Tot School (North Woods, Animals, Lacing Beads)

**J is 28 months old**

Part of our Tot School time this past week was spent doing "life fun" outdoors in the North Woods of Wisconsin. J brought his little toy figures along and my husband set up a couple cute pictures. The colors were at their peak and were just beautiful. We spent some time collecting things like leaves, pine cones, birch bark, pine tree needles, a little bit of moss and a mushroom. Then we arranged them on newspaper for pictures.

I used pine cones to introduce the idea of biggest to smallest. J really seemed to like this. We'd mix them up and he would try to put them in order again. I had to help. For a couple days, he was finding things and naming the biggest and smallest of them too.















We went to the Wildwood Wildlife Park in Minocqua. It was a bit outrageous price-wise ($12 adults and $8 kids 2 and over!) but they did have over 700 animals in a variety of exhibits. It wasn't very busy either since we were there in the off season. We saw tigers (including a white tiger), zebras, red and arctic foxes, wolves, bears, chickens, turtles, and he got to hand-feed a deer. My husband got a few good pictures. One was of J just about to pet a baby bunny in the kids area. In the next photo, he wanted to feed the camel a leaf and he came over to him and ate it! He was a little scared but excited too. I really like the picture that shows how tall he is.









































Once we got home and I was unpacking, J really liked my camping head lamp. He had a hard time figuring out how to put it on. I helped and then he loved walking around watching as it shined on things.









































Daddy's friend came in to town from Atlanta at the end of the week. We went to Devil's Lake and walked around. The weather was so nice, on and off sun and in the low 70's. The gift shop was having a close-out sale on animal figures so I bought J a bunch. He played with these a lot the rest of the day.

Once we got home from Devil's Lake, J couldn't wait to play with his new animal kingdom additions. He liked lining them up together. He also enrolled me into playing with him telling me "play with the the elephant mommy". I played with the elephant and then we played with the lion family (daddy, mommy and baby lion). We would just make up silly things like what they wanted to eat and where they wanted to go.




























One morning while dressing J, I accidentally put both his legs into one pant leg. For some reason this really hit my funny bone and I could not stop laughing. He kept wiggling around saying "I'm stuck, mommy" and I was telling him I goofed and put his legs in the wrong way. I had to get a couple pictures.




























We got out our lacing beads and I started out seeing what J was interested in doing. He didn't take to it right away so I started putting the beads on by matching shapes. He had fun picking out a matching shape and handing it to me to thread it. Then he threaded a few on himself. When he had enough of that I dumped the beads into the wooden container and started arranging them by color. I did a few and then J enjoyed doing the rest.

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