Tot-school | Week 5 | Letter EOctober 23, 2016
This week’s tot-school…
…was a short burst of creativity!
This week we did 4 days of totschool. Mummy and Daddy spent Tuesday shopping for Birthday presents so weren’t about and the week ended with a special party on Saturday night in a soft play place – it was great fun. Adam received lots of gifts from friends and family and though none were totschool specific I’m sure a few will creep into our learning time.
Meanwhile, we looked at the letter ‘E’ and let our creativity shine. This week we abandoned a lot of the pieces we’d started out using and replaced them with more tactile items. It felt very creative this week and I felt like we’ve found a place between the structure and exposure where we are all have fun. With a busy week we didn’t always hit schedule and some days were much shorter sessions because they didn’t take place until evening.
This weeks read more questions:
This is the most asked question I get… and I always answer with a plain ‘no’. Totschool, for us, is about expanding Adam’s English vocabulary not as a way to teach him new words in his second language. We are very much concentrating on getting him to speak English first because once he leaves the house he’ll be in a Serbian world so we are not worried about him picking up that later.
It would be foolish to give the impression that this is all free, everything comes at a cost, but we’ve kept it really rather low. I’ve decided if I find a great whole alphabet pack I’ll consider supporting the people who make it, especially if they give some away free, even so I’ve splurged less than £20 so far. We have bought odd bits like a white board eraser and extra rice and laminating pouches, and the printer ink will probably need a top up soon too.
This often gets asked too, and for us at the moment nursery isn’t essential. I also believe that nursery isn’t necessary for kids that this age. We have 2 parents working from home, we have space to play and a good number of toys. Having worked in nurseries in the UK I’m probably more picky about who I leave my child with and the policies here are much more relaxed than UK nurseries. Nurseries here tend to have quite a long day of around 7 hours, there is no half way point, no playgroup for 3 hours or similar, and I don’t like the idea of Adam spending 35 hours a week apart from us.
Week 5 : Letter E
Monday
Monday the table was set with an elephant toy, an egg and an envelope alongside the letter tracing mat with corresponding pictures. We matched the pictures but the egg looked different so we needed to crack it first, it was a lovely tactile way of looking at the letter and Adam did really well with pen placement when we moved onto the laminated sheets.
1) Letter pages plus image in upper and lower case
2) Capital Letter tracing mat
3) Objects – egg, toy elephant and envelope
Tuesday
No totschool.
Extra picture from Wednesday – Mummy hadn’t finished sewing the E!
Wednesday
We tried out the 3Dinosaurs elephant puzzle that is made of nine squares, (though we had only divided it into 3) to replace the 2 piece puzzles and it was a great success. As well as completing the do-a-dot ‘search for the letter’ pages we also did some letter sorting. Using mini foam floor piece puzzles I separated the letters and had Adam replace them in the spaces, the second time round we matched the letters with the felt letters.
1) Do a dot sheets – find unbound letters on elephant + letter with elephant
2) 3 piece puzzle with guide
3) Letter sort – fill the shape, + match with the felt letter
Thursday
Today’s totschool was later in the day. Adam caught me printing a silhouette game so we started with that. Onto the first craft, a elephant finger puppet and learning to paint with a big sponge. We pushed fingers and party blowers through the hole for the trunk. During the drying times we played with our Bing bunny wipe clean book which was great for pen control skills and attempted the crayon number station that went right over his head.
1) Finger puppet elephant
2) Silhouette match
3) Bing wipe clean activity book
4) Crayon number station
Friday
Using up the last of the prepared activities meant making the lower case e into an egg complete with chick popping out. We backed these pieces onto craft foam which really made the craft pop! Adam adored the googly eyes and I ended up swiftly printing a do-a-dot page so he could practice placement with them. We also did some upper and and lower letter linking using the felt letters.
1) letter ‘e’ chicken craft
2) Letter sort – felt upper and lower case
1) Do a dot page using googly eyes to fill circles
Next week: the letter F will be swimming with the fishes and more!
Linking up with 1+1+1=1 : googly eyes week ~ Letter E {24 mos.}
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