WEEK OF MAY 2 - KITES

~Punkin is 21 months~

We finished up some of our umbrella stuff from last week and started to work on a kite theme. Punkin doesn't quite get what a kite is yet....she insists they are diamonds. :)

TOT TRAYS

Punkin went straight for this tray first every day....mainly because she loved opening up the containers and dumping out all the toothpicks. She WOULD work at putting them back into the little holes .... for a few minutes. Then, she'd go on to something else. But she ALWAYS would come back to it a few times before putting it away for good each day.

Punkin is getting much better at putting the pom pom magnets on the dots on the paper instead of just placing them wherever on the page. I had the Rr and Bb pages in her tray for her to do this week.

I was excited to find this foam lowercase letter puzzle at a garage sale last week. She enjoyed punching out the letters, and she'd tell me a few of them that she knows. (Somehow she knows "e" now, too, though we have not formally worked on it.)

These were another garage sale find. Daddy tried to teach her how to link them together, but she didn't manage to link any together by herself. She still had fun playing with them, though.

I had this back in her trays this week. Once again, she was not interested in matching the numbers on the cups to the egg carton or counting the clips, but she once again spent lots of time stacking the cups and dumping out the clips and telling me the colors.

Punkin finally figured out this week how to string these Melissa and Doug beads onto the shoestring all by herself! This was a HUGE accomplishment! (She's always struggled a bit in the fine motor area.)

FINISHING UP UMBRELLAS

I got this craft idea from The Sellers blog. I cut out a U shape and had Punkin use her Do-a-Dot markers to decorate it and then glue it onto blue paper.

She also decorated an umbrella shape I cut out for her, and then I gave her a blue marker and told her to make raindrops. Well, she didn't make rainDROPS, but she had fun making lots of rain anyway...because she got to use a MARKER!

Here's her finished Umbrella.

I saw this idea from The Sellers as well, but it didn't go over that well. She had fun coloring on the paper plate with colored pencils, and then I taped on a straw on the bottom for her and tried to get her to carry it like an umbrella. She didn't really want anything to do with it after she colored it, so I didn't get a picture of what I had intended it to be. Oh well.

We also did some more work with the letter U and counting umbrellas and sorting, but for some reason, I didn't get any pictures of those.

KITES - MATH / NUMBERS
We didn't get to a lot of kite math activities this week since we were finishing up with umbrellas.

We used this idea from Chasing Marcus again to work on introducing patterns, and once again, Punkin did very well.

She also had fun stacking the blocks....


LETTERS / ABC'S

Watching our Starfall "movie."

Matching lowercase and capital letter bows to the right kite.

I had to help her mainly to stay focused and not start throwing the bows on the floor. But since I color coded them as well, it wasn't too difficult for her.

I printed this out from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I had Punkin match the lowercase letters to the uppercase on the sheet to spell the word KITE. She did well. I have been helping her do a lot of things like this to expose her to the lowercase letters. She got all of them correct except the t on this one.

Punkin had fun gluing pictures that start with the k sound onto her kite. I had her tell me each picture as she put them on. Throughout the week we referred to the kite and said the picture names again. Also, throughout the week, we tried to think of lots of things that start with K and we made a big deal when we read things in books or saw things while we were out and about that started with k.

These were printed from Confessions of a Homeschooler as well. I had her first just point to capital letters and pictures for me that I called out. She loved just that part of it.

Then, I got out the foam lowercase letters that I cut out last week and gave her one at a time. If she didn't know it, I told her what the letter was and had her match it to the capital letter. She really enjoyed this and did fairly well. Again, it's the simple things that she likes the best.

I tried my own version of "build a letter" that I have seen many places in the blogosphere. She loved playing with the pieces and telling me what letter we were building.

It was hard for her, though, to match how the pieces were to go, so I had to help her place them on the cards, but she had fun anyway. She has actually asked for them a couple more times after seeing them on my desk.

