Tot School Sunday #2

Whenever I go and look at the "official" Tot School website, I get completely overwhelmed by how many different things we can do! There are dozens of ideas on that site alone, and then looking at the sites that link to it... I wish I could do all of them! But I can't, so I'm having to pick and choose things that work for us; I decided to assign a theme for each day, in the hopes that this will help us have a well-rounded "curriculum" without getting tired of anything. Also, I'm kitschy and neurotic that way.


Music & Movement Mondays
Nathanael loves music... dancing, singing, banging on the piano, anything that involves music makes him a happy boy. We got out a drum, a gourd that rattles when you shake it, Nathanael's train whistle, big sister's recorder, and a water whistle, and played some tunes on the iPod. I was expecting Nathanael to try and make music along with the songs we were listening to, and he did at first, but he was really very sleepy and started zoning out fairly early on.

I couldn't let him go to sleep, since we had somewhere we had to be in an hour, so I put on his Wee Sing Children's Songs and Fingerplays CD. Here he is showing "out came the sun" from the "Eentsy Weentsy Spider" song (we say "Itsy Bitsy" in our house, but the good folks at Wee Sing disagree).

We did a lot of the clapping and finger games, and then got down on the floor for "Head, Shoulder, Knees & Toes" and "Ring Around the Rosy." Wee Sing's "Ring Around the Rosy" has several verses with different activities like "skip around the rosy," "hop around the rosy," and "run around the rosy." As I mentioned earlier, Nathanael was sleepy and by the end of "Ring Around the Rosy"... well, this is how his last "we all fall down!" looked.

The kicker was, he never did take a nap, even though we spent quite a lot of time in the car and that usually puts him out faster than anything.


Tot Tub Tuesdays
We don't have any trays, and I like containers with lids, so instead of "tot trays" we are using plastic tubs.

This Tuesday, we brought out the beading tub. I recently got a really good deal on a Melissa & Doug bead set, with lots of different shapes & colors & alphabet beads. The beads are quite a bit smaller than the beads that Aliyah had to play with at his age, so once again hyper-vigilance on my part was a must. Also given the smaller size, I thought that it would be easier for him to successfully thread them if we used something sturdier than the laces that came with the kit, so I substituted some florist's wire. And instead of the entire box of beads, I only got out 10 pairs of shapes and the letters in Nathanael's name so that I would know exactly how many I had out and could be sure that they all got put away!

Success!


Sliding

Florist's wire is bendy!

After a while, he started noticing the matching pairs of shapes, and began separating the pairs from the rest of the beads. These are the only ones that he wanted to thread; I was impressed by how deftly he got them on the bent wire.

"Ish!"

Workbook Wednesdays
(Not really "workbooks" per se; things like lap books and flash cards and other sit-down bookish things.)

Side note about yesterday's activity: this morning when we were playing in the front yard, Nathanael was trying to thread leaves and pieces of ground cover onto pine needles. So I guess he enjoyed the beading. :-)

I bought these Sesame Street flash cards in the $1.00 section at Target several months ago.
I have another set that is "Shapes, Colors, and Opposites" but it is currently hiding somewhere in the chaos that is my living room, so we didn't get to play with it today.

He can't use the cards "as intended" since he doesn't know his numbers yet, much less can he read any words, so this is what we did with the "first words" cards: first I pulled out 2 cards for each of the Sesame Street characters that I know he knows by name.
I like how even though two cards have the same character on them, the characters are different sizes, or facing a different direction, or are doing something (flying a plane, driving a car) that makes finding that character's card in a group a little bit more work.

Then I lined 5 cards up in front of Nathanael on the table and asked him to find a specific character's card.
Once he found the card, I would set it aside, remove the other cards and lay five more cards down, asking him to find the same character. After he found the 'matching' card we would look at the differences for a little while and then do it again with another character.

With the number cards, I pulled out some cards with both pictures that he would recognize and words he could say.
None of the items repeated on any of the flash cards, so I couldn't do a matching game with these cards. Instead, I'd show him a card and ask him what was on it. Once he correctly identified all of the items, I put all seven of the cards I'd chosen down on the table and asked him to find the different items. When he found the item I had asked for, we would count how many were on the card before moving on to the next one.

After we had done that, I got out all of the counting cards and let him look at them however he wanted. If he was particularly interested in a card, I would name the item on it and then we would count how many of that thing there were. He loves to count things, and can count to three on his own, but he forgets about "one," so counting with him sounds like this: "Doo, doo, dree." It's awfully cute, if I do say so myself. :-)

Themeless Thursdays
Generally speaking, Thursdays are errand days. It's story-hour day at the library and it's the one day that we always have to pick Aliyah up from school, so if the weather is nice we try to go to the zoo before we go and get her. This Thursday, however, I wasn't feeling very well, so we did a whole lot of nothing until it was time to go get Big Sister.

Fun Fridays
Does this look the the face of somebody who is interested in having fun?
Yeah, I don't think so either.

This Friday, I thought that we would do something SUPER FUN and bust out the finger paints for the very first time ever! Sounds like lots of fun, right? Especially for a little boy who "finger paints" with yogurt, oatmeal, refried beans, and any other marginally spreadable foodstuff that is set before him. So finger painting with actual finger paints seemed like an obviously good idea.

Well. We got off to a good start.

But there was an unexpected snag, in that he didn't want to touch the fascinating orange blob on the paper. So I smeared it around for him and then encouraged him to try. Turns out, he didn't much care for the feel of the paint on his fingers, and immediately started trying to clean his hand off by wiping the paint off onto the table.

Then he pointed to the other tubes of finger paint, so I squeezed some green and blue onto the paper, thinking maybe he would like it better with the other colors... not very logical, but he's not-quite-2, so we don't see a lot of logic around here. He did experiment a bit more with the other colors

but he still didn't like getting his hands dirty.

I cleaned his hand off, got out a new sheet of paper, squeezed a blob of each color of paint onto it, and gave Nathanael a plastic fork, thinking that maybe he would enjoy painting if he didn't have to touch the paint. Again, looks like a great idea, yes?

This time he was bothered by how dirty the fork got, tried to wipe the paint off the fork with his fingers, and then got upset because his fingers were dirty again.

Finally we just gave up on finger paints, watched an episode of Blue's Clues, and spent some time playing games on sesamestreet.org. So it turned out to still be a fun Friday, but not the way I was expecting. I think I'll wait a couple of months before trying the finger paints again.