simply sarah.: tot school

Showing posts with label tot school. Show all posts

Monday, July 11, 2011

Lydia vs. The Shaving Cream

Shaving cream is a fun tool I use for pre-writing skills and it's just a fun sensory exploration...

Aaron loves it!

Lydia, well, the pictures will speak for themselves...

He was having so much fun he was oblivious to her apparent misery.

(Hint: If you want to try this with any children in your life any type of shaving cream works great, jell or regular. And often you can find it very cheap at dollar stores. We do like the female scents better than the men's... it's VERY strong smelling! Bonus: if they play long enough it rubs away and is easier to clean up. Trays or pans like this also help (somewhat) to contain the mess.)

Sunday, August 29, 2010

August Tot School

Aaron is currently 35 months
and
our resident tiny tot Lydia is 11 months

We've been doing tot school activities ever since I learned about it from this lovey lady almost two years ago! I just have a slight problem with getting overwhelmed... :-) for those of you how know me might be laughing out loud! ...so the blogging of all said tot school activities has been lacking.

Aaron will be doing many "preschool" designated things this year but he's not even three yet so I'm still going to keeping it simple.

One day everyone woke up from their naps early so we made a quick trip to the store to buy some white flour and made three batches of play dough! I've learned the hard way that fresh ground wheat berries DO NOT make good play dough.

the beautiful result

Aaron and my mothers helper

This is an old Before I Write book I got from paperbackswap. My mother's helper put it in the plastic slip pages in a binder so he can use dry eraser markers!

Shaving Cream! I am not afraid of a mess. :-)
I think I did get a little carried away with it and gave him way too much.
But he had fun drawing and writing letter Aa.

Lydia will be doing lots of play learning, our favorite kind around here!

Lydia really likes these Melissa and Doug knob puzzles! She's great at taking them out.
We are still working on the putting them back. :-)

This photo is from awhile ago but I didn't have any recent one of her drawing.
She really likes the aquadoodle!

counting bears for working on color recognition
She very much enjoyed dumping them out and throwing them on the floor.

I gave her the bowl upside down and showed her how to play it like a drum. She promptly turned it over and started stirring. :-) Ahh, that's my girl! A kitchen helper in the making!

By far her favorite is looking at books! She often wakes up from nap before Aaron so that's our cuddle reading time. We both love it!

Check out more tot school activities here

Monday, January 18, 2010

Tot School

Mr. A is currently 28 months old

Here is a summary of some of our tot school activities over the last two weeks. I'm working on taking a picture of them all... I don't always get good shots. (you'd think with my daily photo obsession this wouldn't be a problem! haha!)

Ping-Pong balls! 72 of them! They come with 144 so I split them with a friend. Right now I've made him an upper and lower case set, leaving 20 for spares or numbers later... we'll see. To see more ping pong ideas check out 1+1+1=1.

Here are some activities under the "fun" category. We played with icicles. He loved dropping and break them! He was cracking up which was cracking me up!

Then we read about birds and how they live in nests... so he, of course, wanted me to make him a nest!

Also, below are pictures of our The Wheels and the Bus books and puzzle. This might be his favorite song! I don't know why, but if I say we are going to sing songs he always wants to start with this one! They sang it every week at the library story time we went to during the summer, and it certainly has stuck with him! I found the puzzle and small book set at Boarders on clearance!

We played (our own version of) the Goodnight Moon board game... as you can see, he matched the pictures just fine... but had more fun playing with the cardboard!

He also did some pouring/scooping and he rarely makes any kind of mess. He has mastered this... but once I said he had to look for the circle chips I hid inside cleanliness was no longer in the picture.

Finally, he now has his own scissors and is always asking to use them.

He's a fan of his do-a-dots. I am too! I'm already brain storming new things we can do.

Since he's such a fan of spelling things... from his Word World craze... we got him the Melissa and Doug see and spell puzzle. He still floors me with his memory of how to spell short words! I don't know if he really knows he's spelling or not but it's fun to watch and hear him!

Several activites went un-photographed. Like our sign language time. When we was a baby we did this often and he knew many signs. Since his sister is getting near the signing age I've brought it back. He can identify the alphabet letters and he can sign his name. Some of the hand letters are still tricky for him to do so he can't do the whole alphabet yet... but we are working on this slowly so I'm not pushing it. I'm actually surprised he picked up all the letters SO fast! It's so cute when randomly while he's playing he tries to make a letter and asks if it's right.

We've also started working on signing the different animals. I didn't realize how the baby signs for animals are pretty different than the ASL ones... but I guess I know what he's saying, and he knows what he saying.

Does anyone have any good sign language books that they could recommend??

He talks non-stop these days... and pretty much all of it is understandable!!

Except today... on the way home in the car it SURE sounded like he was saying "Starbucks, Coming Soon!" over and over... haha but I really don't think that's possible? Who knows?!??