Tot School, November 15

The Littlest Apple is 26 months old.

This week I presented activities to The Littlest Apple on trays, letting him choose which activity he would rather do.  I only offered two trays at a time, partly because The Littlest Apple gets overwhelmed by too many options and also due to a lack of space (I’m really not sure where I would put 5 or 6 trays).

We did several “life skills” activities this week.  The Littlest Apple helped me mix our Pumpkin Spice Granola:

He also vacuumed up a storm.  He LOVES his vacuum, and all vacuums, really.  We have to look at vacuums every time we go to Target.

The Littlest Apple was not interested in arts and crafts this week, but we did manage to complete our Letter H project, from No Time For Flashcards.  As you can see, my guy is a little heavy handed with the glue.

We talked about lots of things that start with the letter H: hands, hair, head, helicopters, hearts, hamburgers.  We made the letter H sound.  That was the extent of our Letter H activities for this week.  The Littlest Apple wasn’t interested in the rest of what I had planned!

We tried the Harvest Sensory Tub again, this time on the living room floor with a quilt underneath.  He loves this activity so much, and the quilt definitely help contain the mess….some.  Until he started throwing the popcorn kernels over his shoulder with a ladle (not pictured).  As much as I would love for this to be an activity for The Littlest Apple to do while I get a quick task done nearby, I think I’m going to have to supervise very closely until he learns the “rules.”

I created this very rough looking name puzzle for The Littlest Apple.  His real name is Finley aka “Finn”…I’m not sure why I decided to call him The Littlest Apple instead of using his real name for the blog way back in January 2008, but it stuck.  I created this on the spur of the moment.  The bubble letters didn’t lend themselves to tracing and The Littlest Apple crumpled up the paper at one point.  I’ll make a nicer version of this at some point, perhaps laminated.  He caught on to this very quickly and impressed all the grandparents with this one!  I’m planning on making some other simple “see and spell” activities, similar to this Melissa and Doug toy (which we may buy him for Christmas).  He has mastered uppercase letter matching and some lower case.  The Littlest Apple is starting to understand that those letters form words, like his name and the word “mix” for cement mixer (that’s on one of his shirts).

The Littlest Apple loves any activity that involves water pouring and transferring.  I found a turkey baster this week at the store that I thought would be perfect for this.  The idea was to transfer from the bowl to the pitcher, and after a little coaching, The Littlest Apple figured out he had to squeeze the bulb on the turkey baster, then wait for it to “get big” again, meaning it was full of water.  Then he moved it the other bowl and squeezed to empty.  The table was probably a little too high for this activity, but he absolutely refused to let me move it to the floor.  He had so much fun with this, until he decided to pour the pitcher of water on the floor.  Between this and the popcorn kernel slinging, is he testing the rules or what?!  Sorry this photo is slightly blurry.

This little pie puzzle from our Funshine Express curriculum went over better than I thought, and The Littlest Apple came back to it several times.  There was a 2 piece pie and a 4 piece pie to fit together.

The most successful activity of the week was sorting coins and putting them in his duck bank.  We sorted the coins together, naming them as we went (though he only remembers “dime”), then The Littlest Apple dropped them into the bank one by one.  We did this in batches because The Littlest Apple was very eager to get to the dropping-coins-in-the-bank part.  Once he was finished, we poured them all out and started again.  Dropping the coins in the bank took a long time given the number of coins, but The Littlest Apple loved it (and I was most grateful to be able to take a break and sit on the couch nearby reading a book!)