Tot School: Letter Ff and Training the Tot

Our princess is currently 27 months old.

Tot school has been limited the past few weeks.  I will admit, with this pregnancy winding down, I have not been doing the necessary planning and preparation for Tot School.  There is so much other stuff to do.

We have done a little more work on "Training the Tot".  Click here to read about the first few sessions.  The princess did so well in our last session last week.  I don't know if it was due to being indoors rather than out, or if it was the new toys I gave her to play with, or simply her mood that day.  But she sat on her blanket and played with 2 dollar-store finds for 25 minutes.  25 minutes!!!  So close to our goal!

I found a bag of beads at the dollar store, and she loved putting them on pipe cleaners.  I also found these link-together toys (supposed to be used to make jewelry), and she enjoyed putting them together and taking them apart.

 Look at that concentration!

 The only other day we did Tot School, we used some Ff pages from 1+1+1=1.  She colored some objects that start with F, and we practiced our "fffff" sound.

 I taught her to trace the Ffs, and she did pretty well at that.

 She colored the capital Fs green and the lowercase yellow.

 She is getting the hang of tracing from left to right, and she stayed on the lines really well this week!

 Finally, shapes.  She did better with these, though she needs some work identifying the more obscure shapes.

I will admit, I do not have any Tot School plans for this week yet.  I'm tired.  Maybe I will work on that tomorrow.  :)

Tot School: Ee is for Elephant and Eggs

Our princess is currently 26 months old.


 Our focus this week was the letter Ee.  I did something new and actually planned what I was going to do on each day.  Novel idea, I know.  Up to this point, I was just printing out a bunch of activities and doing whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like it.  This resulted in missing several activities each week or doing 5 the first day and only doing 1 on the last day.  I like the planning idea.  We ended up doing 3-4 activities a day, which was the perfect number for her attention span.

We began by making an elephant.  You can find the template on the first-school site.  She enjoyed making elephant noises as she pasted shapes in place.  I also drew the letters Ee at the top for her to trace, and she enjoyed coloring those in more than tracing.

We did this week's left-to-right tracing from 1+1+1=1's Ee printables.  She did a really great job of tracing the lines this week!

But when we moved on to the next activity (also from 1+1+1=1), I wanted her to color each object as we talked about it.  Instead, she kept drawing lines from left to right.  :)

She practiced putting the lids back on the markers.

The bottlecap activity from COAH was not a big hit this week.  After 1 letter, she decided to play with her trucks instead.

We tried again later in the week, with similar results.  She liked dumping the bottlecaps out and stuffing other objects in the jar...but she had absolutely no interest in matching the letters.  I think we will skip this activity next week and come back to it later.

 

She made an Ee page for her alphabet book this week.  This week's pictures featured Elmo, Eeyore, egg, elbow, ear, elephant, and envelope.  You can see in the picture on the left that she's making an elephant sound as she glues him in place.  :)

Her coloring page for this week was "Ee is for Elephant" from DLTK's letter E coloring pages. 

And again, you can see her making an elephant sound as she colors :)

We tried this activity from 1+1+1=1's Tot School printables.  This sheet served as a way to talk about colors, numbers, and the letter E all at the same time!  I would tell her to color a certain number of Es a certain color, and she would occasionally follow directions. 

We tried these coloring sheets from 1+1+1=1's letter E printables. She did a great job of listening to directions and coloring the eggs the colors they were labeled.

She also did this Ee egg puzzle from 1+1+1=1. This was a bit simplistic for her.

This week was our first attempt at doing any sort of sequence (from 1+1+1=1), and I did not think she would be very good at this.  She got it first try!

She colored shapes and numbers.  Shapes are definitely something we need to work on.

I attempted to let her stamp the letter "E" on her big "E".  She was not a fan of this activity.

We had a great week, and planning ahead really made it a lot more fun for both of us.  We are going to take a break from the alphabet this coming week, in order to wait for more printables from 1+1+1=1.  :)  I am looking into doing some Easter focus, so we will see how that goes!

Tot School: Dd is For Dinosaur, Doggie, Duck, and Dolphin

Our princess is currently 26 months old.

Wow...I took a lot of pictures this week.  This could be a very long post.  Here goes!

We worked on the letter D this week.  I was really excited about the new alphabet printables at 1+1+1=1, and I used a few of her ideas this week.  I also used some from COAH and DLTK. 

The following three activities are from COAH's D is for Dinosaur printables. We tried clipping clothespins to dinosaur cutouts. This did not go over very well. Her fingers just aren't strong enough for this yet. She did enjoy pulling off the clothespins I put on though.

The Dinosaur matching game was a little better.  She did well putting capital D on one side lowercase d on the other.

 

The bottlecaps were not such a big hit this week.  We only did this activity once, and she didn't even complete it that time.

She was more interested in playing with the bottlecaps and dumping them out of the jar.  She also enjoyed seeing how many clothespins she could fit into the jar.

We had an impromptu diaper-sorting by color.  That of course turned into a game of pile-everything-on-the-princess-in-the-basket...a favorite at our house.  :)

 

She really enjoyed this Doggie craft from DLTK.  I was just encouraged that she got the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth all in the correct order.  :)

 

We tried these pre-writing sheets from 1+1+1=1, and she did a pretty good job of tracing left-to-right.  She needed a lot of verbal instruction though.

Our coloring sheet this week was from DLTK's Dd is for dolphin. 

We are a week behind on our alphabet sheets, but we did the letter C this week.  My idea to paint with a carrot actually turned out pretty well!  The princess' little Buddy was here that morning, so she joined us.  Neither of the girls ate any of the paint, so I was very encouraged.  :)  I do love to watch as the girls' little personalities come forward.  Princess is a cautious, watch-and-see little girl and prefered the dip-and-swirl method of painting.  Buddy is a jump-right-in, fun-loving girl and went for the dip-and-dot method.  So cute.  :)

And finally, our "Dd" page this week featured a dolphin, dinosaur, dog, duck, Daddy, her "D" uncle, and her 5 "D" cousins. 

 This week is the letter Ee.  I just printed off some projects, and I am excited about this week!  I just love doing Tot School with my girl.  It's so much fun.