Tot School: Letter C

Welcome to Letter C Week! The spring semester started this past week, but we managed to work around it. I don't have pictures of everything because school started and things have been a bit hectic this week. But we did manage to get in some awesome stuff!

Of course, we started off everyday by coloring pictures of the Letter C.

We did some fun projects this week as well. My favorite: Corn made out of tracing Pumpkin's handprints.

And Pumpkin's Letter C collage:

For our C is for Crayon unit, I created a color matching activity. The Crayola website is fantastic. You can find plenty of printables and fun activities under the Educator's Tab. I found a coloring page of crayons, so I printed out a few copies, colored them in, and made matching colored notecards, and let Pumpkin go to town.

Of course, Pumpkin was more interested in the cat.

Pumpkin's favorite activity of the week: Counting cars!!! I had no idea he would have so much fun with this. I set out paper with the numbers 1 to 5, and helped him to put the correct amount of cars on each number. It was a huge hit!

And, to go along with the cars, our Alphabet Book includes this new letter!

I don't have pictures of the cow puzzle, because he did that with Dad while I was at school. But we have the Melissa & Doug puzzle block set, with 6 different pictures. He always has fun doing that. And Pumpkin always loves any excuse to play with his cars. :)

For more information about Tot School, visit 1+1+1=1.

Tot School: Letter B

This past week, Pumpkin explored the second letter of the alphabet: B! We had a shorter than normal week with Tot School activities this week, as we had to see a pediatric urologist in another state on Monday, and Pumpkin protested quite a bit on Tuesday when we tried to get back into the swing of things. We began Tuesday by coloring a B; however, he was more interested in putting the crayons back in the box. Good practice for putting his toys away!

After coloring, we moved on to making the letter B for his Alphabet Book. I took the idea from the Now I Know My ABCs section of the Totally Tots website. Pumpkin loves getting to use a glue stick. They absolutely fascinate him! They're sticky, they make things stick to other things... To him, they are magical.

Our last activity for Tuesday was to make blue playdough, because blue starts with B! I think that Pumpkin had the most fun with this activity, because it was the most "hands-on" activity of the day. Special thanks to my aunt, who gave me this recipe:

Playdough Recipe:
3 cups flour
2 packages Koolaid
1/2 cup salt
2 cups boiling water
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil

Combine flour, Koolaid and salt in a bowl. Bring water to a fast, rolling boil. Combine water and oil into dry ingredients and mix together. Let cool a little, then knead with hands and enjoy!

Please excuse the pacifier in this last picture. We haven't quite yet given that up. :)

On Wednesday, we again began by coloring. Pumpkin is starting to get used to the idea that there can be letters and images on a piece of white paper, and he can still take a crayon to them. After coloring, we tried some more hands-on activities: sorting. Since the sorting idea came to me spur of the moment, we had to use what I had on hand: poker chips and gift tins. The poker chips were a fairly good size, so that Pumpkin couldn't really put them in his mouth, and they offered the opportunity to sort the three different colors into different tins.

We also made a letter collage. We went through a couple of magazines, and we pointed out the letter B as it appeared, and we cut out a few pictures of things that start with B: boots, boat, blueberries, bananas, bear, burgers and books! We then sorted through a rather large pile of foam letter stickers to find all the Bs.

Again with the gluesticks!

Thursday was fairly low-key. The only activity we did on Thursday was work on stacking. We worked with a bag of blocks that were found at a yard sale for $1.

We rounded out the week on Friday by marble painting, again using the color blue since it starts with B. Pumpkin really enjoyed this! I put some blue paint into a couple of baby food jars, and let him drop the marbles into the jars. After watching me shake on the jars to cover the marble in paint, he shook the others, and he retrieved the marbles out of the jars and dropped them into a shoebox. We then tipped the shoebox in a number of different ways. I have new artwork to hang up with last week's apple finger painting.

Pumpkin really amazed me this week. He very proudly can say the letter B, accompanied by the correct sound. He also learned new words this week, all starting with B, including saying "blue" while holding a blue crayon. To top that off, my father's birthday was this week, and Pumpkin gave him one of his apple finger paintings in a frame. When Grampy asked how he made it, Pumpkin told him, "Apples!" It truly amazes me that he was able to remember that he made that picture with apples and paint. This journey with Tot School is one of the best decisions I've made thus far on my motherhood path.

To learn more about Tot School, please visit 1+1+1=1.

Tot School: Letter A!

With the new year, we've decided to begin Tot School! Being 17 months old, Pumpkin is definitely ready to try some fun, focused, educational activities. For the past month or so, I've been checking out different websites, mainly from homeschool moms, who do some sort of curriculum with their child. These sites have given me so many ideas of things to do with Pumpkin!

We took this week slowly. Since Pumpkin is used to playing with whatever toys he wants all day long, I figured it would take some adjusting to begin Tot School. So we've done small hands-on activities all week, totalling about a half hour each day. All of our activities have been focused around learning the letter A, and our main theme for the week has been Apples!

To begin the week, we started by tracing an A, and coloring a bit.

Pumpkin loves it when we get out the crayons, but I think he was a bit confused about not coloring on an entirely blank sheet of paper. We began each day's activities with an A coloring page. After coloring, we did an A activity: featured here are an A made entirely out of dried beans, and an A collage made out of stickers and As we cut out from a magazine.

I can't believe how good he was and how awesome he did with these activities! He did try to eat a few of the beans, but once he saw me put down the first 3 beans, he began setting the beans where I had put some glue. And a few times he tried to put a couple of beans on one spot of glue. But the A came out awesome! And the collage was successful. We went through an old magazine, pointing out different letter As we saw on the pages, and we cut a few of them out. He decided where to place them on the paper, and he did the stickers all by himself.

I made an A is for Apples Tot Pack, an idea taken from 1+1+1=1. Pumpkin may be a bit too young to really understand the early concepts presented in a Tot Pack, but he did really great!

The A is for Apples Tot Pack included number matching, color matching, shape recognition cards, and upper to lowercase matching cards.

We rounded out the week with a fun activity: apple finger painting!

Pumpkin tried once (or twice) to eat the apples we were using! He kept saying "apple" and "mmmm". I forgot just how much he likes apples! Our apple theme went over well! And here are the two awesome new art hangings I have for my wall:

As for reading, we stuck to reading books about ABCs at bedtime. We have a wonderful alphabet flip-the-letters book that Pumpkin adores! We also have quite a few of the just-his-size picture books that feature a different picture with each letter.

All in all, it was a productive week! We've learned how to make the letter A in a variety of ways, and we've learned about fun things we can do with the letter A. We've learned lots of words that start with the letter A, and we've started exposing lots of early concepts using apples, an A word. We've also begun Pumpkin's Alphabet Book. I've set aside a binder with clear page protectors to add each letter craft to, and plan to have it professionally bound when we've finished the entire alphabet. It should make a wonderful keepsake!

Next week, we'll begin learning all about the letter B!