Hart 2 Hart: October 2013

Firecracker is 27 months.

I made several attempts with Firecracker to do "Tot School" from about age 1 on, and unlike her sister, Punkin, she was NOT interested. Then, suddenly one day I noticed her identifying letters and counting things, and I decided to try again. Well, something clicked, and now she LOVES Tot School! Due to schedules, we can't do it every day like I did with Punkin, but we enjoy the days that we do get to have Tot School while big sis is at Kindergarten.

Our Tot School area the last couple weeks. We read and re-read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom over and over again!

And she LOVED (as did Punkin) the Chicka Chicka video from HERE.

We said the ABC's and as we did, Firecracker found each letter and lined them up on the floor.

She loved lining up the letters.

I printed THIS PAGE from Making Learning Fun and gave her a specific color (one at a time) and had her mark the letter I called out. I also said a sound and had her mark the letter that made that sound.

Finished product! Her fine motor skills still amaze me! She did the stamping all by herself!

One of her favorite activities was digging for her ABC letters in our Rainbow Rice bin and then putting them back in the puzzle.

I printed out these cute Chicka Chicka lowercase letters from HERE and spread them all over the living room floor. Then, Firecracker went and found them in ABC order.

And she brought them over to the couch where she lined them up.

I made a letter matching activity by printing out coconut trees and labeling "coconuts" with lowercase letters. Then, she used her uppercase bottle cap letters to match uppercase and lowercase. (You can download a copy HERE and write in your own letters, or numbers, or whatever skill you are working on matching.)

Firecrackers knows her colors well already, but she loved looking at the color word (identifying it by the color of the print), and finding the matching tree as I read the words to her. She thought it was so fun to put the trees in the pocket chart! LOL! You can download my file HERE. (I simply cut apart the sentences, colored the blank trees to match and cut them out.)

To review shapes, I had Firecracker make this shape tree as we identified the shapes she used. I lightly drew lines on the paper where the shapes should be (roughly) glued. It was also very good fine motor practice as she used the glue stick to glue down each one.....which she loved being able to finally do like Big Sister, Punkin!

We also practiced using more fine motor skills, as well as practicing how to spell her name by finding the letters in her name on stickers and putting them on a Coconut Tree.

We used her Bottle Cap letters again to practice spelling her name, matching the capital letters to the lowercase letters.

More uppercase / lowercase letter matching using THIS SHEET.

For Sensory Play one day, I put a bunch of plastic letters in a sink full of bubbles. She had a blast trying to find the letters and "fishing" them out of the water. I made her tell me the name and sound of each letter as she put it on the counter. (And yes, I took her shirt off since it was getting soaked!)

We also briefly worked on numbers after reading Chicka, Chicka 123.

We used her shape tree that she had made as her workmat. She picked a number from the cup, had to identify the number (with help....as we are still working on number recognition), and then counted that many "coconuts" (cheerios) onto her workmat.

We also laid down a coconut tree on the floor and then stood back and threw a handful of foam letters. She had to then run over and count how many of the letters landed on the tree mat. (Which usually was only like 1-3.... the rest usually went flying all over the room! But that was part of what made the activity fun for her!)