Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months old

Since it’s officially fall it was time to starting working in some of those favorite fall themes. So we did apples this week. We also took a break from introducing a new letter.

Literacy Activities

She did these cute little apple puzzles from 2 Teaching Mommies apple unit. We only did letters A-F, as those are the letters we’ve covered so far.

She did really well considering she hadn’t really worked with lowercase letters much. ( My only goal with any letter activities at this point is exposure to the uppercase.) But I told her what the lowercase letter was and she matched it to it’s “mommy” and she got them all correct. That was a nice surprise!

She made this apple collage, also from 2 Teaching Mommies. There was a lot of gluing involved so she was THRILLED!

She really likes these bottle cap 1:1 correspondance activities from COAH, so we did the one from her Apple unit.

As you might of guessed, we read a lot of apple books. Her favorite was Apple-Picking Day (Clifford's Puppy Days) so we read that one a few times. Not enough for me to want to hide it though. LOL

Math & Science Activities

I got out Hi Ho Cherry-Ofor the first time. I thought that’d I’d be able to convince her they were apples but she didn’t even give me a chance. “Oooo cherries!” Oh well!

She liked it a lot. Just not as a counting game. We each took one spin and after that she just wanted me to put all the apples on the trees so she could knock them off. When she tried to sneek it into the living room, I had to put it away. We’d never see those cherries again. LOL

We played an Apple Roll & Count game from 2 Teaching Mommies. She did not want to color the apples after she rolled so we switched to putting on dot stickers instead. She was happy with that.

Our FOAM DICE had dots on them so I covered one of them with numbers so we could work on recognition too.

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We played with real apples. This was Kayleigh’s favorite activity of the week. She loved them so much she was willing to count them, sort them, line them up. She drew the line at making a pattern with them though. LOL

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She did a great job with this apple shape puzzle from COAH.

We worked on visual discrimination with these same/different apple cards from Prekinders. I didn’t demonstrate and just gave her verbal instruction and she did it quickly and correctly. On the ONE card that she was willing to do. LOL I think I’m going to leave this activity out for next week and see if I can’t get her to do some of the more difficult cards that she ignored. It’s a good skill to work on.

We talked about the parts of an apple using this adorable felt activity from 2 Teaching Mommies.

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Life Skills and

Other Fun Stuff

She practiced cutting with this cut and paste activity from COAH. I cut the apple pictures into strips and she just had to cut between each apple. Scissors and glue…what more could she ask for?

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We have a new sensory bin for the month of October. Black beans, mini-pumpkin erasers, stretchy skeletons, mini-pumpkins, rubber bats, and halloween buckets. Both girls love it!

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We did a little cooking this week and made Cutie Pies from My Montessori Journey. They’re just cute, little apple pies. Kayleigh helped with the cutting, the mixing, and the seasoning. Mackenzie did that plus handled the crust.

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Be sure to click the Tot School button at the top of the page to see what other tots have been up to this week.

Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months

Tot School this week was very much Kayleigh-led.  My plan was to finish up the Letter F using  2 Teaching Mommies’ Forest Unit.  But instead we had a lazy week and just got a few of my planned activities done.  We didn’t even get our Letter F page done yet.  lol There’s always next week.

Here’s what we did do. 

Literacy Activities

Kayleigh used our Do-A-Dot Markers and painted a “F” and Swimmy the Fish.  We read Swimmy this week and she wanted to paint him.   Since the main characters were a fish and a frog, they fit in nicely with our letter of the week.  And hooray for Making Learning Fun for having a Swimmy printable.

She did the F is For Fish Magnet page from COAH’s Letter of the Week Curriculum.

Math and Science

She played with our Feed the Frog Game again.  She just loves that.   She’s even taking to counting them out a bit instead of just shoving the “flies” down the poor frog’s throat. 

She did this fun forest animal track puzzle from 2 Teaching Mommies.  She really liked that and did them more than once.  Because she’s a little odd, she jumped on the puzzles EACH AND EVERY TIME that she did them.  She said she was playing hopscotch. 

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She also did the Count and Match Pine Trees game from 2 Teaching Mommies.  She did a really great job.  She was even kind enough to find the correct number after we counted the trees.  Apparently, she is starting to recognize some of them.  =o)

We never did get to the Pinecone Sorting game so I’ll save that for when we get to P.

She really got in the forest aspect of the games because we had read Little Rabbit Foo Foo until my throat was raw and bleeding a couple of times beforehand.   The book is now hiding under my mattress. 

And as long as we’re on the subject, Kayleigh was certain that the rabbit was not naughty because the mice, tigers, worms, and goblins enjoyed being bopped on the head.  “Deys happy!”  I think she secretly wants to be a goon.  She did manage to refrain from bopping any of us on the head though. 

Kayleigh pulled out her Shapes on the Farm magnet book.  (And hey, farm starts with F. We’re still on topic. Sorta.)  This is one her all time favorites.  She plays with it all the time.  She usually just places the shapes randomly.  This time she chose to put them on the “proper” page.  Without any prompting from me.  I was stunned.  Generally her motto is “I’d rather walk barefoot over hot coals than do things the right way.”

Fine Motor and Learning Toys

I finally broke out My First Book Of Mazesand let her try it.  I put them in page protectors and gave her a dry erase marker.  She LOVED it!  And she did pretty good considering this was the first time she’d done anything like that.

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She got out our Krinkles, similar to Bristle Blocks.  Both girls always enjoy these.  And guess what?  The particular set we have has a farm theme. LOL  I couldn’t have planned it better myself.

Naturally the instrumentsmade an appearance.  She loves anything that makes a lot of noise.