SHAPES

Like I did with the butterflies a few weeks ago, I gave Punkin shape cut outs and had her find where to put each one on the kite. She loves this kind of thing....I think because I let her use glue...and she did really well, telling me the shapes as she put them on.

I found a whole bunch of hexagon shapes in my stash, so I added that this week. She could say the word really clearly, but obviously doesn't really know what a hexagon is. However, she still matched the hexagon shapes just fine by looking at the color and shape.

This was kind of a dud activity. She told me they were triangles and the color of each shape and had fun playing with them on the easel, but I had to really guide her and basically do it with her hand over hand to create the kite shape using all the triangles. When we were done, however, she immediately noticed we made a diamond!

I then called out a letter for her to find and had her put it on the board to spell kite. This was easy for her. Now, she'll go up to the board where the picture still is and point to the word and say, "Kite!" because I told her that is what we made and spelled. (But if I show her a random picture of a kite in a book or something and ask her what it is, she'll tell me it's a diamond.)

THEME ACTIVITIES

I did the size order activity again this week with kites (from Confessions of a Homeschooler). She did 100% better. I think it was because the sizes were much more distinct than the umbrellas last week, and I only gave her 3-4 at a time.

She actually really got into it this week and clapped every time she put one down!

We also colored a lot of kites this week. Punkin LOVES to color! (Love the concentration on her face!)

For our craft this week, I taped three diamond shapes onto a piece of paper. Then, I had Punking use a bath sponge loofah thing to "sponge paint" the paper blue all over. She wasn't quite so sure about this method of painting. She started off doing it vigorously, but then, got upset when her fingers got all dirty. She kept asking for her "bush" (brush) to use instead. So, I finished the sponge painting part for her.

Then, when it dried, I took off the diamond shapes I had taped onto the paper and added "strings" with a marker and had Punkin color the kites. She liked this part much better.

MISC.

Punkin has always loved her magnetic letters. On her own, she would sit at her table and play with them a lot this week. She enjoys putting as many on as she can fit and then taking them all back off again.

I found these Melissa and Doug stacking blocks at TJ Maxx this week for 4.99. I have seen these on many blogs, and decided to get them for Punkin. She has had so much fun playing with them this week. When it was time for us to clean up each day from her independent playtime in her room, I'd line them up for her in the right order, and then she'd put them inside each other one at a time. She LOVED the last little tiny star block.

I haven't really shown her how to stack them yet, as I wanted to see what she would do on her own first. I am going to put them in her tot trays for next week and show her more specifially how to use them.

Punkin LOVES playing with bubbles, and in fact LOVES washing her hands in the sink because it makes bubbles. So, to keep her occupied one day while I made lunch, I gave her a bowl of soapy water and some of her little cups. She played for quite awhile, and did NOT want to stop to eat lunch...which says a lot, because the girl loves to eat!

I am kinda feeling like I'm in a rut with my activities and ideas. The nicer weather brings more opportunities to get out and do other things, so I have a feeling that Tot School will be more laid back here as summer approaches and we get busy with outside fun and vacations. We'll see.......Anyway, to find out what other tots were up to this week for Tot School, visit 1+1+1=1.

WEEK OF APRIL 26 - UMBRELLAS

~Punkin is 21 months~

This week was even crazier than the last two! I keep thinking each week that it won't be as busy, but things always seem to come up. We were only home one of the seven mornings this week, believe it or not! Since we do Tot Trays in the mornings, Punkin obviously didn't get much time to play with her Tot Trays this week. I did give her some time a couple of evenings to do a few activities, but I think we'll end up with a lot of the same activities next week???? We WERE home most afternoons to do "Tot School," though, and this week went MUCH better than last week. I found, though, that it works best to do her Tot School at the kitchen table right after her snack when she is already in her chair. We have been doing it in our office / schoolroom, but it is SOOO distracting to her, and she likes to look out the window (which is right in front of her table) or wants to "watch movies" on the computer she sees on my desk, or finds other random things in the room she'd rather play with. I set up the room to be a fun place to be our schoolroom, so I'm kinda bummed we have to do it at the kitchen table (and that I have to drag all my supplies down there each day) but for now that has been what works, and she has enjoyed Tot School again this week!

