Our First Week - Tot School (18m)

Well, I've been meaning to try and make a Tot School post for weeks now, but either I felt I had nothing really to speak about or I didn't have pictures, or once I started writing the post went "poof" out of my head.  So this post has been in the works for a while.

One of the blogs I read, Fostering My Family, was the first one who introduced me to Tot School.  If you want to learn more about Tot School, please go here.  I have been perusing this blog for a few weeks now and I keep finding more and more information and cool ideas.  Since I have been homeschooling, I have learned one very important lesson ... do not re-invent the wheel.  So why should I redo something that someone already is doing (quite well), I shouldn't.

So based on a few ideas I learned while visiting my friend in FL and ideas I found over at the Tot School site, I started collecting items I could use with my son for his "tot schooling."  One of the very first items I was trying to get was a cheese shaker - ours was almost empty.  Everyone in the house knew that we were trying to save this so it could be used as the wikki stick container.  Guess what?  Hubby forgot and threw it in our recycling.  Then one day we had some italian meal and I asked about the cheese and he says "Oh, that's gone.  Has been for a while."  Of course I grilled him wondering where it was and why it had not been cleaned and saved.  He just said "I forgot.  Sorry."  It's not really that big of a deal, but man I was really wanting that container.  Instead we've been using another container that we put our own holes in it and it seems to work fine.

Anyways, last week I made sure to include Seanan in our school time.  We did some very intentional planing.  We have been collecting bottle caps and I let him take them out of the container and then he put them back in.  This kept him occupied for quite a while.

On another day we played with this wonderful balloon puzzle.  Seanan loves balloons so I knew this would be a fun thing to play with.  Also each balloon is a specific color so we worked on naming the colors.

Then later in the week, I remembered that the girls had gotten some bead stringing bags for our trip to FL.  So I asked Audrie if Seanan could play with hers.  Of course she was glad to share.  He didn't quite get how to put the block all the way on the string, but he sure did try.  We ended up having to take this away from him because he kept trying to eat the block beads and the string.

Taking the bead out

Threading the bead

Pulling the bead onto the string

We did some other fun things including playing with Legos (one of his most favorite toys) and read books.  I think this was a very full week and look forward to posting again soon.  Be sure to check out what others are doing during their Tot School.