Well. It hasn't been non-existent...
But I've clearly taken a blogging break with Tot School and our activities have been much less structured and a lot more recycling of past favorite activities.
We have kept up on reading, though!
I suppose that's appropriate for "summer break", but I am hoping to get back into the swing of planning activities and small lessons for the kids.
Poor Will.
He really misses it and has asked almost daily if I would "play a game" with him. When I say "Sure, buddy. What game do you want to play?" He always says "an activity!"... which is his reference to Tot School work. I guess I'm glad he thinks of them as games!
Some of my upcoming goals with the kids include:
1) continued focus on phonics and reading with Will - working more with blending of letter sounds
2) a new ritual of calendar time with Will - acquiring an understanding of yesterday, today, tomorrow... as well as the flow of a calendar and upcoming events
3) some basic writing practice with Will
4) he's into geography lately, so I'll probably play into that some more
5) speech and language comprehension with Sophie
6) continued fine motor activities with Sophie
7) color recognition with Sophie
8) continued sensory stimulating activities with Sophie
And here's a little of what they've been doing over the past month
(you'll have to scroll down on many of these links):
-transferring pom poms with various tools (fine motor and pincer grasp)
-dot stamping color-by-number pages from MLF
-assembling large Melissa & Doug USA floor puzzle
-ob.sess.ing over his "cars & trucks" - sorting them, racing them, learning all their names
-exploring little critters
-and big critters! (it's hard to see, but we've had a small, red fox in our field -probably eating food scraps- twice now!)
-exploring vegetable gardens
-building with Connectagons
-puzzles
-helping in the kitchen
-various fine motor work such as putting q-tips into a small jar (also see here)
-more puzzles
-ooh! this one is soooo cool! I saw it on another blog and had to try it! we made a hopscotch board on the carpet using colored tape and filled it with double digit numbers so Will could solidify his recognition of the teens numbers... it worked and was so fun (you can see we ran out of tape though :))
(we also used farm animals for markers - LOL)
-gross motor skills - and so funny! - we played wheel barrow!
-used Melissa & Doug animal magnets to practice more animal sounds
-more play with our family flash cards
-more play with nuts & bolts (for fine motor practice)
-and, of course, the calendar... this has been on my to-do list for quite some time and I couldn't bring myself to actually buy one... so I took some tips from a couple other blogs and just made one... it cost me 35 cents for the poster board... I kept it basic - I'm not interested in including weather and feelings in our calendar at home, but I do plan to add more features such as pictures of people on their birthdays, clip art to display upcoming events, some sort of marker for the current day, actual labels that read "yesterday", "today", "tomorrow", etc... I'll update here as I add to this...
(he already knows days of the week, but this is good practice in learning how they're spelled... and it's also good for practicing double-digit number recognition)
-pipe cleaners into a jar
-playing with colorful plastic buttons - sifting them, transferring them, etc.
-dividing handfuls into a muffin pan 
-sensory finger-painting with yogurt
-more gross motor skills... balance!
So that's a glimpse of what we've been up to.I spent some time recently reorganizing my Tot School storage area and am starting to sift back through the notebook I keep of ideas. So hopefully, we can pick things up a little more...
What are your favorite activities to do with your child?
Are you all fired up again for "back-to-school"... regardless of whether or not you have a school-aged child? That's the thing about August, no? :)
1 comment:
We do hopscotch/numbers practice with chalk on the sidewalk. It uses less tape :)
We got some neat puzzles from Lakeshore Learning to work on sequencing with both numbers and letters.
Lots of crafts... dot markers and glitter/glue are current favorites. There are little glitter bits all over our house. I found a couple in William's diaper today. Sweeeeeet.
Target had a bunch of cool stuff in their dollar bins last time I was there. One of her favorites is a book where each page has a squiggle on it, and she has to expand it into a complete picture.
Letter tracing practice. We have some books that let her work on that using dry erase markers, or I'll put some play sand or rice in a tray and let her trace in it with her fingers.
And lots of unstructured play. She has such a wild imagination. I love to just play with her and see what her mind comes up with.
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