Tot School (Music, Books and Life)

J is 27 months old

Where did the week go??? It seems like I just did my Tot School post from last week and here I am ready to write another. This week really flew and although we did lots of fun things together, there were plenty I didn't get picture of and definitely more "life activities" than actual focused Tot School. Below is the recap of the week.

J started out the week by getting out his stacking cups. He hasn't played with these in a while. He took them up the stairs and started lining them up in different ways. He shifted the cups back and forth and this seemed to be all he wanted to do with them.









Coloring
J continues to love to color. Almost anytime I suggest it he'll gladly color, but most often he's either getting the coloring books out himself or asking me to help get him started. Like when we're reading, again he loved counting multiple things.


















Counting
Here we played with his numbers game. If you press the number, it says the number aloud. It also has a game where it says, for ex., "find the blue number" or "find the purple 5". I ended up using this as a way of teaching him to focus on (waiting for) and following instructions. I noticed he wanted to keep jumping ahead and just hit the numbers so I held his little hand explaining we'd wait and then he'd press the number after listening. I think this did really help with learning more about how to wait and listen first. He's really good about finding the number when they add the color to it (the red 2), but not recognizing the number by itself yet.

Shape Sorter
He hasn't been picking up his shape sorters a lot lately, so when I brought this out he was eager to play. He did a few rounds of dumping out the shapes and putting them back in, but kept forgetting where the pieces of "mail" go so I guided him a bit on that.









Mr. Potato Head
J tried to grab the camera when I was trying to get a picture, but he first had fun putting the glasses on and running around. Then he sat down and got busy putting the pieces where he wanted them, none were in the right order but he had fun, yet he played with it only for a brief time.



































Music

These pictures are J in action dancing to Hap Palmer with his little bells.

Hap Palmer - Learning Basic Skills through Music
Recently, we went out to dinner with a couple friends, one of whom teaches preschool. We were talking about how lately J is really into elephants and it started with the Jungle Book with marching. She thought of this CD as it has an Elephant and a Marching song. I wasn't sure how he'd respond to this one but he really liked it. Although, I think his favorite was the song called Colors. It tells the kids to stand up and sit down and he started doing that and I noticed he was following the song. I think my favorite was the Elephant song though! During this song, he actually brought me the E from his alphabet floor mat! We did this a couple times and then the third time I had the idea to get out our instruments like tambourine and bells and he enjoyed playing with whatever I had in my hands at the moment.

Worship - Veggie Tales
I kept this CD in the car for when we were driving. J always is asking to listen to "his music" in the car. If I put on something I like he always says "no, I don't like this song...I want Veggie Tales worship". This was his favorite "in the car" music until I got the Sesame Street CD.

The Best of Sesame Street
He kept asking for an Elmo song, but this is from 1987 before Elmo. As he's getting to know these songs better he's trying to sing along.















Books
The picture above was my ambitious idea to read all these elephant books we got from the library or own. I sat down with J and he picked one called Where is Pup and gave me the elephant magazine saying "mommy read it" meaning read it to myself while he read something else. He was funny that he seems to really want to pick the books himself and didn't like it when I had a set of books picked out that I wanted us to read. So I didn't fuss about it.

One book that stood out this week was J enjoying Richard Scarry's Best of Mother Goose. We haven't done a lot with nursery rhymes yet and I think he really liked the rhyming as he kept saying the words back after I would read them. He loved naming the objects in the pictures as Richard Scarry books are great for that.

He also wanted to read over and over 4 older Disney books I found at the library for 50 cents/piece (Lion King, Lion King II, Dumbo and Finding Nemo).
Something I also noticed that is a newer development is J naming colors of things in the book and trying to count everything that he sees in multiples. He'll get the counting right if I hold his finger and move it to point, but on his own he counts and recounts, skips around, etc. I really love this. We had lots more, but these are the ones that stood out the most.

Finally, below is a video of J reading. Of course, most of his reading is all made up but he seems to catch a lot of what's going on in each page. Here he's reading a fireman book.



Fun enjoying "Life"

We went to Devil's Lake (a favorite of ours) on Labor Day and did what is now our usual thing, bringing plenty of books, cars, animal toys and coloring books so he has plenty to do all day. It was a bit too cool to swim (and really windy) so we didn't go down to the beach very much.









We stopped to see J's grampa on his daddy's side after the lake. He is very talented and enjoys woodworking. He showed us his current project making several of these rocking horses, including one for J so he got to try it out.










On our way home, we stopped at Pizza Hut for some dinner and I decided to bring in his toys as eating is the thing in J's life where we have the most challenges. He had such a great time playing like this, that we didn't have any problems. He only ate so/so but no fits or melt downs :o)

For more fun with Tot School ideas, visit 1+1+1=1


Also, here's another Tot linky I joined that is fun to visit.