Tot School (Before and During Vacation)

**J is 27 months old**

We started off our week with me teaching a little song with finger play called "Where is Thumbkin". This is one we used to do when I was a kid. Somehow it popped into my mind today. J really loved it. He kept saying, "Do again it?!" (do it again) so I'd do it over and over until he started joining me in singing and trying to use his fingers too.








































They had a 75% off sale at our grocery store and I got this book I Can Stencil My Numbers. They have numbers 1-10 with a little picture. I wasn't sure if J could do this one yet, but I started out and then he wanted to do it. I think he did pretty well. He enjoyed it too.















We had a play date with two other moms and the kids did a couple projects. One was ocean creature sponges that start out as a tiny little capsule that when put in water expand into a little sponge. J's was a lobster. We also did some Do-A-Dot painting of a dinosaur an elephant.

While making breakfast one morning, J wanted me to play our kids worship CD, Songs for Worship Volume 1. I hadn't played this in a while and it was nice to enjoy it again and see J enjoying it.





























J had a little book frenzy as I opened the cupboard with all our books and he "read" a bunch on his own. After he was done, I had to take a picture of them strewn all over floor. Then a picture once cleaned up ;)















We went to his play group called Pal Zone. We were excited to see my friend Eileen with her son Jackson. During circle time, Birch (the teacher) read a gorilla book that also had many other animals in it. For the craft, the kids got to make any animal. Not really sure what J's animal is, but he had a really fun time making it. He did really well with showing me where he wanted something (feathers, eyes, shapes), I'd put the glue in that spot and then he'd press it on.









































J found a box I had sitting off from our living room. In it was an elephant slide that goes with his little summer wading pool, but we never used it. I got the idea to blow it up and let J play with it inside. He had a ball! He would slide down it and then his spider man would slide down. He also had his dinosaurs and elephant figures walk through the little tunnel under the slide. We got out all of his balls and rolled them down the slide too. We'll have to do this one again!















We spent some time at the park on one of the beautiful afternoons we had. Here's J enjoying the swings. I did my good deed of the day with fixing the two adult swings. Someone had twisted them around the top of the swing set so they were stuck. I pulled over a picnic table and stood on top. Using a long stick, after several tries and lots of arm work I got the swings unraveled and then mommy got to swing too!




























There is a lot of milkweed there (at the park) so I was looking around and sure enough I found a nice, large monarch caterpillar! A friend of mine had raised one with her children and I thought this was a great idea so J and I took him home. I put him in an empty water bottle to take him home, then I used an old lunchables container. Here he is crawling on the top of the container and then below it is when he surprised us by starting to curl up into his pre-cocoon position. I am doing a separate blog entry about this so I'll post that soon.

BOOKS
Peek a Boo Elmo
Old McDonald Had a Farm
Grandma

VIDEOS
We watched part of a movie called Misty. This is based on a book I read as a child called Misty of Chincoteague. Chincoteague is an island in Virginia where wild ponies live and every year they have the herd swim into the town and auction off some of the foals. It was fun reminiscing while I saw this movie, as I loved the book as a child.

We watched the movie Stellaluna and it had the words from the book following right along on the screen. J loves this story yet this time he actually got sad because the owl chases Stellaluna's mom but he didn't want me to turn it off.

We watched some of the Leapfrog Storybook Factory.

We did a little from Sesame Street's 123 Count with Ernie.

We found the DVD Old Bear and Friends which had the story called Hoot. This is a book we read from the library. Hoot is a story about little stuffed animals who find a little owl friend. I think J loved seeing it even more on DVD. It is a sweet little story.

VACATION

These are some pictures from our trip up to the North Woods of Wisconsin. As I type, I'm sitting in a little restaurant called Sunrise Cafe that has WiFi. We have a cozy little cabin in the woods off a lake called St. Germain. Our friend Dave (my husband's old roommate of 11 years) traveled with us too.

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.

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.

A day at home with lots to do

This morning L and I didn't get to have our alone time. J woke up crying at 7:30am, just as I was getting out of the shower. He recovered pretty quickly and was quite rambunctious too. We still had some prayer time but pretty constant interruption from J until I got him coloring. Some of the highlights of playtime were getting out Mr. Potato Head which J hadn't played with in a while. That really didn't last long. He wanted my help with getting his mustache and glasses on. We did some work with ABC's using these ABC panels I found at the dollar store. He asked for his numbers poster and we did some counting and naming of objects. (I'll put a lot more detail on this in my Sunday Tot School post.) Then I brought out his Teletubby puzzles and he worked on those for a bit. I got a good picture of him with a grumpy face while he was working on it. I think this was when he didn't want my help anymore.

I was doing something on the computer and J came over and wanted to watch. I decided to look on You Tube for some bible stories and found Jonah the Whale. This was super cute and J had me go back and replay the part of Jonah getting swallowed by the whale over and over.

Jonah and the Whale


J-likes to help me feed the birds and the feeders have been empty for a couple weeks now. The poor birds keep stopping by and there's no food. So we went out into the garage to get the seed ready. This is a good pouring activity for him. After we filled up the bird feeders, I checked out the garden again.







My (4) banana pepper plants are now producing and one is almost ready to pick. The cherry tomatoes are the only tomato plants producing out of 6 plants. This was such a weird gardening year for my little plot. When we came back into the garage, I was going to sweep up all the bird seed that spilled, but J really wanted to sweep. I got it started for him, then showed him how to push it out of the garage. It is great to see him eager to help with work! If only that will last. It was so beautiful outside (very low humidity) so we did some bubbles but I could tell J was getting tired. He didn't chase them around like he usually does, so he went for his nap.






