Tot School: Week 8

-Ella is currently 22 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

We took the week of Thanksgiving off from Tot School (we didn't do anything official), but we got back into our activities this past week.

• Letter B: We started working on learning the letter B this week (Ella can now easily recognize the letter A everywhere!). We focused on "B is for Butterfly" and Ella really enjoyed coloring butterfly pictures. There are a ton of great ideas for the letter B on the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. Many of her activities are still to advanced for Ella, but we were able to use a few of them, and I look forward to using more as Ella continues to learn.

• Christmas/Winter Activities: This is Ella's second Christmas, but it is the first one that she is really old enough to learn about some Christmas/Winter things. We've been learning about snowmen and Christmas trees. Ella has been coloring Christmas trees and snowmen all  week long. I found a bunch of coloring sheets from the Crayola website. 

• Shapes: Ella has been doing great with her shapes! She thoroughly enjoys doing her shapes puzzle I made from the COAH blog.

• Life skills: We decided to give Ella a Christmas present early so that she could have some practice with opening Christmas presents and learning how to act during present-opening. The Christmas present we gave Ella was a Melissa and Doug latches board. This "puzzle" has different types of locks/latches on doors that open up to reveal different animals.

Waiting for dad to open it up!

Cheesy posing with her present picture:

Tot School: Week 7

-Ella is currently 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

Do you ever have one of those weeks where you look back and it went by so quickly you don't even feel like the week existed? I had one of those weeks last week. Needless to say, Tot School activities were a bit slacking in our house last week, but that's ok - it is part of life! And, unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures this week either. :(

We did a lot of work on continuing to recognize the letter "A" this week. Ella consistently identifies the letter "A" now and she is so proud when she points it out. One day she brought me a book and pointed out letter "A"s on the pages for probably 15 minutes. It was so cute! I try to take every opportunity to show Ella the letter "A" as we are going about our daily activities. I think it is good for her to learn to recognize the letter "A" in many different situations. 

Ella loves to play with her pegs and pegboard. I tried to work on sorting colors with the pegs, as well as identifying colors, but this week she was mostly concerned with building the longest stick of pegs possible and saying "tall! tall!"

This weekend we had the opportunity to take Ella to her first University of Texas football game - this was quite the learning experience for her! There were so many things to watch and learn about at the game. She had fun clapping along with the crowd, identifying the longhorns that were everywhere, watching the football game, as well as learning about the band.

Tot School: Week 6

-Ella is currently 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

One of Ella's favorite things to do over the past several months is to put things into containers, take (dump!) them out, and put them back in again. After I saw this particular idea (straws into a container) I knew Ella would love doing this activity and it would be a great time for her to work on her fine motor skills. I was right - she loved it! She played with this all week long!

Ella is still a little bit too young for me to venture into making cookies from scratch with her (I think she'd get bored with the activity before we finished), but my mom had the idea a while back to make cookies using the pre-made cookie dough. The week after Halloween I spotted these pumpkin cookies on clearance, and thought they'd be perfect for us to make.

Ella loved that they had pumpkins on them since we've been doing a lot of stuff with pumpkins lately.

I turned the light on in the oven, and showed her how to watch for the cookies bake.  Of course, she had to have her monkey with her! :)

While the cookies finished baking, Ella wanted to color. Once they had cooled off, she tasted the cookies, and loved them! (See the huge bite she is taking, lol!)

We continued to do a little work on recognizing the letter A. She loves to say "A for Apple" but hadn't really been recognizing the letter A when I asked her about it, until last night. Last night she identified the letter A several times! We'll continue to reinforce the letter A this week.

We also did some coloring activities with turkeys (since Thanksgiving is coming up very soon, yay!). I hope to do something along the lines of this Thanksgiving turkey activity this week.

Tot School: Week 5

-Ella is 21 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This week we continued to work on learning colors; however, most of our play focused on sorting/matching colors rather than actually identifying colors (although we did do a little work on identifying colors). I made a very simple activity for her to work on. I laminated a blue piece of construction paper and a yellow piece of construction paper, as well as a few shapes in blue and yellow. I had her practice sorting the yellow shapes onto the yellow piece of construction paper, and the blue shapes onto the blue piece of construction paper. This task was very easy for her! In fact, not long after she started, she purposefully would place a shape incorrectly, and look to me to see if I noticed. Such a silly girl!

Ella also continues to thoroughly enjoy coloring. She has been asking multiple times a day to get in her seat to color. I printed several coloring sheets from Crayola's website to use. I'll be hunting down some Thanksgiving themed coloring sheets for her to use this coming week.

