Wilson Ramblings

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Nathan vs. Rocking chair...

Tonight, while getting ready for bed, our little man tripped and smashed his face on the leg of the rocking chair... the chair obviously won. Poor little one!

Nathan's First Pumpkin Carving

Nathan helped to carve his first pumpkin this Halloween! We scrambled to find pumpkins on Halloween (procrastination at it's finest), and after going 6 places, finally found these 3.

Nathan loves pumpkins and was quite attached to it from the beginning... but not as attached to the pumpkin as he is his cars!

This part was the funniest. I cut the lid part and then he pulled the stem out of the hole and shuddered at the sight of the insides. He then handed it to me and said, "pumpkin yucky. no. mommy do it."

After some prompting, he was excited to scoop out the guts, as long as it didn't touch his hands... mommy trait!

Next, he helped me pick the shapes for the eyes and nose; triangle eyes and an oval nose. Then, he "helped" me cut out the eyes.

He loved putting the eyes in and taking them out. Great tot school activity!

This is a horrible picture, but I love the face he's making!

Next, daddy fired up the dremel with a pumpkin carving attachment and Nathan was excited to help.

Yeah! Our work here is done!

Thanks daddy for making such a fun memory happen!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Tot School - the last two weeks

Nathan is currently 23 months old

These past two weeks have been crazy! We had so many Halloween/fall parties to go to and we had so much fun at each one! Nathan dressed up in his Fireman costume close to 10 times and got to spend a lot of time hanging out with lots of kiddos. He also had lots of opportunities to bounce in bounce houses, ride horses, play carnival games, climb, get candy for mommy, learn about people in costumes, meet new friends, and so much more! In the little bit of down time we had, here's what we've been up to during tot school...

Nathan has learned how to put these stretchy hats on all by himself and he insisted upon wearing it for the better part of a day. He walked around patting his hat and saying, "you're wearing a santa hat. Ho!Ho!Ho!" We also worked a few times on cutting these cool velcro fruits.

We did quite a bit of fine motor work this week... coloring...

first time painting with a paint set... (here we also worked on sequencing and left to right... dip the brush in the water, dip it in a color, then paint)

fun with pearler beads (I've been making ornaments all week for Jesse Tree with these beads and he's wanted to get in on the fun)...

putting pasta into really small holes on a lid...

putting pearler beads into a small hole punched in another lid...

lacing beads... So much fun fine motor stuff!

We also did a few file folder activities thanks to Carissa and www.filefolderfun.com. This name game below is from a Big Machines tot book by Carissa.

Matching the egg to the dino from www.filefolderfun.com.

This is a size sequencing activity from Carissa's 5 Little Monkeys tot book.

Also this week, we worked on sorting by color... with the added fun of stacking!

And of course, there are always towers to build and crash.

Nathan has really begun to enjoy building different things with his mega blocks. This was a great exercise in self control as the instructions were to keep the blocks on the high chair tray.

Just today, I found a new book by Roger Priddy called Magnetic Learning Colors. I LOVED IT! It comes with square magnets (and a case they fit nicely in which attaches to the book) and the child can find where the magnets go on each page!

I made these letters for Nathan out of Pearler beads and we had fun identifying them!

He gave knuckle touches (boooooyah!) to the picture I called out.

Lastly, Nathan wore at least 50 pairs of shoes in the last week. He loves to find shoes and put them on. Today, he told me he was going to wear Beesa's shoes to preschool, and out the door he walked... well shuffled. He wore his sneakers in, but during the ride to preschool, he wore them for part of the time. Silly boy!

Join other moms from all over as we teach our tots through fun learning adventures! Check out other blogs by visiting Carissa's blog. Have fun learning!