Miles' Tot School: Yellow

Miles is 16.5 months.

I don't have a picture of the shelf this week, but here are some of the activities he enjoyed!

Dropping buttons into a slot.  This simple game was a huge hit - probably because it made a really great noise when it hit the bottom of the container.  We used jumbo lacing buttons and an old sour cream container. 

Coloring. He loves being able to color when Sophie is doing other table work.  He gets this look like he is so proud of himself for being so big!

Yellow pom poms and paper tubes. He liked to stand the tube up and try to pour poms into the tube.  I think he just liked them going all over! :)

Clothespins on a cup. With a little assistance, he could get them on the cup.  But he mostly liked pulling them off and giving them to me to put them back on.

God Made Everything Color Book. We are in the "can't get a candid shot" phase.  He does this cheesy grin every he notices the camera.  I love it! So stinking adorable.  He used dot paints to paint his yellow sun for his God Made Everything Color Book. We also played more with the felt board, but I don't have any pictures.

Water Play.  Please ignore the toys all over the kitchen floor! He played with these sponges and little bit of water for almost thirty minutes.  By the end, all of us were soaked, but he had a blast!  And my kitchen floor was essentially mopped.  :)

Miles' Tot School: Blue Week

Miles is 16.5 months old.

Sensory Play

Miles was a HUGE fan of sensory play this week!  Beyond his color basket, which he mostly put a blue foam dice on a plate and gave it to me to "eat", he LOVED playing with the bin of pasta.  This kept his focus for almost 20 minutes at a time on several occasions.  He really surprised me with his lack of attempts to eat it, maybe I can allow him to have some more "big kid" sensory bins now.  

 Other Trays and Actvities

Coloring with "Big Kid" Crayons. Sophie was not satisfied to let him only color with blue and kept giving him more and more crayons to use. Pretty much he just enjoyed putting them back in the tin more than he did actually coloring.

Blue Stickers on Blue Paper. He is getting good at stickers, and really likes them.  

Blue Playdoh. He loved playdoh again this week.  (And every time I get the camera out, he wants to smile at me.  Gosh, he's adorable.) He started breaking the playdoh into little chunks this week, which I hadn't shown him at all. I love getting to see him figure out and try new things!

God Made Everything Color Book. I had planned for him to use do-a-dot paint on this page, but he saw glue on the table and let me know very clearly he wanted to glue.  So, I cut some construction paper squares and let him glue on the page.  He loved helping move the glue stick around on the paper square.

Shape Sorter. I took out the star and the cross shape, and only gave him the square, circle, and triangle to make it simpler.  This was his first time playing with this toy because it had been out of the rotation for a while.  After a few days he could get the circle every single time, and he could get the square and triangle about half of the time.  He would try and then just set it on the top of the sorter if it wouldn't go in, and just look at me, like "hey, I did it Mom! Aren't you going to clap and say yay?" 

I had also planned for a fun sponge and water play bin, but I didn't prepare it.  And I am learning very much, that if I don't have it prepped at the beginning of the week, it just isn't going to happen!  I will push it further and further back on our plans until we are just way past it.  I need to just take the three extra minutes on Sunday evenings when I'm pulling everything together to gather all of the materials I need for things like this.  Because I know he would love it.  Ah, oh well.  Who says the water has to be blue? Maybe we'll just save it for another color week. 

For more Blue Theme Tot School activities, see Sophie's Blue Week.

Miles' Tot School: Red Week

Miles is 16 months.

It is kind of fun to start Miles on some of the themes I've already done with Sophie - and it makes planning activities much easier! Miles is a few months older than Sophie was when I started color themes, and their strengths and interests are different.  Some of the activities will be the same, but others will be new for Miles. 

Sensory Play

The red sensory basket was a collection of red items from around the house including a baseball hat (GO CARDS!), some Hawaiian leis, oven mit, bean bag, shiny red gift wrap "grass", and a few other odds and ends. The gift grass was the favorite part, and he didn't even really bother with anything else. It was just too fun to pull out all the grass and make a mess. 

On the Shelf

Pool Noodle Stacker. This homemade ring stacker was definitely the favorite activity.  I used a pool noodle cut into slices.  It took him a few tries to hold the noodle just right so he could put it on the rod, but he ended up playing with this for 15 minutes at a time. Multiple times a day.  Big hit.

 Counting Bears 1-to-1 Correspondance. He really liked playing with these little counting bears. He would put them in and out of a cup and try to drop them onto the tray (something Sophie would have never come up with! I love seeing their differences like this!).

Red Duplos. Not even touched.  He was way too interested in the other trays to even bother with some old blocks.

Other Activities

Red Shape Stamping. Sophie was doing some shape stamping, so Miles joined in stamping some red hearts from a foam shape block. Not long after this picture it became finger painting, which was fine by me! But then he realized his hand was messy and he decided he was done. :)

Red Playdoh. He sees Sophie do this all the time, so he loves getting to do anything she does. He still wants to eat it, so playdoh time is usually short lived.

Coloring.

God Made Everything Color Book and Felt Ladybug.  I'm excited to get to start Miles on his very own God Made Everything Color book. We made it with Sophie and it is something she still enjoys looking at and playing with. He really enjoyed painting with the Do-a-Dots, but liked putting the cap on even more. Gosh, I love that sweet concentration face. 

For more Red Theme Tot School ideas, see Sophie's Red Week.  

Linking up at 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place and Teaching Mama's Everything Early Childhood.

Tot School: Transportation Theme

Miles is 16 months old.

On the Shelf

Cars.  I made a painter's tape road on the carpet for him to try to drive his cars along.  He wasn't too interested in the road, but the cars were played with constantly!