Ella loves to be outside, and she had so much fun running around grabbing the "marcorns" (aka "acorns"). She loved putting them in her pumpkin. One day we went to the park, and she enjoyed watching a squirrel run around. She also loved going up and down the steps at the park's gazebo (the second picture is taken at the gazebo).

Teaching Ella about God and spiritual things is incredibly important to me, and I hope to be able to share different things we do each week in regards to spiritual Tot School as well. This week we used these creation cards from Apologetic Press.

Tot School: Week 4

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This past week was pretty busy, and I didn't get as much in as I would have liked; however, Ella still had plenty of opportunities to learn and explore!

Ella loves playing with her blocks. We practice counting (she can consistently count to "6" now, and sometimes even makes it to "10"!), colors, sorting, building, and letter recognition with these blocks.

Ella also loves to play and learn with her puzzles. She has gotten so good with them that she'll purposefully put a piece in the wrong place to see if we notice - she loves to test us! Ella has several puzzles, but we've been using a shape puzzle (similar to this one) and a couple of different animal puzzles recently.

We continue to work on learning our colors, and this week I introduced this dinosaur file folder color matching game. Ella loves playing with it! I think it helps that it uses dinosaurs - she really likes dinosaurs!

Ella also had an opportunity this week to take a really long road trip with her daddy. She had lots of time to learn about different kinds of vehicles on the road, and she loves to point out the big trucks!

If you've been keeping up with my posts about learning activities I've been doing with Ella, you know that I'm constantly on the lookout for new blogs and websites that have activities I can do with her. Here are a few sites I've recently come across that I've found to be very helpful. I can't wait to implement some of the great ideas I've read on these sites.

• Confessions of a Homeschooler (I've mentioned this one a few times)
• 1+1+1=1 (The host blog of Tot School)
• Counting Coconuts
• Totally Tots
• No Time For Flash Cards

Tot School: Week 3

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

A is for Apple, Avocado, Ant, and Ali (our dog). This week we officially started looking at the alphabet, specifically the letter A. Right now, we are working on recognizing the letter A, and learning a few words that start with A. Ella loves to say "A for apple!" There are tons of resources with printables for doing work with the alphabet. I chose to use several of the printables from the blog Confessions of a Homeschooler. There are so many on her website, I only used a few last week, and we'll be using more this week.

This is the first week that we used crayons at home (she's used them at other places, I just haven't had any for our house until now). She's enjoyed coloring in her own "workspace." Coloring has given a good opportunity to work on colors, although right now the only color she consistently identifies is purple.

Ella also continues to enjoy playing with her puzzles that I created from the printables on Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. The pieces have held up really well to Ella's rough play! When we first started using the puzzle pieces, she really wasn't sure what to do with them. Now she can match them up and identify what the "whole" is a picture of even if she only sees a "half." The apple and pumpkin were two of her favorites to find this past week.

We also played with playdoh for the first time this week. Ella was pretty unsure what she was supposed to do with it, but she thought it was pretty great when I made a "mouse" out of the playdoh. I'm glad she has a good imagination because my mouse was pretty goofy looking!

If you've got a toddler, be sure to check out the link below for more great ideas for your toddler!

Tot School: Week 2

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This week was a pretty crazy week because we had family in most of the week. With our family being around this past week I didn't really plan anything specific for her to do, because I knew that the majority of her time would be spent playing with our family. However, even with our family in, there were many things that Ella was exposed to throughout the week, so I thought I'd share a few. Once again, I slacked a bit on pictures, and I hate that . . . next week will be better! :)

• Counting

• Like last week, we continued to work on counting. Now that Ella is starting to "get it" (at least a little bit), I really want to continue to expose her to counting. We counted many different things, but I think her favorite thing to count might be toes! One of my favorite learning toys for Ella right now is this peg play board - it works great for counting, building, and colors (plus lots of other stuff too!).

• The Great Outdoors

• The weather has been absolutely gorgeous, and we've started going outside more and more (it wasn't that long ago it was too miserably hot to be outside for very long). Ella had a lot of fun playing in our sage bush. I pointed out the leaves to her, and explained that the leaves were green. I don't know if she really paid too much attention to me though - she was too busy playing peek-a-boo within the bush!

• Helping

• Ella loves for us to assign her tasks to do - especially if she thinks she is helping out with her baby brother. We'll ask her to take things to the trash, or to take dirty clothes to the laundry pile (this is new this week). I'll also ask her to bring me Troy's blanket or pacifier. I love that she enjoys doing these things, and is also learning to listen and follow directions. I'm hoping that by asking her to do these little things, even at such a young age, we'll have an easier time teaching her to help out as she gets older.

Week 3 of Tot School for us will be our first "normal" week we've had in over a month (between Troy being born, and having tons of family in because of Troy). I'm looking forward to introducing Ella to some new things this week - including really starting to work on the alphabet.