Tot School - Week 2

I'm combing this week in to one post. Mostly because I was slacking this week, but also because it may be easier this way (from here on). Maybe not, we'll see. This could get long ;) 
This week started off......bad. I'll just say it. B.A.D. Annabelle bit her tongue twice over the weekend which resulted in not eating for several days, which resulted in - an obvious outcome - a grumpy baby. She was also tired because she was waking in the night hungry. We were both just a MESS. Who knew a little tongue bite could cause such turmoil?! Whew! It took us most of the week to get back on track. Oh well. Once we did, we had a good time :) 


Tot School - Week 2
  Letter: B Color: Blue
Shape: Square and Circle   Word (s): Ball, bear, bike, butterfly, bird and baby. 

Did you know there about 1029719284610923846128 toddler "Bb" words?!!? Seriously! Aside from the above mentioned there are: bottle, blanket, blocks, books, barn, bear, boat, bath, bugs, bus, bee.....those are just the words I can think of off the top of my head that she already knows....the list goes on. So, we just picked a few that we would do activities for. When I pulled out the flash cards on Monday, I held up the "Bb" card, and asked, "what letter is....?" before I could even finish she replied, "B!". Okay then. Let's just skip this week. (haha just kidding of course) I'm not really sure why this is so familiar to her, but I'd go out on a limb and guess it probably has something to do with an iPad app, or TV show. Just a guess.... And they say TV is bad for kids ;)

Since we really weren't "learning" any new words, just doing activities with the ones we know, I decided to include a few more shape and color activities. After last week she still wasn't identifying our color, red, so this week we continued to focus on it, and add blue to the mix. 


Shapes & Colors
I have seen this idea on a few different sites, mostly when scrolling through pinterest, so I made up a little felt puzzle variation of my own. Probably took me 10 minutes.  

Aaaaand it probably took her 10 minutes to finish. Maybe 5. Maybe, like...2. hah! She has always liked puzzles, and she definitely knows her shapes (better than letters, numbers or colors). When she was finished, she looked at it like, "bam! that was easy!" hah! 

"ta-da!"

 I was browsing pinterest on my phone, and saw this ball printable. Since I was on my phone, I just drew my own. I planned to let her use the "dot paints" for this one, but she saw the markers, and it was all over ;) So instead of all the "big B's being red and little b's being blue" it was a color sheet, and that works. She drew some circles on it, and I think made a balloon? 

We also used the flash cards for a matching/shape activity.

We did a Circle/Color activity on day 3, where she was given a whole sheet of circle smiley stickers, and peeled them off and stuck them to the appropriate color. But since we were focusing on blue and red, I colored those in on her sheet (and yellow because otherwise you couldn't see it), so those were the most successful matches. 

I ended up peeling them off for her because she found that part difficult

lots of them ended up on her face, hands and legs :)

I dumped out the blue and red sorting bears, and added some blue and red puff's (puff balls? squishy puffs? I don't know what they're called - we were referring to them as balls because i didn't know what they were called to keep with the theme). Instead of sorting the colors, which she did easily last week, she decided to sort by item; balls in one cup, bears in the other.

  

 

Words
...Ball, Butterfly, Bird, Button...
We gathered all the balls and played toss with them. We tossed them into the big bucket, down the hall, at daddy....we tried rolling, but that wasn't fun today.

  
"Button" was actually a new word, that just fit with our B craft. :) First, she just played with the buttons, and lined them up on the "B". Then, we glued some down. She really enjoyed it!

Butterfly! We painted some coffee filters to make into butterflies, and then painted our Butterfly coloring sheet I drew. 

We also filled up our backyard bird feeder (she was more than happy to help scoop handfulls into it!), and did quite a bit of bird watching. :) We have SOOOO many birds here! It's easy to catch a look at some from inside our "school room" (aka play room/craft room). 

Books
 We don't have a huge home library, but we happen to have quite a few books with the letter "Bb"! These are the ones we picked to read. She loooooves Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?

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If you didn't notice, I started adding watermarks to my photos for this blog. At least for my tot school posts. I've researched it, and it doesn't seem like a huge deal to me (i.e. It doesn't ACTUALLY do anything to protect your photos), especially since I have very few viewers, but since it's back to a public blog, I think I better protect what I can, and this is a very simple way to do it :)  Anyway, it's nothing fancy, just the blog title. So it works :)


 Finally, as I mentioned earlier on, I don't really come up with most of these ideas, and I do get them from somewhere. Sometimes I will link directly to them, but I usually just use ideas, not really copy 1/1, so more often than not, I'll just direct you to Pinterest, or a couple of my favorite Tot School Blogs. Like these: 
1+1+1=1 
 School Time Snippets
Activity Mom 
The Educator's Spin On It 
And my super favorite, Diapers to Diplomas