Tot School

-Ella is 26 months old-

It has been awhile since I have written a tot school post. We’re still doing things (although I haven’t been quite as diligent as I would like to be), but I have done a poor job documenting it here on the blog.  This week’s post is going to be abbreviated – but I wanted to show how just one set of things (in this case, little colored animals) can be used for a variety of activities.

Ella has been obsessed with these little animals for a week now. She can spend hours everyday playing and learning with them. (Anyone else’s toddler like that? Do they get obsessed with one thing and not get bored with it?) Here are just a few things Ella has been doing with the animals:

• Counting the animals (generally)
• Counting specific ones (for instance, ask her to count only the ducks or only the blue ones)
• Sorting the animals.
• Identifying the animals by name (duck, cow, pig, sheep).
• Identifying the colors of the animals.
• Selecting specific animals out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a pig)
• Selecting a specific color out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a blue one)
• Selecting something even more specific out of the bunch (for instance, ask her to find a blue duck)
• Comparing the sizes of the animals (ask her which horse is bigger (there are different sizes in the bunch)).
• Moving the animals around (for instance, from her bucket to her purse to the table).

 

Tot School

-Ella is 24 months old-

Last week we worked on the letter “D” using several printables from the COAH blog. Ella can now identify A, B, C, D, E, and sometimes L. She’s picking up letters quickly now. We’re still only working on one letter each week, but she’s learning to recognize the letters a lot more quickly than in the past.

In conjunction with the letter D, she had her first exposure to a lacing activity using the dinosaur from COAH. She didn’t get it at first – in fact she just ripped the dino’s head off even though I had laminated it – but by the second day I let her play with it, she was actually practicing lacing!

Ella has also been doing really well with counting to ten, although at times she forgets eight. We practiced counting using the Ten Tiny Puppies book.

Ella has been thoroughly enjoying playing with her shape sorter. It has a bunch of shapes and is a good challenge for her. Sometimes she enjoys just dumping them all out and putting them back in (with the lid open), but that works great too!

Tot School

~Ella is 24 months old~

We’ve been really out of our regular Tot School routine. We’ve had a sick household off and on for about two weeks, but with that said, we have done a few things.

For Christmas Ella got a ton of Melissa and Doug toys. I love these toys, and so does Ella. They are great for learning, and Ella really enjoys playing with them.

Ella has loved building towers with these blocks. I’m absolutely amazed at how good she has gotten at building the towers. She also puts the boxes all back together. I thoroughly enjoy watching her mind work through the process of figuring out which order the boxes must be put back together.

Ella is beyond obsessed with coloring lately. Although it is still a bit advanced for her, I printed out tracing sheets from COAH. Ella has started drawing lines and circles on her own, so I thought I’d go ahead and introduce the tracing sheets.

Ella played with alphabet fridge magnets I got from Target for $1.00. She loves playing with them on the cookie sheet. Although she can’t recognized many letters yet, she loves finding the ones she knows. She’ll ask “What’s that?” when she comes to a letter she doesn’t recognize.

Ella has also been playing with puzzles a lot, like this Melissa and Doug animal sound puzzle. She’s so quick with the puzzles now, but she still loves to do them!

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On a completely unrelated note, my photo of Ella that won first place in the Paper Mama’s Photo Challenge is in a vote-off for the best photo of the month. I’d love a vote if you like my photo! :)

Tot School Organization

We haven't gotten back into the swing of things with Tot School quite yet after our break for the holidays; however, I do plan to start our activities again this week. I thought I would share a new organization system I'm putting into place to help me with Ella's Tot School activities.

I'm incredibly busy. More busy than I care to be, but that is life sometimes, I guess. In order to really to the things I want to do with Ella for Tot School, I've come to the realization that I need to be better organized going into the week or I will get overwhelmed during the week. My friend was showing me an organization system for homeschooling she heard about from the Confessions of a Homeschooler Blog, called the Sue Patrick Workbox System (You can read the COAH post about it here). Now, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not implementing any kind of full time homeschool program for Ella. Rather, I'm using this general idea of a workbox solution to help keep me organized for her Tot School activities. Down the road, if we decide to homeschool, I'm sure I'll investigate using this organization system for homeschooling, but that's another subject for another time!

We're using this storage tower from Office Depot for our workbox organization system. The very general, basic idea is that you put one activity in each drawer (aka workbox) and you work through the activities for the day. My plan is to fill each box with different activities the night (or week) before so that we are ready to go when the time comes during the week.

You could put all sorts of things in the different boxes from puzzles to coloring sheets to games to books, etc. I like this particular storage unit because it has some larger boxes at the bottom for larger activities. I plan to share what I'm putting in the boxes in my weekly Tot School posts.

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