Tot School

~Kayleigh is 23 months~

Hello fellow Tot Schoolers!!! I hope everyone had a great week.


We did a slightly better job getting in some Tot School last week. It helped that I wrote down my plans instead of just trying to remember my ideas. We didn't get to everything but we managed a few things. She's just so difficult during big sis's school that we never have time to finish her activities.


In a perfect world, she'd do 20-30 minutes of Tot School before we started Mackenzie's school and then do 20-30 minutes after. Sadly, Mackenzie's school takes 5x longer then necessary because we're constantly starting and stopping to deal with Kayleigh's "spiritedness." We wind up finishing Mackenzie's work while Miss Thing naps and then we have just enough time to straighten a bit of the tornado Kayleigh leaves in her wake and start dinner before Daddy comes home. Although I doubt Daddy can tell we've cleaned anything, such a mess that child makes. LOL

It's hard to be mad at her because she either had has such a happy look on her face or one of such distain for you that you can't help but laugh. Needless to say, one of the things we're going to be working on for Tot School is cleaning up your own mess.


Now that she's getting older I'm starting to expose her more purposely to things such as shapes, letters, colors, etc. So I'm start to organize her school around that with some fun "theme" activities thrown in the mix. So for this week I had planned to touch on circles, red, A, 1, and more on our winter theme. We touched on 3 out of 5. LOL

ABC's

Mackenzie read Kayleigh the Little Scholastic Alphabet book. A lot.



Kayleigh made the cover for her Alphabet Book that we are going to be making thoughout the year. She used dot-to-dot markers and regular markeres. She worked for about 45 seconds before she lost interest. We got the cover from Totally Tots.






She made her A page for the book. Our A is for ant page also touched our shape and color of the week.

She loved painting the ant parts red.

Even more fun then painting, I finally let her use the glue stick. She was so thrilled.

She was less then thrilled when I took the glue stick away because I was not going to allow her to glue things to the table. I tried to distract her by having her draw legs on the ant. Didn't really work well. LOL

The finished product. You can see her anger in her work. LOL

Oh, I got the A is for Ant project off of Teacher Filebox. It's not a free site but I love it. Basically, it has printables from almost every book Evan-Moor has published. I use it a ton for my older daughter. Just having all the History Pockets at my fingertips makes it worth every penny for me.

She also played the letter-zoo game on the Fisher Price website.

We also "made" an A snack. Mommy diced apples, with a little cinnamon and sugar, and put them in a baggie. Kayleigh shook them up to mix them. Turns out cinnamon makes her break out. She wound up with a lovely ring of red all around her mouth.

Shapes

Our shape for the week was the circle. I thought it would be so much fun to go on a shape hunt like the other tots seem to enjoy. I had a little bag already for her to put the circles she found into. I thought she'd have so much fun. I need to stop thinking. She was not interested and it made her angry. Very angry.

3 days later she found this. Brought it too me and said "Here you circle" and then walked away. Little monster. LOL

We played with her Lauri Shape and Peg Stacker and talked about the shapes.

We also did her Melissa and Doug chunky shapes puzzle but I didn't get any pictures.

Colors

Other then painting the ant red, we didn't do any other activities with the color red. LOL

She did get this fish puzzle from Grandma for her birthday. (Next week, sniff, sniff). We talked about the colors of the fish.

My favorite thing was how she "cheated" while fishing. She wouldn't hold the rod and "catch" a fish. She'd hold the magnet and stick it to the fish. Less room for error that way. LOL

I'm not going to lie. We didn't do a single winter themed activity. I made them. They're cute. We tried them last week. She doesn't like them. LOL Wouldn't even consider touching them this week. Not the mitten matching. Not Feeding the Snowman (numbers). Not the cute Snowflake Shape Book Carisa created. She doesn't like dressing the snowman either. At least she can't rip them anymore now that I've got a laminator.

I'll suppose I'll try again with Valentine stuff next week. LOL I'm toying with the idea of doing stuff with converstation hearts but I know she'll refuse to do anything but eat them. How do the rest of you get your tot's to play with food but not eat them? LOL (And aren't I supposed to be encouraging her to eat her food and not play with it?)

Be sure to check out what the other tot's are up to over at Carisa's.