Tot School "Lite"

**J is 30 months old**

I love doing Tot School with J! We are very laid back and so far I don't really plan anything. I keep a lot of things visible to J and let him lead when it's time to do some focused learning-play. Thanks for stopping by!


Well this is the first time it's happened to me -- my computer crashed!!! I am so thankful that I backed up the computer for just the second time on 11/13 so I was able to restore my computer from that date. BUT that means I lost some of my pictures from this week. We ended up having a really light Tot School week so I probably didn't lose too many pictures. We did a lot of errands and had a few scheduled play activities that kept us on the go. You'll notice J is wearing his green jammies in many of the photos. He actually wore these two separate days during the week when he was adamant he wanted to wear them and I think they're cute so I didn't mind.

Some of the things we did this week:

Playing at Pal Zone


























































Pal Zone is a community play group we've been part of for over a year and a half yet I've never taken any pictures of our play time there. I really love this group because it's very diverse. Many of the people who come are originally from other countries so J gets to interact with children from different cultural backgrounds. There is open play time with zillions of toys then we gather in another room for circle time with songs, a story and a craft. One great activity is where we sing a song where each child learns to say their name and then pick up their name tag and place it on a felt board while we sing and clap for them. The story and craft go together and J gets to learn how to use glue, scissors, pipe cleaner activities and many others. We go once a week and really benefit from this group.


Watching Mark Schultz, Worship DVD





























One afternoon, J really wanted to watch a "worship movie". I explained that we can sing worship from our CD but I didn't have any worship movies. But then I remembered my husband had won a CD from his men's group that had a DVD of a live worship performance. The artist was Mark Schultz whose songs include "Back in His Arms Again" and "He's My Son". It was fun watching this together and singing some of the songs.


Story Time at the Library



























This is another activity we have enjoyed, going to our local library for their story hour. Every other month, they have a session a week for 4 weeks at a time. They pick a theme like today's was bears and then they have a craft to go with it. Today's craft was making a bear's cave surrounded with snow and the bear hiding in his cave. J and I worked together to use the glue bottle and stick them on.


Making Christmas Cookies, A Play Date


























































I haven't got started on an Advent calendar and I haven't done my Christmas decorating, so I have really been wanting to do something related to Christmas. Today I got all the fixins for sugar cookie decorating and invited my friend so our sons could do this together. I haven't done many cooking activities with J so I knew this would be interesting. We didn't really know what we were in for, but I was glad we were doing this together. We each had our own bowl letting our sons help mix and use the cookie cutters (sorry, we had our hands full and I didn't get pictures of that part) but never imagined how tricky this can be with a not-yet-2 year old and 2-1/2 year old. My friend remembers her mom used to make the cookies and the kids decorated and we laughed at how much easier that would have been. We couldn't move fast enough to stop little hands from tossing flour and grabbing sprinkles and frosting. There was plenty of clean up, but it was well worth it. The boys loved making as much as eating and we had fun fellowship together enjoying this activity with our kids.

Pom Pom Sorting






























We started out this activity with the idea that j would sort them into the ice cube tray. Then he got the idea he wanted to switch to playdoh. Before we could do playdoh, I told him we needed to clean up. He was super excited about putting the pom poms away in the container so that became a little activity in itself!

Playdoh















J did a little with the Playdoh. On my wish list is a set of Playdoh tools, but in the meantime I have to improvise. I got out a small rolling pin so J could play with that, but he wasn't really into it. I then found a highlighter and he loved the pressing the lid and seeing the designs it made. I also found a set of dice and when he pressed it into the Playdoh you could actually see the number design.


Books
Disappearing Desmond
The Little Drummer Boy (musical book)
O Little Town of Bethlehem (musical book)
The Pine Tree Parable
The Scarecrow and the Spider
Time for Bed Elephant Small
The Tiny Seed


Movies
Little Einsteins; The Christmas Wish

Dinosaur Train; Dinosaurs in the Snow
I just had to post a video of J while he was watching this DVD. He went bananas over a song called "The Night Train" and had daddy and I play it for him literally 10 times or more so he could dance to it. I took a short video of him moving and grooving to the song. I love watching kids dance!







Music
Veggie Tales; 25 Favorite Toddler Songs
Songs Kids Love to Sing; 25 Sunday School Songs

See the fun things other moms are doing at the Weekly Wrap Up, another place I link up.

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.

