Will LOVES Tot School.
He tells me "Mommy, I want to do a game with you!", (referring to our Tot School activities) and gets so excited whenever I have something planned for us to do. This week was a very educational one for Will. It was all about shapes - some traditional, some nontraditional.
Will has been way beyond his chunky puzzles for months now, but I always like to find new ways to repurpose previously loved toys. So when I saw this suggestion, I thought it would be a fun addition to our "shapes" week. The first round was purposely easier, just to give him the hang of it. I just traced around the pieces onto some paper and he had to match the piece up to its outline. He did this in no time at all.
The lacing animals seemed like they would be a little harder because all the animals were generally the same size and shape with just a few small differences. Plus the wood pieces are painted the same on front and back so he would have to figure out which direction I traced each one to correctly match it.
But once again, this was no challenge for him. He did seem to enjoy it, however, and did request to do it more than once through the week.
This next activity was super fun. It's called a stereognostic (or "mystery") bag. I found two of each object shown and placed one in the bag and one on the tray for Will to see. Then he touched each piece, told me what it was and talked about its properties (smooth, soft, hard, round, etc.) Next, he told me which item he was going to find and had to reach inside the bag without looking (I held the bag) and pull out the correct one, selected by touch alone. Pretty cool, huh?
We did this twice in a row and then Will wanted to challenge daddy. So he called out an item for daddy to find and told him what it should feel like. He also repeatedly told him "Remember! Don't look!" (just like I told Will several times - LOL).
On another night, Will took a piggy back ride around the house and we pointed out all the shapes we saw, i.e. the door is a rectangle, the pillow is square, the clock is a circle, the kitchen floor tiles are square. Then I introduced the names and concepts of three new "shapes": sphere, cylinder and cube. I described it like this: a circle is flat, a sphere is like a ball; a cylinder has a circle on top, a circle on the bottom and is long in between; and a cube is like a square with many sides or many squares. I wrote their names on three pieces of paper and drew a rough sketch of each one. Then I pulled a bunch of objects around the house and set them on the buffet and Will had to sort them on the dining room table by its correct shape.
We had a beach ball, a soft baseball, a bath toy ball, a pom pom and a marble. We also had a roll of paper towels, several cans and cannisters, a gift box, a block and his shape sorting cube. Cylinders are very common in our every day life! Will can now recognize all three of these shapes and tell me their names at random when I ask him what shape something is. He forgets the word "sphere" sometimes or it comes out "suh-phere", like "severe", but he says cylinder and cube really well and it's very cute. I'm very impressed with how well he did and I think this was a very good vocabulary lesson! 
Afterward, he played with his shape sorter for awhile, so I'm glad I was able to renew his interest in that again. :)
As I research all these ideas on Tot School activities, I find so little that applies to the "baby" set. I understand that most logical concepts are beyond them for awhile yet, but I would still like to come up with some fun activities for Sophie that set the stage for all of the cool stuff Will is doing. So many of her favorite "toys" are not actually toys at all. She loves that little shaker toy that I made her awhile back from an empty (washed out) honey container filled with a couple tablespoons of dry split peas, so this week I made her another (since I just finished another container of honey after making those granola bars last week) filled with colorful, pony beads. They make a slightly different sound than the peas and are much prettier to look at. A couple concepts that I like to really play into with Sophie are object permanence (like that game we played with hiding an object under an upturned bowl for her to lift and discover) and that wonderful, tedious work only babies do where they sit for long periods putting objects into a container and then taking them out... and putting them back in and taking them back out. I'm sure there's a name for it, but all I can come up with is "repetitive" and "cause and effect". Most of what I've read says that that doesn't really start to take effect until about 12-15 months or so, but we're now at the beginning of that age range so I decided to try it. I came up with this:
An empty (washed out) wipes container filled with ten, colorful, giant pom poms for some sensory fun too. I bought a huge bag of various sizes of pom poms back when I had Will sort by size, and we always come up with new ways to entertain ourselves with these bad boys. So I showed Sophie how to open the container and what was inside. Then I let her do it herself and she LOVED it!!