We had a battle of the wills tonight at dinner. First it was J wanting to keep coloring when I called him to join us for dinner. Twice I had given him a heads up he'd have to stop coloring soon and he waited until I started the 5-4-3-2-1 count (I only had to say "5" and he came over). Then he ate maybe 3 bites of pasta and no meat and says he's all done. He's been doing this lately, only taking a couple or few bites and saying all done and refusing to eat. So I decided to try something to work with him on it. I set aside a few more bites saying if he ate that he'd be all done and we sat there.....and sat there....and sat there all the while he's crying and saying "all done" and me reading my book super calm telling him we needed to do just 3 bites. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore when he started to really cry and I wrapped it up. Maybe another time. Later, we all took a nice little walk around the neighborhood with J's car. It was a beautiful night. There is a hint of autumn in the air though.

Tot School (Mish Mosh)

**J is 27 months old today**

Mish mosh (in the slang dictionary): A disorderly conglomeration. Without a theme or focus.

That's what this week's Tot School was like. No real order or theme; just a bunch of random, different things we did. J was OK with some of the things I planned for us to do, but mostly he would pick out activities on his own which was fine.

J likes all kinds of trucks and equipment so I picked up a DVD called Mighty Machines. We watched this and he really paid attention when the garbage truck segment came on. They describe what the trucks do from the time they pick up the garbage to the time they bring it to the dump. J likes to watch our garbage man when he comes each week. He'll run to the window and sometimes we'll go outside to watch him and the truck which picks up the garbage with a mechanical arm. Now he knows where our garbage goes.

Letters, ABC's
We got a kids "computer" from my sister that J really likes playing with (Fisher Price Fun2Learn...I had no idea it cost this much). There's a setting where he'll press a letter and the capital form of it comes up on the screen and a voice says the letter and then it shows an animal with that letter while saying the name. J liked playing this over and over. He is just learning how to recognize letters and after a time there were about four he could pick out on the keyboard, probably because he likes those animals right now (d=duck, e=elephant, h=hippopotamus, m=mouse).

My sister also gave us this ABC puzzle which J really loves. He doesn't recognize letters very well yet, but he is getting very good at moving the piece around until he finds the right fit. I would read the letter on the puzzle piece and he'd name the object before he put it in. This time around, he didn't get very far from what the last picture shows before he was off to something else.
















Fire Truck Puzzle
He wanted to bring out his fire truck puzzle (Melissa and Doug Giant Fire Truck puzzle ) and needed help with it. We did this in a past Tot School. We worked on it together, first sorting out the pieces and putting "like" pieces together. Then I put a few down and we started to build on it. I'd ask him questions like, "Do you think this piece goes there?" and he'd say NO! if it was way off or Yes! if it looked right. Then I'd move it close to where it fit and let him connect the piece.


Numbers and Shapes
I found a great teaching video on numbers and shapes from the library (Little Steps: Numbers and Shapes). The first part on counting had a few different segments. In one segment, the numbers would drop out of a plane one at a time and we'd say them together. In the next one, numbered blocks would show up on the screen from 1-10, and in the last one fireworks would go off and be in the shape of the numbers going up to 10. This is the first time he actually counted 1 to 10 without skipping any numbers. He used to make it to 4 and then skip around, so he's making progress. I really liked the repetition as the 3 segments were repeated again and again giving him a chance to count several times. He wasn't that interested in the shapes segment and asked to go back to numbers again so we went back to counting.

I found a large 1-20 numbers poster from the Dollar Store. J was interested more in naming the items versus counting. He did do counting with me a little bit but he quickly lost interest in this one.










I used our shape flash cards and came up with an activity to sort the shapes by color in rows. Then the idea was we would go through and name the shapes. J wasn't that keen on playing along. I started out by setting out the flash cards and explaining what he was to do next. He ended up placing down two yellow shape cards in the correct row, but then had more fun knocking the cards out of their row and then picking them up and running around with them wanting me to come chase him. Hmm....maybe another time.








Cars
When J got tired of taking my shape flash cards and running off with them, he wanted to play with cars. He likes to drive them on mommy's leg.







Music Appreciation
J has this fascination with Elvis. This was the first musician he recognized on the radio. We heard an Elvis song once and I told him who it was. Then some other day we heard that song again and J goes, "Elvis mommy!" Now he asks for Elvis in the car and we play a 50's CD. The funny thing is he'll say "I don't like this one" when we play any Elvis song BUT Jailhouse Rock. He has something for Jailhouse Rock. So he was asking to see Elvis on the computer so I showed him the Jailhouse Rock video of Elvis from 1957 on You Tube. Once it was done, he wanted to see it again.

Matching
At the dollar store, I got three sets of cards. A Bible memory match, Bible heroes and Bible Go Fish. I worked on matching a few months ago showing him how to match socks together, but he wasn't catching on at all. I thought I'd try again with something else but I kept the pictures face up to start out. Since this was our first time, I really walked him through it by placing the matching cards near each other and then helping J find the ones that matched. He seemed to get this a little bit, but was more interested in collecting the cards, holding them and also laying them out. This will be a good continuing activity.





Physical Activities
J has not played with this toy in months but it captured his interest on this day. Walking around the house "making popcorn". The cat wasn't too excited about it.







We also played a game of hide-and-seek. So far, J seems to like the same place to hide. He loves going behind the kitchen door and then I'll tiptoe up to him and yell "boo!" once I find him there he'll scream and laugh and then come running out. (This picture is a little blurry.)




When it's my turn to hide, he'll go to the stairs to sit and wait while keeping his eyes covered. (I love this and think it's so cute!) I'll go find a place to hide and say "OK, I'm ready" and he'll come looking for me. I also love it when he's found me I jump out and he squeals and runs away and we start over again.

For more Tot School ideas, visit 1+1=1.