Lastly Kayleigh and Daddy played with her, wait for it, Little People Animal Sounds Farm.   I should’ve done F is for Farm.  Clearly that’s what she wanted.   I’m surprised she didn’t get out her Melissa & Doug Farm Puzzle.

Life School

We made some yummy banana bread, in the form of muffins.  I decided to be a good mom and let the children help out.  I’m one of those people who doesn’t really enjoy cooking and I enjoying it even less when there are “helpers” who make a bigger mess. LOL  I’m trying to overcome that flaw though.

Of course, the fit she threw when she wanted to crack the eggs instead of mash the bananas did not endear the project to me. LOL

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And that was our week.  Be sure to click the Tot School button at the top of the page to see what the other tot’s have been up to.

Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months

Click the Tot School button to see more fun tot activities!

We had such a great week this week. Kayleigh was 75% cooperative and she even got to go back to Jamestown with us. (We went last week without her but decided to go back and explore on our own sans tour guide. It’s nice that those home school tickets are good for two weeks. And that we live so close. )

Literacy Activities

Our letter this week was F. A lot of our activities focused on fish and feelings.

We did a 1:1 correspondence activity with letters. We got this from COAH’s Letter of the Week curriculum. I didn’t think she’d really like this, as she tends to feeling that matching anything is beneath her, but she did. It was a pleasant surprise.

She also did a great job sorting capital and lowercase Ff, also from COAH. I knew she COULD do it, but she usually refuses. Maybe it was because I called them “Mommy Fs and Baby fs.” LOL She likes family. LOL

On our one hour drive to Jamestown she watched Brainy Baby : ABC's : Introducing the Alphabet. Every time she watches it she runs around saying “Uble-u says wu, wu, wu.” It’s nice knowing we won’t really have to focus on that sound in the future. LOL

We read Ten Little Fishand made a cute fish snack. I stumbled upon that on Totally Tots on accident the day after we read the book. That worked out nice.

Kayleigh liked making it but the only thing she really ate was the cream cheese that stuck the “body” to the “tail.” You can see how she licked it off. LOL Who doesn’t like chocolate covered pretzels? Crazy!

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One of her favorite activities of the week was her Feelings Tot Book from 1+1+1=1. She had so much fun with it.

First we read a couple of books about feelings, The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too! and Duck and Goose: How are You Feeling? .

She absolutely loved the mini-book. So much that I couldn’t glue it into the folder. I’m going to velcro it in so that she can remove it and read it. She loved acting out the feelings. Especially “angwee!”

The “How are you Feeling?” game was a lot of fun too. At first she was very sweet and did it correctly. I’d say “Oh the little girl has a tummy ache. How does she feel?” She’d say “Sooo sick.” And put on the “sick face.” Then she went back to normal. “The little boy got a new bike. How does he feel?” Kayleigh’s answer, “Gwumpy!” “Why Kayleigh?” “It falled.” Technically, under her scenario, she was correct. LOL

She also liked coloring the color cards and lining them up all over the room. She’s usually not one for coloring but she was happy to do it this week. And she used the correct colors. Bonus!

The only activities we didn’t get to were the concentration/matching and the “draw” your feelings. Next week, I hope.

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I did add in one other activity. I was totally IN LOVE with the Roll-a-Graph activity from the 2 Teaching Mommies’ forest unit. It looked like such fun. I thought about just doing their forest one because forest does start with F but I wanted to stick with the feelings theme because Kayleigh was really into it. So I adapted it for our feelings “study.”

(Although I might do the entire forest unit next week because, like I said, it does start with F and we still have to do our F page in our ABC book. And it is the cutest unit. LOL)

She really had fun doing this, once she accepted that she couldn’t just place the stickers anywhere she wanted. LOL She also liked just rolling the feelings die and acting out the feelings.

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Click the picture below to download it.

She also played with her Melissa & Doug Alphabet Puzzle Book several times this week. She's never had that much interest in it before so that was nice.

Numbers, Shapes, and other “Mathy Stuff”

We did some big/little sorting with zip ties. I got the idea from Chasing Marcus who did TONS of fun things with zip ties. I plan on borrowing more of those ideas in the future. Lots of fun for only a dollar. She did this every day. Naturally she divided them into “mommies and tute babies.” LOL

She played with her MATCHIN' MIDDLESshape matching game. It’s good for matching and snacking.

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Since my Feed the Elephant Game was such a hit with her, I made a new one for F. This week we Fed the Frog. Flies. Kayleigh thought it was Fantastic! She even did all the numbers, 1-10, without losing interest.

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Click on the frog below to download it for your tot.

Fine Motor and Learning Toys

I saw this adorable leaf stringing activity over at My Montessori Journey. And I had everything I need to make it already. It’s very similar to the button snake but it has an autumn twist.

She really liked it. I was a tad worried that it might frustrate her because the button and the slit were smaller than the button snake, not to mention the leaf is flimsier than felt, but she did great. It took her a while to get the hang of it but she kept trying.

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She’s been very into her Melissa & Doug Lacing Beads lately. Although never for more than 4 beads. It’s apparently an unwritten rule.

As always, instruments are a favorite activity. Please notice that she made a “T” with the rhythm sticks in the first picture. She called it a “T” too. That was impressive because we’ve haven’t done T yet and I don’t really expect her to start recognizing letters for about another year. So that and her “W says wu” were nice bonuses this week. LOL (I hope next week doesn’t feel disappointing after all these bonuses. LOL)

And here’s a little peek of her at Jamestown. She had a great time despite the fact that she declared that the Powhatan dwellings were “spooky” and smelled “ewwww…discussin’!” The nice thing about Kayleigh is that you always know where you stand with her.

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