Tot School (27.5 months)

This week we had a lot of fun. Our Thankfulness Tree (especially painting the leaves!) and spelling words out were the central activities.

Kevin (little guy in car) delivered beads to make a bead necklace for Daddy. I was surprised to see that Wes struggled some in stringing the beads on the lace, because he can string them on a pipe cleaner so easily. It was the motion of reaching around and grabbing the other end of the lace after the bead was on the end which presented a challenge. The lace would sometimes slip out of the bead.

Spelling out words was big this week...

We drove trains over our ABC puzzle while singing the ABCs. We've focused on phonics sounds, and not so much on letter names so when Wes drives over the letters he says some of their names and some of the sounds.

He has always said "ABCDFGY" for his ABC song, which he says often in play. After this play session I would hear him saying it to himself and now he has a few groupings of letters "ABCDFGY (as before) and LMNOP and WXYZ" in random order. So, that was neat.

Dusting the letters

We did some tracing...

Wes found this puzzle on the shelf and spent an afternoon mastering it and really enjoying himself.

In anticipation for Thanksgiving, we made a Thankfulness Tree. We drew a big tree. Then cut out leaves (I did that part while Wes cut around on the paper). Then we painted! We had so much fun painting. He got really into it and enjoyed layering many colors onto the leaves.

Then we wrote something we were thankful for on each leaf. We will continue to add thankfulness leaves to our tree until Thanksgiving. Wesley is (so far) primarily thankful for any toy his eye falls upon, and for the many wonderful people in his life.

We did some of  his "reading program". We haven't been doing it as much lately, but he really loves it.

We played some more Van Gogh matching/memory. We had success using eight cards or so.

We played Hi Ho! Cherrio. I could hear him counting 1-6 as he placed each cherry into the bucket, but there is still a connection missing. He will keep counting after he stops putting the objects in, even if he's starting to time the counting correctly with each object (which he used to do only for 1-3). He's starting to get the hang of it...I really love hearing him count. It sounds so sweet in his little kid voice.

We drove around some continents...

We cut out some letters. My idea was to cut out these letters and then glue them in ABC order, similar to the  counting activities we've been doing. We haven't gotten around to gluing them yet as we started the activity late at night. He really enjoyed the cutting, though.

We jumped around on some planets...

We glued the leaves we've been pressing! It was so fun to put them on paper. Now we just have to laminate them or something. Wesley gets so excited when we're out and about and he sees leaves, especially different leaves. He says, "Let's take it home and press it! that's a good idea!".

And practical life skills...we sorted laundry by light and dark color. He was a big help.

Check out other fun activities at 1+1=1 Tot School