Tot School: Blue Week

Sophie is 12.5 months old.

Sophie continues to enjoy Tot School - sometimes we even do it more than once in a day if she crawls over and indicates she wants to play! This week was all about the color blue.  

Sensory Bin

Her sensory bin was filled with all sorts of blue toys and household items.  Some favorites included a hand broom, her blue cup, and a frozen ice pack.  She hardly explored this bin this week.  Her favorite thing was to take the little cup, put her paci in, shake it up until the paci flew out and then repeat. 

Tot Trays

The first Tot Tray was laminated family pictures.  We had just spent the week with my family (who lives in St. Louis) and I figured it was the best time to work on the family name vocabulary while they were fresh in her mind.  She really loved this tray - it was definitely her favorite all week.  She did a lot of pointing and saying "dat" (translation: who's that?) and I would tell her.  Sometimes she would mimic the name, sometimes not.  After she found Daddy's picture, though, she didn't really want anything to do with the others (unless she was looking for Daddy).  So the game quickly became "Is that Daddy?...."noooo"..."That's so and so".  I found it interesting that she would always turn the pictures the right way up (so no one was upside down) before she would ask.  She definitely knew which way the picture was supposed to go.

Her second tray was her shape sorter.  I removed the stars and the cross shapes, leaving only the circles, squares, and triangles.  She did a really great job getting them in when she felt like it.  As soon as she would get frustrated, we just turned it into a game of fill the bucket and dump the bucket.  She definitely improved with this during the week though.

Her final Tot Tray this week, and one I *thought* she would love, was blue post-it notes on blue paper.  (I've got to instill a love of brightly color coded office supplies early, you know).  She loved playing with my grocery list post-it note stuck in my notebook at the grocery store last week, so I thought for sure free reign to stick and unstick would be a hit.  But she really didn't care very much until Friday when she figured out they would stick to her as well.  After that she was very intent on getting one to stick to her leg. After a few minutes of readjusting she was finally victorious and we could move on to the fun game of sticking them to Daddy's picture.  Once again, Daddy's picture.  Not bitter or anything. ;)  (Disclaimer: I seriously LOVE that Sophie is a Daddy's girl! I just give him a hard time about the fact that I'm chopped liver as soon as she has the option to play with him instead!)

 Other Activities

She discovered a fun new gross motor activity this week - chair pushing!  She pushed our bar stool all the way across the room several times this week.  Way more fun than a musical toy purchased solely for the purpose of pushing around the room.  Toys are overrated. ;)  In related news, we are SO close to having a walker.  She's taking lots more independent steps these days, but crawling is still the way to go when efficiency is required.

She "read" her Bible to Grandma over Skype one morning.  Precious.  For real.

 And finally, we tried Do-a-Dot painting for the first time this week!  It was a big hit!  Her first piece of artwork was to paint on Daddy's Father's Day card.  We will definitely be bringing these back out soon!  (Check out that concentration!  Love it!)

Next week will be all about yellow! Perfect for summer!

Places I'm linking up:

Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1 

Tot School Tuesday at See Vanessa Craft
Tuesday Tots