FINISHING UP RAINBOWS

We didn't get all of our activities from last week's rainbow unit finished, and I didn't want to just put them aside since I spent the time to get them ready for her. Plus, I wanted to review a few things since Punkin learns best with re-exposure and repetition. So I decided to finish up rainbows first before starting umbrellas. (Thus, we didn't finish our umbrella stuff THIS week, so guess what I'll be continuing next week?)

We used the lowercase r's again that I made last week to review lowercase r. She matched the colors again and we did a lot of work this week noticing lowercase r's in books, on signs, etc. I am glad that we reviewed lowercase r as now she points it out or can tell me what it is if I point to it in a book. Yea! (Although, I noticed she sometimes gets the lowercase f confused with the r if there is both of them on a page. But we'll keep practicing.)

Punkin thought it'd be fun to line up her r's in a row. So after she did it herself once in random order, I helped her put them in rainbow order and we sang our rainbow color song as we pointed to each color set. (That's what she's doing in the picture.)

It took us a few days to complete our Fruit Loop rainbow from last week, but we finally did it! I would give her Fruit Loops as a snack and as we ate our snack, I'd put glue on a few circles and have her put the right colors on. As long as I'd let her eat a few as she worked, she did great putting them on the page. I did find that I could only do a few of each color at a time, or else she kept knocking them off the page accidentally as she tried to get more on. Until we let them dry completely, those little Fruit Loops moved all over the place!

And here is her beautiful finished rainbow! It is displayed on our refridgerator, and Punkin calls it her "pitty wainbow!" :)

This was a really fun activity that I adapted from Making Learning Fun. I first just gave her the materials (the page on a cookie sheet, her white magnetic pom poms, and the big number dice) to play with however she chose. I found it works best to do this before I ask her to do what I have in mind. It sort of gets it out of her system so she is not as tempted to do her own thing when I want her to do my activity. Anyway, she threw the dice a few times, rubbed the "puff balls" (as she calls them) on her face (she LOVES to feel "sof" things), and to my surprise, she even took the pom poms and began putting on on each circle on her page...in random order, but hey! I was impressed!

Then, I had her roll the dice and count that many "clouds" and put them on her page. For some reason, though she knows her numbers by sight, she refused to tell me each time what number she rolled. I suddenly realized I had never shown her which number to look at on her dice (the top one). I was sure that was the problem, and I began pointing to the top number when she rolled the dice and asking her to tell me what it was. NOPE! Still not going to do it.....(sigh). Oh well. For each number I gave her the correct amount of pom poms to put on and she counted them as she put them on. She LOVES to count. I often will hear her just counting things as she plays. However, she doesn't know when to stop per se, so I gave her the amount for now as she is learning. When we got the page filled, we practiced using our pointer finger to count to each one and count the whole page. Punkin can sort of count to 20 (14, 15, 17 all sound the same to me), so we do a lot of practice these days counting past 10.

TOT TRAYS

She would have done only this tray if I had let her! She LOVES play dough! I printed out this page from Confessions of a Homeschooler and put it in a page protector. I showed her how to pull little blue play dough pieces to put on each dot. She did a GREAT job! She also had a playdough mat page in her tray from Homeschool Creations (I didn't get a picture of her doing this one) that just had the letter U and u for her to make out of playdough. I made "snakes" for her with the playdough and showed her how to trace the U shape with them. She much preferred the first activity, however! :)

I bought these little paper umbrellas from Dollar Tree. Punkin loved poking them into the egg carton lid. After the first time she did it, I added the pink dots so she could tell better where the holes were on the lid. But she still enjoyed making her own new holes, too! :) By the way, it's a good thing these little umbrellas were cheapo, because they break easily and I found are really a one or two time use item. That's okay. I had gotten lots! :)

Here is how this next activity was supposed to go..... match the number on the little pink "shot glass" (also from Dollar Tree) with the number in the egg carton. Then, put that many paper clips in each cup. Well, too many steps I guess. I even had her try just putting the cups in the carton or just counting in the clips into the cups. Nope. Not interested. She WOULD tell me the numbers on the cups and the colors of the paper clips, and though she didn't do it the way I had planned, she LOVED playing with this tot tray....in her own way.

