Week 2: Tuesday and Wednesday

*linking up with 1+1+1=1's Tot School Gathering today*

TUESDAY

Feed the Lion:
(I first saw the idea here at Eyes of a Boy)

Monday night after Scout went to bed I explained my need for a friendly looking lion head to my husband. He thought my attempt was pretty hilarious and agreed to draw me a new one.

Much better :)

When we came downstairs Tuesday morning she was a little weary of the Lion on the table, but warmed up to it. She played with it for a while before getting her pipe cleaners out again. (She really likes those, but I had to take away to container for a little bit because she wanted to bang it against the coffee table and didn't listen when I told her not to.)

Sorry about the poor quality, my flash isn't great.

Skills:

• pushing objects through
• fine motor skills
• in/out
• letter recognition practice

Vocab:

• In/out
• lion
• letters in her name

Stickers:

 After her nap she played with the pipe cleaners again. My homemade paper lid eventually ripped and I had to make another one. Then she did a sticker project but I didn't take any photos of that. I had to peel the stickers off for her, and she seemed a little upset that once they were stuck on the paper she couldn't get them off again.

Here is a picture from today of the finished product.

A couple times while Scout was holding one sticker she'd point to its mate on the paper. After they were all stuck on she pointed to one monkey then the other monkey and one elephant then the other elephant. If I asked her to find a specific one (e.g. Where is the other giraffe?) she wouldn't do it.

Skills:

• fine motor
• creativity
• pinching
• matching (a little)

Vocab:

• Lion, Elephant, Giraffe, Monkey, Tiger, Zebra, Rhinoceros (a new one for her)

WEDNESDAY

Art:

At the Detroit Zoo (and probably other zoos, though I can't speak from experience) they have a station called "Handimals" where a person paints your hand, makes a hand print, and then draws your hand print into an animal of your choice. Last summer I got Scout a tiger print. Its adorable. I was originally thinking I'd try something like that, but the morning really got away from me somehow, so I just let her paint freestyle.

This was her first attempt at painting, and I may have tricked her a little bit by putting the paint in bowls (I thought it'd be easier for her to see and reach and not tip over) and putting a bib on her. So naturally she thought it was a snack and tasted it (though really she's been very picky about new foods recently and wouldn't even touch a strawberry this morning even though she'll eat them in her yogurt...but I digress.)

Once Scout realized what a bad idea that was, and what you are actually supposed to do with the paint, she had a lot of fun. I probably should have named the colors for her, and added more to our vocab, but I was having so much fun watching her paint that I didn't really emphasize learning this time. Maybe in the future if I remember.

Trying out her fingers instead of the brush.

Obviously having a moody Picasso moment here.

I couldn't stop laughing, and she looked at me like, "What?"

Skills:

• holding a paintbrush
• pre-writing (sort of)
• color mixing
• art/creativity

Vocab:

• paint
• paintbrush

So today was pretty laid back. We tried something new, and enjoyed it. I think painting will probably work its way into most our themes. And I think I'll grab a couple cheap table clothes from dollar tree next time I'm there to use as tarps for the table and floor (just in case).

-Jes

Week 2: Monday

MONDAY
I thought I'd get things started by bringing out the the Feed the Lion game. That did not go over well, and as Scout was trying to shove the terrifying thing as far back on the shelf as possible, she noticed the pipe cleaners in the next bin. I helped her bring it over to the table. It was an instant hit.
 ...On the plus side, I learned if I want her to voluntarily pick up around here all I have to do is put scary lions on her things.

Here is an action shot of her putting the lion away.

Pipe Cleaners

She knew what to do with it right away and she worked on it at least 20 minutes before getting bored.

I was originally going to draw and cut out little animal pictures and tape them to the top to go along with our zoo theme, but after poorly drawing the other animal cards we used I decided to skip it. I'm glad I didn't do it now because she got pretty creative and decided to put both ends of the pipe cleaner through the holes.

I counted each pipe cleaner she put in (6 total) and named each color as she did it (red, black, orange, purple, green, yellow). We even worked on cleaning up after we were done, but she did get it back out a couple more times.

Skills:

• fine motor skills
• identifying colors
• counting to 6
• pre threading/lacing
• focus

Vocabulary:

• in/out
• numbers 1-6
• colors

Heads and Tails Game

This started out well. Scout has some easy 2 piece farm puzzles that she likes, and this was very similar.

One thing that really upset her though, and kinda ruined her interest in it, is that they don't fit together like two puzzle pieces. If she pushes them too far they overlap. She only got the ends together correctly if they were in the right order to begin with; if the right piece was on the left side she still tried to just slide it over and didn't care that the picture wasn't complete.

I love this look of concentration.

Skills:

• matching
• very basic animal anatomy
• puzzle work

Vocabulary:

• Dolphin
• Giraffe
• Panda
• Elephant
• together/apart 

She also had fun dividing her sensory/discovery bin. She didn't like her toys being mixed up with her rocks.

Not a bad start to our week. I have an art project or two in mind for Wednesday or Thursday, and maybe the hubs (who is a much better cartoonist than I) will draw us a friendlier lion so we can play our Feed the Lion game without worry.

Thank you all so much for your encouragement last week. Tot school is intimidating at first but I am very glad I decided to give it a try.

Jes

Week 1: Monday and Tuesday, (or How We Got Started)

The end of February seems a weird time to start "school", but since my daughter, Scout (that's a nick name, I don't want to share her real name), hasn't any sort of experience with it she will never know. And honestly if I had thought of it and tried to start it in January, I probably would've have fizzled out by now. As it is, I am in such a hurry for Spring to begin (which wont happen here until April, if we're lucky), that now is the perfect time to make some changes.

So MONDAY:

We didn't do anything. I didn't come across the idea and decide to really implement it until yesterday.

TUESDAY:

I started with an idea I saw on Pinterest called a "Name Puzzle". You write their name on bottle caps, one letter per a cap, and then they can spell it out like unscrambling a puzzle. Scout is way to young to spell, but she can identify letters. Not which letter is which, just that these symbols are letters and that they make sounds. Usually if she sees any letter she'll call it "A".

Well it just so happened that I found some milk bottle caps sitting on top of our fridge the day before, left over from when I collected our milk jugs to make a Halloween craft (...that I never actually got around to doing). The jugs have since been recycled but the caps were forgotten about all winter until I randomly decided to dust off the top of the fridge, (lol, no I was just standing on a chair to see the top shelve of another cabinet and saw them over there, I haven't dusted the top of the fridge in ages).

So I scooped them up and got out my scrap booking supplies and glued cute little circles with her name letters on them. Then I let her look them over; she seemed unimpressed. So another idea came to mind that I remembered seeing on Pinterest somewhere. I ran up stairs and dug out an old baby wipe container. The caps fit in perfectly. And she spent at least 5-10mins dropping them in through the slot and taking them out. She needed help getting the container open to get them back out.

I blacked out the letters of her name.

Vocabulary:

• the letters of her name
• in 
• out
• upside down
• right side up
• face down
• face up

Skills:

• putting a round object through a thin slot on its side
• opening and closing
• spelling...sorta
• letter recognition

So she liked dropping the caps in, and even flipping them over so all the letters were face up. It may have been a coincidence but she got all the letters (except one) right side up too, as if she knew how they were supposed to look. She did not get them in the right order but she consistently had the first letter of her name at one end and the last letter at the other end of her line.

This seemed like a good start. Later that night (because it was the only time I had to run an errand without taking her with me), I stopped by Dollar Tree and picked up some more supplies.

I'll go into some more details about that next post.

-Jes