Repeatedly, she opened, closed, opened, closed, opened, closed the container. Then finally she decided to take out one or two balls, close it, then open again, put those balls back, close it, and repeat something similar to this over and over.
The new and the old shakers.
Hmm... does this fit in there?
Suddenly, she hears daddy go by on the lawnmower (we were up in my bedroom sitting on the bed).
And later I found the new shaker in the microwave of their kitchen toy.
Comparing sounds...
Not sure when this happened, but these jammies are WAY too small on her. They barely cover her belly!
This is a great toy to keep beside the changing table for distraction while I change her diaper.
Awhile back, I bought this Melissa & Doug mosaic puzzle game and just held onto it to introduce when it fit into our lessons. It has a magnetic, white board and about ten or so pictures (front and back) to follow as a diagram. Or you can just leave the board blank and create your own. It is fun and Will really enjoyed it.
He's known the name and shape of a trapezoid since we did our popsicle stick shape building a few weeks ago, so this was a nice refresher on vocabulary with yellow hexagons, blue parallelagrams, red trapezoids, etc.
Another evening, Will patterened "cylinders and cubes" (lacing pieces) onto a skewer poked into styrofoam. He's really improved his understanding of patterns and can now do an ABAB pattern with no problem. He also knows it's called a "pattern" and told me "look at this pattern!"
We talked about the shapes that end in "-agon" as they can get kind of jumbled together. I drew each side in as a different color to differentiate the sides and then numbered them to help him stay on track when counting the sides. This was a good practice in 1:1 counting too and I may try more counting activities where the counted object is actually numbered because it helps prevent him from getting ahead of himself. Admittedly, this was a pretty boring activity and we didn't spend a long time on it.
Counting sides...
Another stereognostic bag:
Describing the di in his hand as a "small cube". 
Reaching inside with focus. :) 
And then practicing on daddy again and reminding him (again) not to look. LOL
On another day, Will sequenced some cylinders (a.k.a. paper towel/toilet paper tubes) by height...
And finally, on Friday night, daddy made Will one of his coolest activities of the whole week: a geoboard! To make it, Craig took an approximately 1'x1' piece of wood and drilled 25 screws into it (five rows of five), each 2" apart. Then we took rubberbands and created all different sorts of shapes around the board. So cool!
I didn't really plan this, but we had different colored rubberbands, which helped to differentiate our shapes when they overlapped. And surprisingly, Will had no trouble with rubber bands snapping his fingers at all.
We made all sorts of shapes including squares, triangles, rectangles, hexagons, octagons, trapezoids and parallelagrams. We couldn't make circles or pentagons, but Will didn't seem to mind. And of course he had help for most of these, but it was a really good learning tool for how to create shapes.
We also brought back out and worked on our popsicle stick shape building activity this week and used it as a sort of diagram for working with our geoboard.
So that was our week and we definitely had some good, educational fun! What a great vocabulary lesson for Will too! He learned the words: cylinder, cube, sphere and mosaic!Also, on our way home from the library on Saturday, Will pointed out a "new"-to-him street sign by saying "Look at that red octagon inside the yellow diamond, mommy!" We talk about the shapes and colors of street signs often so this was not an unusual conversation for him, (although I think he assumes all many-sided, red shapes are octagons at first glance) but I was just impressed with his observance of one "inside" the other and saying it in a way that made sense. It was a "stop sign ahead" street sign and he'd never seen one before. I just love listening to him point out and talk and converse about anything and everything he observes, thinks about or feels. It's so exciting for me!
Next week, we're venturing into some art... hopefully. I am like the least artistic person on the planet. But I want to expose my kids to more than just MY hobbies and skills, so I'm giving it a shot. Nothing fancy, but hopefully fun. Stay tuned!
I'm pretty sure there's an age gap here, but still...
And one more flashback, just for fun... 