Dumping out all the paper clips, filling the cups with as many as would fit, stacking and unstacking the little cups, putting them into the carton (without paying attention to numbers)....much more fun than Mommy's way! LOL! (But hey, I figure all that still made for a very good learning activity anyway.)

MATH / NUMBERS

Punkin thought these umbrella numbers were the best thing! She'd pick one up and hold her over her head like a real umbrella! LOL! Anyway, ONCE AGAIN I spread the numbers out in the living room and had Punkin pick up the umbrella numbers from the floor as I called them out in order, and then I had her put them on the couch in that order. This took us awhile as she kept getting distracted this time. But then I gave her a finger pointer and she had fun pointing to the numbers on the couch that I called out and then as we counted them in order. Sorry the picture is blurry. She kept moving as she counted down the row, but I wanted to get a picture of her using her pointer. This the best I could get.

No, I am not showing you a random picture of my bedroom. If you look closely, you'll see 4 little number umbrellas hiding in the room. I hid them during Punkin's nap one day and then had her go around the room and try to find them all (1-10). She had to tell me the number and color each time she found one.

She really had fun with this....

...though everyone needs a break now and then. All that hunting can be tiring! :)

We did a "Sort and Count" for the first time this week, inspired by My Montessori Journey. (I had originally seen this idea a couple weeks ago on another Tot School blog that linked to this post, but now I cannot remember for the life of me whose blog it was. Sorry!) We sorted and counted "raindrops"..... blue beads, blue pom poms, and blue jewel rocks. Then, she matched umbrellas with number stickers on them to the correct set of "raindrops." She needed help focusing on the acitivity at hand, but overall did well for the first time.

When she was sorting, I noticed she found all of one kind at a time and put them in a container rather than picking out one thing and finding where it went and then picking out a different item to find where it went, etc.

She cannot "eyeball" how many items were in each container yet, so I took each group of "raindrops" out for her to line up and count. Again, she loves to count, but we worked really hard on pointing and counting one item for each number....I don't know if that makes sense. She knows to use her pointer finger to count, but she often will just point randomly and point faster than she is counting or count the object two or three times....she just loves to keep counting! :) I love this activity, though, to work on that skill.

Matching up the umbrellas was the hardest part....not because she couldn't do it, but because she just wanted to squash / play with the umbrellas and not pay attention to the numbers on them....

...and because she found out it was more fun to do this with the umbrellas! LOL! But we got it done....with Mommy's help. :) I really liked the skills this activity taught, so we'll keep doing this kind of thing over the next few weeks!

I didn't think this would be a hit at all with Punkin, but boy was a I wrong. It seems it is always the simplest activities that she loves the most. Anyway, I printed out these number / dot pages from Childcareland and cut them apart. The first day, I gave her 1-4 and had her put stickers on each dot.

Then, we matched up the finished sticker pages with the right number page. The second day, we used our Do-a-Dot markers to do the same thing with 5-8. I didn't get a picture of that becasue silly me forgot to put my memory card back in camera....so I THOUGHT I was taking pictures, but ....

LETTERS / ABC'S

We again watched our Starfall "movies" which she LOVED. She kept asking for more!

I printed these out from Childcareland as well. We did it a few different times this week. I only used the first two pages, not all of them, as that would have been too overwhelming. I cut out the lowercase set of letters and put magnets on them so we can reuse them and do this over and over. (Plus, now that I have a lowercase set already done, I can use them with other shapes other than umbrellas, too, without having to cut them all out again!) Punkin learns by repetition. (She learned all her uppercase letters just from playing with her foam bath letters and magnetic letters over and over again with us telling her the names of them all the time...nothing formal at all.) So, I just dove in with this to see how she'd do, with the goal of doing similar activities again and again so she gets constant exposure to the letters. (Instead of relying on one letter a week.) For the ones she didn't know, I'd show her and tell her and let her match it up and then we'd point and name the lowercase letters in order. After a few days of working on these first 8 letters, she was getting better at matching more on her own.

