45 Minute Tot School

After what has been WEEKS of altered arrangements for karate night (me taking both kids so Craig can work, me on vacation, etc.), we finally had a normal week that Craig took Will and I stayed home with Sophie. I love our little time together, however short it is, and I try to make the most of it for quality one-on-one time.

Karate class is only half an hour, not including the commute. And I have to get dinner on the table at some point during that time that the boys are gone, so if we're lucky, we might manage 30-45 minutes of play time when I have dinner prepped in advance.

This night we focused our Tot School time on a couple of fine motor activities and practicing number recognition.

The button snake was a Christmas stocking stuffer last year for Will. It came from this seller on Etsy, who no longer seems to have our purchase available... but still has some sweet, felty, learning "toys" if you want to browse. Basically the button snake is a long ribbon with one square of felt secured at the "bottom" and a button at the "top". There are ten other felt squares with a slit in the center that the child can practice fitting over the button for buttoning practice. Sophie had actually never played with it before and she loved it.

Great fine motor work for little hands.
After successfully getting all ten squares on and off multiple times, she tried buttoning a pair of her jeans (one of the only pairs that button instead of snap) and that proved much more difficult and frustrating for her. It's not nearly as easy as the snake so I expected her to struggle a bit. I demonstrated a couple times and we'll just have to keep practicing that.

Another fine motor task she tried was to open a tiny lock using a tiny key. This required a lot of patience and focus!

She needed a little help making sure to get the key all the way in, but then she figured it out. This was something Craig bought to show Will but we kept forgetting to let him try it. He did later on when he got home and he enjoyed it far more than Sophie did. :)

I brought out the old, numbered, "car parking lot" that I made for Will almost exactly two years ago to practice number recognition. We borrowed three of Will's toy cars and practiced "driving" them around to different numbered spots that we'd call out. Sometimes she seemed pretty solid on a few of the numbers, other times she seemed to not know any of them. I know she recognizes 0, 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 pretty solidly. Why mostly even numbers? I don't know.

We incorporated a numbered cube that we'd roll to determine where our cars would park next.

And then we each rolled a numbered cube and found that number on the number puzzle and collected the ones we rolled.

She matched the puzzle numbers along the outer edge of the parking lot...

...and then put them back as I called one out.

Sophie uses a stock answer of "I don't know" whenever I ask her a question even if I know she knows the answer. I think she just has in her head that I'm going to tell her the answer and so she says "I don't know" without thinking for one second about my question. If I press her gently with "Sure you do! Find me the number 6"... then she'll usually get it right. But she doesn't quite have the motivation to give me a correct answer and be praised for it yet. And we definitely still need to keep working on numbers. ;)

She loved this matching game, however!

Again, another recycled game from Will a couple years ago. I took an old deck of cards and cut one of the suits all in half horizontally. I set the cards numbered 2-10 out in front of her and she found their match and placed it below. I just said each number aloud for her as she matched it.

Quite proud of herself after this one. :)

One of the very first "games" I made Will when we started Tot School was this: numbered clothes pins clipped to a piece of thick cardboard. The numbers are written in different colors so matching could be made by color or number. And then the pinching of the clothes pin is another good fine motor skill. Sophie rocked this game and loved it just like Will used to. She completed it several times and announced "I did it!" each time to me.

While I got dinner onto plates and set the table, Sophie did this 12-piece jigsaw puzzle over and over about five times. It's her current favorite and I keep saying we need to present the puzzles to her more often. Will used to do puzzles EVERY DAY with such patience and interest when he was her age. But they're kept in his closet because that's where there's room for them currently and so they haven't sat out for her easy access as much as they used to for him.

After dinner, while I cleared the table and ran the bath water, I gave the kids a quick and easy glue and paint craft for a snowy "scene". They had a couple of evergreen tree shapes and trunks to glue down onto paper and then a dollar store cleaning brush to "stamp" white paint (snow) onto the scene. The original idea for this suggested using a new, cheapy, toilet brush... but this seemed easier to maneuver with little hands and it was only a buck.

Oops! This picture didn't turn. My bad. This one is Sophie's and it looks like a quiet, light snow...

...while Will's looks more like a windy blizzard. ;-)

I honestly wouldn't mind if we got a blizzard right now. I miss the snow! But the closer and closer we get to March, the less I'm going to feel that way. The 40's and sun this week have me thinking spring and I'm afraid as soon as I let that thought sink in... we're going to get a foot of snow that catches me totally off guard. Ah well. Mild winters are nice for running. :)

Looking forward to my next date with Sophie in a couple weeks!