Tot School

Nathan is currently 19 months old

This was a great week of tot school. Nathan has found a place in our bonus room where he likes to do tot school and he's been running there and sitting down requesting "tot tool". I've been keeping his trays behind a gate in the bonus room so that he can pick his activity, and this has worked very well! Before we get to the trays, how about some tot school with friends (aka learning to share, wait, ask before taking, learning to take turns...)
Nathan and Zachary sharing the purple couch and Nathan waiting to hold the yellow fork.

Izzy and Nathan took turns on the peg board and Nathan learned it's okay to stack pegs with friends. :)

I was so proud of this big tower he built!

As you can see, he was happy too! Thanks Bethany for sharing your great stacking toys with us!

At home, Nathan stacked his cups and practiced counting to 10. He can correctly count to ten without any prompting now!

Playing with clippo blocks. Nathan things that everything you stack or build MUST be crashed and these blocks provided some resistance to being crashed. Despite that resistance, I think he liked building with them. Before long, he was making cars and boats out of the blocks. It was great to see him pretending!

Playing Izzy's piano while sitting on Miss Spider (whom he dearly loves on Noggin). He looks a lot like Charlie Brown in this pose!

This was the first week I introduced the bottle cap spelling. Nathan knew the letters on the paper and on the caps but had a hard time understanding the concept of matching the letter on the cap to the letter on the paper. He wanted to stack the lids at first and also asked for the bottle they go on. Within a few minutes, he understood more and correctly completed "hat".

This is always fun... laying out picture cards and asking him to touch certain ones. It's a great way to test receptive language skills. This week, to add a challenge, I asked him to touch the one that said "tweet tweet", or the one you like to eat. It was fun to watch his wheels spinning.

Nathan loves the photo wall in our foyer. He always points to the pictures and says the names of the people. We stood on the steps for a while with me asking him to find Nathan, another Nathan, Uncle Matt, daddy, Karmyn... Fun game!

Nathan has had this toy for a while and easily mastered stacking the shapes on the pegs. Until this week, I'm not sure he fully understood matching the colors, but he did it perfectly! He has a great sense of humor too. He would hold the green circle up to the red peg and say red and look at me out of the corner of his eye. Then he'd say, "no silly green". Very cute.

We have three of these books and love them. They ask a question, and you choose the right figure and slide it in the pocket of the page. This one is about colors and Nathan really enjoyed sliding the pictures in and saying blue bird, orange lion, etc.

Sticker fun - building those fine motor skills.

Nathan loves to color now and colors with both hands. He also likes for mommy to color as well and will hand me a crayon and say "mommy draw color yes".

Puzzle time! Always a favorite in our house!

I found this at Target last night. It's a picture of a kiddos each feeding an animal but the kid and animal fit together too, and don't have their own hole. This made it more challenging for Nathan.

This puzzle is also challenging because all the pieces fit in the same holes, you're matching colors. Nathan did this by himself and managed to get 5 out of 7 in the right holes.

Last night I also found a dough cutting set which included tiny cookie cutters and kiddo knives. We had a great time making shapes in the dough, cutting the dough, and working on using the cookie cutters.

Q-tips in a container.

Spooning lentils from one container to another. Next time we'll try jewels like these because this was messy!

Using the mini tongs to pick up corks. Nathan loves this and is becoming quite proficient!

Of course, there is always room for Bailey in our tot school activities. Especially those involving a bucket of ice...

She's not growling, merely chomping on ice like my kiddo. It was cute to see them "share a meal" together. Many moms will cringe when I say this, but Bailey would pick up the ice and crunch it into smaller pieces and Nathan would eat the smaller pieces that fell out of her mouth. :) Hey, she just got her teeth cleaned and a dogs mouth is cleaner than a persons! :)

Bubble popping! Great for hand/eye coordination.

Playing in the sprinkler has to have some gross motor skill development associated with it!

More playing with Zachary, this time in the water. Great for sensory input as well as sharing, taking turns, and learning patience.

While we are on outside activities... I finally broke out finger paint and sponges. Nathan loved painting with the sponges, but NOT AT ALL with his fingers. He did really well keeping the paint on the paper.

When the finger painting was finished, I decided it was time to add a little shaving cream to the mix. Nathan wanted nothing to do with touching it until I gave him a few of his trucks. He drove them all through the shaving cream and played here for a good 20 minutes. So fun to watch too!
So my friend Kristin K reminded me that building forts with kiddos is so much fun! Nathan and I tried to build a fort too but our cushions kept falling over, so instead we built a barracade and climbed behind the cushions and read books for a very long time.

Finally, Nathan played in my shoes and learned how to walk in flops with socks on and the flops on the right feet. There's got to be some coordination development with that scenerio!

We had a great week of tot school and look forward to reading your posts about what you and your tot are up to! Please link your tot school posts to Carissa's blog here! Happy tot schooling!