Tot-school | Week 14 | Letter NJanuary 24, 2017
This past week’s tot-school…
…was our normality.
Embarking on the second half of the alphabet Tot-school has become quite a part of the life of the house. Adam’s desire to learn more and more is evident in his choice of video material and in the snippets of the alphabet song he sometimes sings at nap time. He’s long enjoyed sifting through magnetic letters and now he names both numbers and letters, lifting up ones he doesn’t recognise for us to identify.
For the letter N I initially chose to work with nails and nose. What emerged quickly was that while nose worked nails didn’t. Sighing at the shelved paperwork I tried our secondary concepts of nuts and necklaces and both went swimmingly. This week I made less pages for the pack but still had spare, it’s a balancing at I’m still wobbly on.
The pack I’ve made is available for download at the end of the post.
This weeks read more questions:
The big taped latter on the ground, N is a brilliant shape to balance along.
Nails. I had great plans of exploring real nails but i left sourcing them to too late and with our love of throwing right now it felt a foolish choice.
I coloured half a bag of large macaroni using a few drops of liquid food colouring and a tablespoon of white vinegar, repeating with the other half and a new colour. I’ve tried this and rice before but this time I used a Tupperware tub rather than a plastic bag and it was so much easier and less messy.
Tot-school | Week 13 | Letter MJanuary 16, 2017
This week’s tot-school…
…was stir crazy!
For much of the week temperatures outside regularly dropped into the double figures and our poor little guy had to do with being cooped up all day, sometimes only exploring one room at a time as the doors conserved heat and the hallway linking them turned into a fridge. Totschool was therefore both a release and a chore, something new to explore but one of limited options. Monday went really well but the next 2 days struggled.
Letter M is a great one to explore and we really dwelled in the monkey theme. However the most beautifult moment for mummy came when he was working with the M craft. He took the pieces of map and as they came together he declared with real surpise ‘Look a m!’
The pack I’ve made is available for download at the end of the post.
This weeks read more questions:
The mask was a big hit again, though the hat was a little more hit and miss. The crafts were probably the best learning moments even if the monkeys limbs are all backwards.
The caps page just didn’t hold his interest, perhaps we’ve overdone buttons and stamps and other placement bits and he’s looking for something new.
looking back it must seem like totschool is a big part of our day, but it really isn’t. It’s probably more part of my day as i find activities and ideas but for Adam isn’t often shorter than a couple of his favourite cartoons. It’s rare to be longer than 30 minutes.
Tot-school | Week 12 | Letter LJanuary 10, 2017
This week’s tot-school…
…was back in action!
Though it was still the Christmas season, which for us is sandwiched between 2 Christmas days’ (the second Orthodox) and New year had barely finished ringing us in, I was eager to get back into our routines. Adam took to the activities with gusto, I suspect he’d been missing it. It’s clear that he’s much further on that when we started and so this week I trialled a few new activities.
While the letter ‘L’ is easy to resource we kept this week quite striped down concentration on our new elements and limiting the number of activities. Limiting the mess helped when on Thursday night we ended up carrying the cot into the sitting room and embarking on 3 days of living in one room. It happened just as temperatures dropped dramatically (we’ve been on Red Warning for Extreme Low Temperatures) so it was a real mixed blessing. However, Tot-school suspended on Friday left me realising how much we’d left undone.
The pack I’ve made is available for download at the end of the post.
This weeks read more questions:
Restarting has to be high on the list but the lion mask was soon separated from the rest of the totschool paraphanalia and much played with.
The ladybug trails and the big letter pages were pretty much ignored. I think this was mostly because the letter itself is fairly dull in construction and I’d made the trails too short.
Letter baskets, or sometimes called ‘discovery baskets’ are something I’ve shied away from in the past so it may be odd for me to choose to use them now. Adam loves to empty and fill things rather than root though them. As he gets better at recognising that things ‘live’ in certain places this basket was a litmus test of sorts. He responded really well and I’ll probably continue to do this but they simply wouldn’t have worked earlier than this.