I noticed a couple of things. She kept putting the lowercase letters on top of the capital letter on the umbrella, which was fine, but I turned it into a following directions lesson as well, and I'd tell her to put the letter in the square...and then she would. Also, it was hard for her with the lowercase b and d on the same page. Since those two are hard for little ones to distinguish between, I may make my own page like this, but not put them in abc order necessarily, so I can make sure similar letters (b,d,p,q for example) are not on the same page until she really knows them well.

This also came from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I made my own lowercase matching letters cut from file folders. We first pointed to all the capital letters and I had her say them in order to spell umbrella, which she obviously did without a problem since she knows all her capital letters. Then, I showed her the lowercase letters in order and I had her repeat each one back to me in order. Then I set out a few letters at a time for her to match. She did really well. I had to help her, but I expected that as I was using this as a teaching tool to learn lowercase letters. (And again....that constant repetition and exposure to the letters helps her.)

SHAPES

I haven't been doing as much really with shapes since she knows them all so well. But I used this activity from Home Grown Hearts mostly as a following directions activity. Punkin loves to color, so I gave her the page with just the shapes at first. I told her what color to pick out and then I'd say, "Color the star" or "Color the diamond." We'd use that color for all the shapes and she'd color (scribble) on each shape as I called it out and then we'd switch colors and do it again. Then, I cut out the shapes while Punkin used the glue stick to "color the glue" on the shapes I again called out to her. After they were all cut out, I let her just pick one at at time to match to the shape on the umbrella. This part was easy-peasy for her, but I just wanted to see if she would pay enough attention to the shapes to match them correctly or if she'd just try to slap them down anywhere. But she did a great job, even saying the name of the shape as she did it.

THEME / MISC.

We tried another size order activity from Home Grown Hearts. I think I need to do these more consistently. The last time we did the butterflies, I thought she did well. But this time she either just wasn't into it or else it was hard....who knows. At any rate, she did it, but with lots of help from me. I should have probably done it again later with just three shapes at a time, but we ran out of time. I think I will try it with kites next week and give her fewer at a time to do.

I had to get out the rainbow rice again! This time I added those little paper umbrellas for her....a HUGE hit!

She had fun using her new finger pointer to point to her letters on her new easel.

Each morning right after breakfast, we read a story from her Bible Story book. She really loves these books! (If you ask her who the Bible book is about, she'll say, "bout Deezus.") We also sing the B-I-B-L-E song and say a prayer before we get on with the rest of our day. On this day, we were reading about Simon catching lots of fish and learning about being "fishers of men." Punkin began pointing to all the fish, attempting to count them all.

I am trying to find toys and such with lowercase letters which has been hard. I ended up cutting these out of foam. But I am not sure if I should put magnets on the back or glue them onto cards, or what exactly to do with them. Anyone have any suggestions?

And finally, this is random, but I won a giveaway on one of my favorite money saving blogs called Hip2Save from Color Inc. where I could design my own photo flip book for free....any size. So, I asked if I could use clip art images, and I ended up making this neat 5x7 lowercase abc flip book for Punkin. (I saved the images to my computer and then edited them in Picnik to add the text.) She loves it, and I love how it turned out. The front and back covers are hard and sturdy, it has nice rounded edges, and the inside pages are very heavy and won't rip. The pictures turned out bold and crisp, and I am just in love with this little book. It looks SO professional....except for the big mistake on the front cover image that I did not notice until I got it and was saying the abc's with Punkin as we pointed to each letter. Anyone notice the error? Goes to show you have to really proof everything you find on the internet.

Well, that just about wraps up our week here. To see what other Tots were up to this week, visit 1+1+1=1. Have a great week!