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!