Tot School, Week 4: Letter D, Dinosaurs, Doctors & Dirt

Breck is 41 months
Rowan is 16.5 months


This week was pretty pitiful.
Neither kid wanted to do much of anything with tot school. It was like pulling teeth....not much fun. Plus, I wasn't terribly organized.


~~~~~~~~~

Monday
While Breck was at preschool, Rowan did the following:

Name Spelling Game
Although Rowan didn't match up her name-letters correctly (and I would have been amazed had she done that!) I was very happy that she knew to put the caps on the letter circles!
At one point, she did manage to get "R" "O" and "W" in the right places!


I also put pictures in the underside of the cap for a little more interest. Rowan really seemed to like that, as well as humming into them!



Stringing Beads
I thought this would be too hard for her, but since she understood the name-game, I thought we'd at least try.
And she did awesome!
I held the pipe cleaner for her and showed her what to do. Then let her give it a whirl.


after this, we took a little break and when I looked over to see what she was doing, this is what I saw:

she was stringing beads all on her own! I was/am so proud!


I Spy Tub
Rowan didn't really dig too deep into the pasta, so I may move it to a more shallow container.
But she did enjoy pulling handfuls of pasta out to dump on the floor!



Shape Sorter
Here she is trying to fit a triangle in the triangle hole, then bypassing the correct way to put it in the bucket, and finally (after Mommy showed her that it really will fit) she learned that perseverance pays off.



*
Tuesday

Dinosaur Play
To begin the day, I got out Breck's dinosaur toys and let him get into a dinosaur mindset!



Dinosaur Books


Title: My Big Dinosaur Book
Author: Roger Priddy

This book is fun to look at, and the names of dinosaurs are incredibly hard to pronounce!
I made several lame attempts to say the dino names and Breck repeated, which was kind of funny! He also grabbed his toy dinosaurs when he recognized he had a match!



And we got the following book from a box of Cheerios!
It was soooo much fun to read! I really enjoyed it and Breck did too!


Title: When Dinosaurs Came with Everything
Author: Elise Broach


(Not) Coloring Dinosaurs


I printed out some dinosaur coloring pages and made a book with them (just with staples, nothing fancy), but Breck just wanted to play with the foam dinosaur stickers, which actually turned out to be a great fine motor skills activity since he had to peel paper off the back!


and Rowan was more interested in taking the marker caps on and off, which also worked her fine motor skills...


...and she coloring her fingers green.


But she did manage to draw a little.



Sequencing
I made about five sequencing games and Breck did them all!



Dinosaur Tracks
Breck loves to paint, so I was sure he'd enjoy this craft, but he didn't. He stamped for about 3 minutes and was done. But, we'll give it another try in a few weeks.

I saw directions for an ink pad from felt and paint at Tired, Need Sleep. And the directions for jar lid stamps at No Time for Flash Cards.


*
Thursday

Counting and Numbers
I finally fixed the counting bees! So, the kids got them out and Breck worked (for about 2 minutes) on counting and number recognition.



Learning About Doctors

Title: A Trip to the Doctor
Author: Deborah Lock

After the story, we talked about what tools doctors use. I printed and cut out some clip art and Breck glued them into a doctor's bag!

He also struck an underwear-model pose with his doctor's bag!



*
Friday

Letter Games
Friday morning started out like most mornings - with Super Why!
It wasn't until recently that I learned pbskids.org has games!

So, Breck played Super Why games for a while and I'm pretty sure they taught him letter recognition much better than any attempt I've made. ...plus, it helped him become more familiar with the keyboard.


Learning About Dirt

Title: The Dirt on Dirt
Author: Paulette Bourgeois

This book was good. It has a lot of experiments for kids...mostly pertaining to Earth science and not so much dirt itself. It's also really wordy, although Breck still liked looking at the pictures.


I originally had planned to do some sort of dirt activity, but that kind of fell by the wayside.