Tot School

E is 28 months old

 
We had a pretty good week of Tot School, working on our bird materials and our new Montessori materials.  We have been outside a LOT this week, putting mulch down in the backyard, weeding the garden, and watering the new plants.  I bought E her own watering can and she loves to help me water the irises and tomatoes.  As for our indoor work, we had 3 good days of school, plus our letter of the week playdate this morning.  All in all, a successful week!

Math and Sensorial:

E worked with the geometric solids, naming them and matching them to the little wooden cards that came with them.  There are a couple of triangles, a square, circle, and rectangle.  I had her find all the solids that matched a shape: for example, for the square she found the cube, rectangular prism, and the square pyramid.  She is still not convinced that the sphere is a sphere and not a "ball."

I pulled out the pattern block pattern cards from confessions of a homeschooler, and E did several of them in one sitting.  She made me do some too - they're fun and relaxing, even for adults!

She also worked with the geometric cabinet.  I pulled out the cards that go with the demonstration tray, and she matched up the shapes to all three sets of cards (solid shape, thick outline, and thin outline). 

E loves to work with the sandpaper numbers.  She tries to trace them with her finger, but mostly we work on naming them and putting them in order.

We did a bit of work with the knobbed cylinders - she's been begging for #4, so I pulled it out.  She lost interest in it pretty quick when she found out it was too hard for her right now. 

She also worked with the pink tower, but no pictures!  She didn't want to make a tower with it, only a staircase.  So that's what we did and we let the baby cube walk all the way down and back up.  She is having difficulty seeing her mistakes when she builds the tower.  I am thinking of pulling out every other block  to make it easier for her to notice when she places one wrong.

Language:

E has also been begging for the sandpaper letters, so I had to come up with some ways for her to use them that don't involve tracing.  She's not ready for that and I don't want her to learn it wrong.  So we used the letters in conjunction with our alphabet box.  She worked on letter b.  I REALLY need to get more miniatures for my box!!  She would do this work for hours if she could, but I don't have enough items.  I am going to buy the picture sets from Montessori for Everyone, just have to get around to it!

The other alphabet activity we worked on was a major undertaking.  We laid out all all the letters in order (singing the alphabet song) and then matched our magnetic capital letters to them.  Some I handed her the capital and told her to find the lowercase, and some I showed her the lowercase and had her find the capital to match.  Some took a bit of thinking time, but she completed all of them with minimal help from me.  (She mixed up p and d, for example, and h and n). 

Science - Birds:

I finally got around to making my bird materials (from the Feathers for Lunch lapbook from homeschool share).  E did a part to whole matching activity:

(Does anyone know the names of all these birds?  I got most of them, but there are a few I can't find, and of course, they're the ones E wants to know the names of!)

We labeled the parts of a bird:

Did a sort of characteristics of a cat and a bird:

And made a cute bird craft!

Whew!  I think that's enough for one week, don't you??  To see what more tots are doing, check out Carissa's blog!