Wilson Ramblings: Tot School

Nathan is 22 months old

With this being our first week of preschool, we made sure to take a tiny break from 5 days of tot school and spent 1 day laying on the couch recovering from being sick, and 1 day at the fair!!!!! Actually, we spent Wednesday celebrating Bethany's birthday, and her request was to celebrate by going to the fair. So, tot school traveled to the fair. My little guy learned all about roasted corn, fudge, gyros, funnel cakes, rides, tickets, chickens, sheep shaving, all sorts of things!!! We also learned that Ethan was the most daring of the bunch! Look at him and his mommy Lauren riding these swings!

Nathan loved riding the pony, once he got used to the idea of mommy not riding with him.

At the end, he gave freckles a pat and said , "tank you horse for da ride"

Sadly, this is the only picture I have of the birthday girl (while she's taking a picture of her little one on the pony). We were more into having fun than complete photo documentation on this particular day. :)

Nathan wasn't a huge fan of the rides, but this one was an exception. All kinds of construction vehicles and steering wheels. He and Izzy and I crammed in a dump truck and had a great spin on the "construction zone".

Now for more "structured" tot school... remember this game? I played it as a kid and Bethany found it at a consignment sale and thought Nathan would love it. For now, we're not timing him, that would be cruel and unusual at 22 months, but he does LOVE to put the pieces in and on the first try put every single piece in the correct hold the first try. It amazes me how good he is at this kind of activity.

Then we worked on fine motor and story telling with stickers... do you see how he put the dog "in" the dog house? He said that one needed to sleep and the one above it needed a bath and some water. So cute to see him tell these stories about the puppies.

Next was some free form play with the colored bears.

Before I knew it, he was arranging them like this with their hands and feet touching. I asked him what they were doing and he said, "da bears holdin hands. dey bein' kind. be kind to izzy and hold her hand." I think he was reenacting some of the character lessons we've been learning this week while playing with Izzy. Lots of talking about how to be kind with our words and hands.

These puzzles are new and Nathan loved them. You match the hands with the gloves, feet with socks, etc. He really enjoyed putting them together.

When I put them in a big pile for him to sort, he had no trouble finding the matches a second time.

Another day we worked on counting. he really liked the pumpkin erasers and held one for the better part of 2 hours one afternoon.

This week for our group tot school, we worked on the pumpkin counting as well as the first letter of every one's name. I regret that I didn't get a group shot this week, but I did get some pictures of the trays prior to tot school. We used "do a dot" markers to put dots inside the N. While it dried, we talked about the letter "N" and Nathan identified the pictures in the "N" book, put together the N puzzles and the nest puzzle. Once the markers dried, we took stickers of objects starting with "N" as well as letter N stickers and he stuck them to the page.

More accurately, he crashed the stickers onto the page. :)

He also worked on more letter recognition and name recognition by putting the foam letter stickers in the appropriate spots on his name card. He was much better at this than I expected!

He's done more art work this week than in the last 6 months! Take a look at our fridge! The plastic baggie is Jonah in the whale, his letter N, a fire hydrant from school (amazingly the teacher put on the glue and Nathan put on the pasta and tissue paper. I was amazed at his straight line of "water"), foam name, and gluing leaves from group tot school!