carisa's Blog here.

Tot School

~Smiley is currently 20 months old~

Itty-Bitty Bookworm...
This week, we read "The Wheels on the School Bus". Smiley absoultely loves the book! We did a few activities from the Itty-Bitty Bookworm curriculum to go with our reading of the book.

We played driving a school bus, which was a big hit with Smiley ;)


Another day, we colored a school bus and then drove it around the house :) Another fun activity that Smiley really enjoyed. He particularly liked gluing on the wheels and driving the bus around his room :)

Colors/Fine Motor Skills...

We played with Smiley's pegs a couple of times this week and focused on stacking them by color. I would yell out "purple" and he would then grab all the purple pegs and stack them. He really liked this!

He also enjoyed playing with his shape sorter. Although, I think he sorted mainly by color, rather than shape ;) Nevertheless, he is really good now at putting the shapes in the correct hole!

Animals...

Smiley still really likes playing with these animal flashcards I got from costco a few weeks back. This week, I put them all out in front of him and said the name of an animal. He then looked for it and gave me the card. Again, he liked this interactive way a lot :)

If you would like to read more tot school posts, please visit Carisa's blog at 1plus1plus1equals1.

TOT School

~Smiley is currently 20 months old~

Unfortunately, I was a bad photographer this week and mostly forgot take shots during our tot school activities. So this week's post is rather short :(

Fine Motor Skills...
We played with Legos quite a few times this week. Smiley is a big fan of stacking them. We worked on our colors at the same time.




Colors...
Smiley continues to enjoy to sort his animals by color. He also really likes to pick them out by name. For example, I will tell him to "find the blue pig" and he will look for it and hold it up. He really enjoys this :)

Art...

We did quite a bit of art again this week. Smiley got to try out markers for the first time :) He loved this! Taking the lid on and off was a big reason for why he enjoyed this as much as he did ;)

If you would like to see what other mom's did for tot school this week, please visit Carisa's awesome blog at 1plus1plus1equals1.

Tot School- 2 weeks

~Smiley is currently 19 months old~

Since I was too busy last week to post write a tot school post, this week's post will include the past two weeks.

Itty-Bitty Bookworm...

We worked on the unit to the book More More More said the baby these past couple of weeks. I do like the curriculum, but don't love it. I will probably go back to doing my own thing after this month, using a monthly theme, working on numbers, colors and shapes and probably starting on letters. I think I will look into the letter of the week curriculum as well, and probably just use a lot of material from totally tots and 1+1+1 :)

Here Smiley did the scribble art to the book More More More...

And added some water color :)

Numbers...

We still enjoy working with numbers a lot and have continued to practice the numbers 0-10. Smiley does correctly recognize all of these numbers without problem now. I guess our next step will be counting as well as 1:1 recognition. We may take our time with this though...

He likes it when I ask him to get a number, such as the number 3. He gets the number and holds it up with a big grin :)

Colors...

Smiley is starting to get better and better with his colors. He pretty much knows blue, red, yellow, green, purple and white by now.

He really enjoys sorting the animals by color.

We always reinforce colors when we play with our connectors or our blocks as well. Those are great fine motor toys also!

Animals...

Smiley is still in love with animals. I think next month's theme will have to include animals as well :)

Art...

We again did a lot of art activities these past two weeks. Here we're working with stickers.

We colored tons and tons these past two weeks :)

Putting crayons in and out of their box is still a big hit as well :)

Reading...

Smiley is absolutely in love with books, so reading is a big part of our day. Just recently he started being into paper books again. He didn't have the attention span for them for a long time. I am so excited that now, he will actually sit through a few Dr. Seuss books!! Big change from just a couple of months ago!

If you would like to read more tot school post, please check out Carisa's blog at 1plus1plus1equals1.