Monday, October 13, 2014

Tot School- Week one!

Last week we officially started "Tot School." Since I am lucky enough to get to stay at home with Lola, and I am a teacher I figured it was only natural to start some schooling of our own at home. We only do "school time" about 20-30 minutes a day which is appropriate for an attention span of a 2 year old. Some days it's less and some days it's more. 

After doing some research here and here I got some great ideas on age appropriate activities and a loosely based curriculum of doing the color of the week series. It is overwhelming at first to see all the wonderful activities, but I just picked ones I knew would interest her and skipped over ones that didn't look like they would work for us. I am planning to stretch ours out and do a color/letter every 2 weeks because there are so many fun activities and I think we can spend longer on each letter. 

Here are some of the things we did last week: 

We started the week with a dot activity that can be found here. I was so impressed by how well she used the dot painters and corresponded with the capital and lowercase A! The next morning we did this printable and we did the capital A's first and then the little A's next. So proud of my little student! 

For our fine motor activity, I used an old parmesan cheese bottle (a big one from Costco) and some Q-Tips. She had a blast working on sticking them into the little holes. This activity was done several mornings during the week. We even were able to pick out colors and "feed" them to the bottle. 





Throughout the week we also played with her color of the week sensory bin. This is so easy to make and I didn't have to buy anything (which is wonderful!) All I did was go around the playroom and put everything in the bucket that was red. Play food was a place where I got a lot of the things, but I was surprised to find puzzle pieces, Little People accessories and other things that we could use. 

The first day I just let her explore the bucket and take the toys out to play. The next few days we would take out an item and I would identify it "this is the RED apple, you have the RED truck." Other days I would ask her to find the RED ____. We also worked on counting the red objects as well. 




A big part of this color of the week curriculum is just using what you have and making a point to orally discuss items. When we went grocery shopping last week we discussed the red foods we saw. I made an effort make red meals (such as spaghetti, things with ketchup, apples, etc) and wear red clothes. It's not an intense curriculum as you want it to be fun and enjoyable for you both. 

We also are currently reading these books that are related to our theme: 

  • Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss
  • Apple Pie ABC by Alison Murray
  • Apples Grow On A Tree by Mari Schuh
  • Apple by Nikki McClure
  • Little Apple Goat by Caroline Jayne Church

Other fun things we did this week:

We had a red themed bath! I bought some red bath finger paint and I drew some red things on the bath wall. Then I let her paint things red with the paint and brush! Simple and fun!


At the end of the week we went on a field trip to the Apple Orchard with Grandma Lisa! We had fun finding red apples in the trees and tasting some yummy apple snacks!





This week I am planning to make an apple scented sensory bin and continue to build on our skills of the color red and letter "A." 

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