Spoon Transfer Vehicle Erasers. He loved these little erasers I picked up from the Dollar Tree.  Spooning was a little difficult for him, but it was great for him to practice.

Construction Vehicle Puzzle, Dump Truck with Blocks, and Vehicle Pop Beads.  No pictures, but he loved taking the puzzle pieces out of the puzzle - no real interest in putting them back in! The other toys were not so exciting because they had been out in our playroom for a while.

Activities With Sophie

Mosaic Traffic Lights.  I am really loving projects that they can do together, each on their own level. I'm definitely going to work to include more of these!

Stamp Painting Cars. They both sponge painted their cars using these templates. Miles was so proud to have something to hang up on the refrigerator next to Sophie's!

Next week I will start doing color themed weeks with Miles. Sophie's stuff will be getting less obviously "themey" as we start her Preschool stuff, and it will be difficult to keep their stuff coordinated.  I'm getting over the desire to have everything all matched to the theme...ain't nobody got time for that.  It's seriously hard for me to let go of that though. But if I don't, we would never actually do preschool and tot school, I would just plan for all of eternity.

So, next week - Red!

Linking up at 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place and Teaching Mama's Everything Early Childhood.

BIG Tot School: Farm Theme

This week in our Fruit of the Spirit Curriculum we were talking about Gentleness and learning Psalm 23.  This one will take us a few weeks to learn, but Sophie is already doing a great job.  We also played "Follow the Shepherd" and talked about how we follow God like sheep follow a shepherd.

Literacy Actvities

Emergent Reader.  We used this super simple emergent reader from Measured Mom and Sophie loved it!  Her face after she read it all by herself is priceless! She was so proud. (The text says, "A chicken." with a picture of a chicken, for example - obviously she was not reading the animal words but was using the picture, but it was a perfect first step for her!)

Initial Sounds Farm Fences.  This idea from Stir the Wonder was a hit!  I had put the popsicle sticks together ahead of time, but Sophie helped me "build" the fences by making playdoh balls and standing them up.  (Playdoh is the way to my child's heart...).  Then she put a letter in front of each fence, and matched up the farm animals to their correct "home" using the initial sounds in their names. She played this multiple times independently after our first time together.  

Farm Poem. We wrote a farm poem together using the "I am" model from PreKinders. To draw the pig, I drew one with simple shapes one step at a time, and she tried to mimic my drawing.  I thought her pig turned out great!

Rhyming Cards. From This Reading Mama's Farm Printable Pack

Spelling Animal Names. From This Reading Mama's Farm Printable Pack.  This was one of the first times I really encouraged Sophie to match the letters from left to right (rather than just matching up letters as she found them).  It took several gentle reminders, but I think it is important I start guiding her that way as we move past just letter matching into forming words!

Math Activities

Farm Animal Pattern Blocks.

Measuring Sensory Bin. This was the world's simplest sensory bin, but Sophie spent HOURS playing in it this week.  No exaggeration.  It started as a tin full of popcorn kernels and some measuring cups, and eventually some Toob farm animals made it in there.  We talked about how the bigger cups could hold more than the little cups and how it took multiple little cups to fill a big cup. Easy peasy, but the favorite activity by far.  I gotta do this more often!

Feed the Pig Counting Activity. Sophie was so meticulous to get the correct number of kernels right in the bucket "so they didn't get a tummy ache."

Roll and Count Farm. From 3 Dinosaurs Farm Printable Pack. 

Other Activities

Animal Matching. We matched our Toob animals with the pictures, and on another day matched the mother animal to the baby animals using these cards from This Reading Mama's Farm Printable Pack.

Shadow Matching. From Gift of Curiosity. This was the most challenging shadow match she had done, as some of the animals had similar shapes and were in similar positions. I was pleased that it actually stretched her a little bit and gave us a chance to describe what we saw in the pictures.

The week wouldn't have been complete without a visit from our neighborhood ducks. These little guys were born this Spring and have made themselves at home on our street. They have obviously been fed a lot, because they are not scared of people at all.  They followed us up to our porch!  It was actually a little bit eerie, to tell the truth! But of course the kids love it! 

Linking up at 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place and Teaching Mama's Everything Early Childhood.

Tot School: Farm Theme

Miles is 15.5 months.

Honestly, Miles wasn't feeling his Tot School shelves this week, and neither was I.  I was establishing a new system for Sophie's preschool activities, so Miles' shelf was a bit of an afterthought. He still enjoyed playing, but the shelf mostly consisted of toys he already plays with regularly, so there was no really new excitement for him. 

Also, he's trying to drop his morning naps, so we just have a lot of the crabbies going on and not much interest in anything except for being held by Momma.

His favorite part was all the animal books (probably because it involved snuggles!).  He loves any books with flaps, and especially our Little Turkey finger puppet book. He is trying to mimic animal sounds, but everything comes out as a growl.  It's pretty adorable. :)

Farm Animal Sound Puzzle. He loves taking pieces off!  And he can usually get them matched up to the correct spot again, but isn't really able to get them back in without help.  But he enjoyed the animals noises on this one!

Farm Animal Puppets and Stuffed Animals. 

Melissa and Doug Hide-and-Seek Farm. This was one I had gotten for super cheap when our local teacher supply store went out of business, and I held it back for him. He loved opening and closing the doors.  Sophie also enjoyed this one, since it was a new toy she hadn't ever gotten to play with.

Farm Playset. This is a daily staple in our house.  The favorite game is dropping animals down the silo.

Sticky Sheep. The one activity we were both actually excited about was the Sticky Sheep idea I found at Two-Daloo.  This was a family affair, and it was so much fun to see them enjoying the same activity together.  I definitely need to work in some more activities that both of my sweeties can participate in together.

Linking up at 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place and Teaching Mama's Everything Early Childhood.