Taking some mommy time and enjoying the long weekend

I realize I didn't blog anything about our days from Friday on so I have some catching up to do. On Friday, our main things were the start of September's library story time, working out at the Y, and visiting with friends that night. The story time theme at the library was trains and how funny that J was wearing his train shirt today (picture to the left). He was pretty into it, especially when it came to the songs and ones he remembered like the hello song. He also seems to stay by me now, whereas he used to wander around a bit. After my workout at the Y and picking up J from their child care, he kept saying "the dinosaurs were wet mommy" and I had no idea what he meant until they told me he had watched while they washed them. In the afternoon, I took a mommy "time out" having a babysitter come while I went to a special showing of Avatar in 3D. I think the last time I went to the theater was a year and a half ago. I really enjoyed the special effects and the movie was pretty decent. It seemed to borrow from other movies I've seen (Dances with Wolves, Braveheart) and I wasn't into the new age religious parts. Yet, just taking the time to go to the theater which is something I really enjoy, is so nice. After dinner, we spent some time with friends we've recently connected with. L grew up with both of them and I just met them recently, but really enjoy the time we spend together. Of course, L loves to reminisce since they went to school together, but we also like to talk about our faith. J had a hard time letting me talk with the adults and kept wanting to be held, or play or color with him. He finally relaxed when their girls put on Mickey Mouse and he loved watching.

Saturday morning was a treat. We went to our Farmer's Market for only the 2nd time this summer. It is located downtown on what they call the capitol square. It is actually the largest producer-only farmer's market in the country. J did pretty well sitting in his stroller for a long time as we walked around. We also stopped to listen to a couple different musicians along the way. The rest of the day was pretty low-key and I got to catch up on some of the mommy blogs that I follow. Lately, it's been hard to do that as it seems there's always something going on. I really enjoyed the Rethinking series my blog friend Tea has been writing. So many of her thoughts are things I've been thinking about lately, especially related to trying to live life simply and decluttering. It goes along with my buying fast where I'm not buying anything (other than essentials) for 30 days and taking time to reflect on what I see. I'll be writing about that weekly, probably starting tomorrow.

Yesterday (Sunday) we went to the morning service at our church to volunteer. I'm with the 3-year-olds and L is with the 4th graders. We had 14 kids in our room today and the time flew. There seems to be one or two kids who end up sticking by me most of the time. It's been kind of neat. We teach the 3-year-olds the same thing they teach J so it's helpful for me to be able to talk to J about how his time was. He remembered they talked about Hannah. When I asked about it he said, "She was sad. She prayed to God." Then he said something about David and Goliath and was mixing things up.

At home, we had a little bit of play time and then daddy took J on a little outing to the lake by the Memorial Union Terrace. I was fighting a headache and feeling wiped out so I got some great R&R for a few hours and watched a movie that goes with a book I just read called God Grew Tired of Us. The movie was good but it didn't get into the detail the book did. I really enjoyed the book as I've read a few about the Lost Boys of Sudan yet this one was especially inspiring. The author is a member of the Dinka tribe and is a Christian. He has a solid faith and it's amazing to see what he's done with his life after the horrors he endured. When they got back from their outing, J got to tell me about his favorite things from their time. They took a walk by the lake and he loved seeing the ducks. When I asked about the lake he just said, "The lake was blue." Cute.

We went to the evening service at church and they had no child care available. They weren't able to get enough volunteers so J came joined us. He was excited about that yet I hadn't prepared for it. A friend from my mom's group gave me a bag of Kix cereal to keep him busy with a snack. He ended up doing really well in the service which surprised me. The Kix did help along with a coloring book I had for him. It was hard for me though to pay attention to the message while managing J. This was our final sermon in our "Wired for Relationship" series. Today's talk was about how we are living stones (1Peter 2-5) and although Christ is the center (our cornerstone Ephesians 2:19-22) it is through life in the body that we grow. He likened this to building a stone wall where all the stones fit in tightly together and hold each other up. In this, we also see the support we receive from the body (if it is healthy) and also the support we are to give to one another. We went over all the verses in the bible that are referred to as the "one another" verses. This would be a good study to do sometime.

Monday was Labor Day and started off cloudy but we still ventured out to Devil's Lake in Baraboo, WI. We spent the day by the lake reading and playing with J. It wasn't warm enough really to swim so I brought plenty of J's toys and spread them out on the blanket. He had the most fun when daddy or I would join him in playing with his elephants and making up little stories together.






On our way home, we stopped at Grampa Bernie's place and spent some time there. J had been sleeping and took a little bit to wake up and then wanted to read all the little kid books Grampa could find.










We stopped for some food on the way home and I'm glad we had J's toys since he hadn't had a nap and it could have been a recipe for melt down city. He was so funny playing with his toys and was really animated. He got a bath when we got home and then daddy was snoozing in our room so J tried to wake him. He couldn't and started crying, "Daddy's not going to read me a book" and was really upset so we both went in there and this time J was able to wake him and roused daddy for some reading time.