Tot School - Week 1

D is 19 months old

I came across Tot School as I was looking for activities for D last week and have decided to join in the fun. Last week's theme was winter. We focused on snow and penguins, though D still doesn't really understand that snow is cold. Darn South Florida winters! Actually I would love to be able to play in the snow with her, but for D "snow" was packing peanuts.

She enjoyed finding things in the snow, some snowflake matching cards and her Little Einsteins friends. And enjoyed putting them back in, until show found a better game to play.  She thought it was far more fun to get in with the snow than just use her hands to search through it.

D made her snow picture.  (See my previous post.)

D then made a penguin puppet.  She liked coloring the bag and gluing the penguin parts to the bag. 

D has started making me crazy by tilting her head and saying "cheese" every time she sees me trying to take a picture.  

And of course we finished this project by pulling the pieces off again.  I think the only part left today is the head (which I helped her glue on).

We wrapped up our "learning" about snow with our Muffin Tin Meal.

Real World

I am one of those moms who believes that kids are meant to get messy. When I taught Early Childhood, the parents knew that their kids would get messy in my class because I knew that they were being productive and having a good time too. For some reason with D, I am okay with finger-painting, and even when she spills all of the "snow" out of the bucket. But, I have been hesitant to give her yogurt since she started insisting on using a spoon by herself. Now I do give her a spoon for ice cream or macaroni and cheese and other things that won't make a big mess if they fall off. This week she had some yogurt on her own. I think it was a learning experience for both of us!

Check out 1+1+1=1 to see what other people were doing this week.

stART Snow!

So JGD is off to Alaska for some sort of cold weather training.  Well, D has very little understanding of what the weather would be like in Alaska.  For the next couple days we will be talking and reading about snow to show D what it is like in colder environments.  Though it has definitely not been the typical Florida by any means.

While touring many of the other Muffin Tin Mom sites, I found this "project community."  In trying to teach D this week we have been reading books and doing projects to go with them.  Similarly to how I did things when I taught my 3 year old classroom and when I taught Kindergarten and First Grade.  I guess it has become ingrained in me.

This morning we read 2 books to go with our theme/art project.  D like Biscuit's Snowy Day by by Alyssa Satin Capucilli, Pat Schories, and Mary O'Keefe Young better than Snow by Philip.D. Eastman and Roy Mc Kie.

After reading our books we made a snowy scene using cotton balls and real glue.  Now this is the first time D has used real glue, so I was quite on top of her during this project.  I put a little glue on the cotton ball she held and then helped her to put the cotton ball on her hand.  This meant that we do have glue everywhere and no cotton balls stuck to anything other than paper. 

Because I was keeping so close to her I don't have any pictures of her actually doing the project, but I do have here is D trying to put glue (from a closed bottle) on a cotton ball.

Here is D's final project, which is now out of reach on the fridge!