Tot School

Kayleigh is 27 months old

Hello Tot Schoolers!!

I hope that you are all well. We had another sucessful week and accomplished quite a bit. We didn't get to all of our themed activities but we did a lot of skill building play. That means we can continue on with caterpillars and butterflies next week. We still have lots of fun themed activities to try.

Kayleigh worked on letter recognition by watching her new dvd Brainy Baby : ABC's . We caught a massive 70% off sale over at Brainy Baby and I was able to buy some of the videos that I've had on my wish list. It was even better than I thought it would be. I really like how it introduces lowercases letters too.

We worked on shapes and colors with her Nuts & Bolts set. She really loved these and played with them through out the week. She had a little trouble screwing them on as she kept turning them "lefty loosey" instead of "right tighty" but that didn't stop her from trying.




She also had fun working on her colors with this Paint Brush Color matching file folder game from COAH. (Scroll down to find it.)

We reread The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Bugs! Bugs! Bugs! quite a few times this week. And Kayleigh continued to pull My First Jumbo Book of Shapes off the shelf every chance that she got.

We practiced sorting small, medium, and large caterpillars from COAH. Or as Kayleigh calls them, "Daddy, Mommy, and Baby." She loved, loved, loved this. It was her favorite activity of the week.

We used these butterfly number cards for a couple of activities.

We tossed bean bags on the numbers that I called out. (I pointed out the correct number too. She doesn't really recognize them yet.)

And we did her favorite, counting and jumping on them. That never gets old.

We enjoyed our new Brainy Baby: Sing Along Songs and played our many instruments. Even big sis joined in.

My favorite was when she turned her LeapFrog Guitar into a violin using her mallet.

We worked on fine motor and 1:1 correspondence skills with our pom poms, tongs and flower ice cube trays. For once she actually did it. With the tongs. Putting ONE in each spot. It's a miracle. LOL We got the tongs at IKEA and the cube tray came from the Target $ spot. The tongs worked great. We've used a couple of different pairs that we had around but she wasn't able to control them. She did great with these.

And I have to say that Kayleigh is really enjoying the new school room. I think it is a big part of why she is finally being more cooperative for tot school. When they house is too quiet you'll often find her here. A future Sonlighter if I've ever saw one.

Lastly, we finally made it to the zoo. You'll remember we did a zoo theme a few weeks ago. Better late than never. LOL Her favorites were the meerkats, elephants, and giraffes.

Be sure to head over to 1+1+1=1 to see what the other tot's have been up to.

Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Friday!!! Hope your week went well.

We've been working, working, working to get this year over! It would probably go faster if we'd stop taking breaks for things like the zoo. Actually, the zoo didn't stop us. We did school afterward. Ha!

Some of our highlights this week...

One more lesson in math!!!!! Woot!!!!!

Science will be done by Wednesday. Double woot!! We're currently enjoying The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible. It's been a very interesting read and has given us a lot of things to discuss.

Mackenzie and daddy had fun with the Blizzard in a Bucket that I picked up for cheap at the Scholastic Warehouse sale.

We have two weeks left of history but I have a feeling that we'll be doubling up next week and finish that up too. That's always easy to double. That will just leave us with two read alouds and two readers to finish. Oh happy day!!! The end is near.

We studied the Nez Perce this week and she made a Nez Perce History Pocket this week. Sorry no pictures.

You'll have to settle for these from the zoo yesterday. It was hot, slightly crowded for a Thursday, and we had to battle the world's worst behaved school group ever but the animals were cooperative for my camera. Even the ones who's tails were being stepped on by obnoxious boys with no supervision.

Be sure check out the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris.

A New Addiction

So I was checking out some of my favorite blogs a week or so ago and I spotted something interesting over at Confessions of a Homeschooler. And no I don't mean her fabulous printables. At least not this time.

She had posted a digital scrapbooking template that she had created and the most adorable scrapbook page.

I am a scrapbooking dropout. I've got lots of stuff to do it but it rarely gets done. It's been years. I've never even finished my oldest's baby scrapbook. Nor am I caught up with her birthday scrapbook. (I thought a bday scrapbook would be easy to keep up with. Only one layout a year, right? What's 9 layouts? LOL)

But, alas, I've never been able to keep up. It might have been easier if I'd had a designated space and didn't have to keep dragging it all out and then putting it away.

So when I saw the template, I was intrigued. That seemed more doable for me. Plus, as I'm not terribly creative, I could redo the page until I liked it without wasting precious papers and the like.

So here's my first attempt at digital scrapbooking. It took me a while to figure out just the basics for this. But I'm slowly starting to figure it out. Lots of reading and tutorials in my future.

So now I've got a new obsession. Do you know how much free stuff for digital scrapbooking is out there? Downloading that stuff is a bit addicting too.