Tot-School

At least once a week, and sometimes more, we visit out local small library and pick out many books to accompany "Tot School".
A few weeks ago I discovered the author Sandra Boynton, and in doing this, we have found another wonderful author that we all enjoy tremendously. She has many, many books, most of which we haven't seen yet, but we are really looking forward too them from our interloan library service. We talked about about living and non-living things this week. I have a matching game that has many, many photo pictures, so I picked out 10 sets of things to look at. First we talked about each picture and decided if it was alive or not, and then the child picked up the match and put it in their pile. Luke, 3 1/2, caught on very quickly, he even was correct when I added plants to the mix. He said, "Yes, they are alive because they grow and you feed them water."
Kimberly, 2 1/2, on the other hand, doesn't quite get this concept yet.

Kimberly is still having fun with her favorite book, Brown Brown Bear, What do you See?

I made this activity last year, she just simply finds, and places the animals in the correct order as we come to them in the book.

We have had a lot of fun fishing this week. You can see this fun here.

New this week are our Hands on Learning Counting Mats. This has the cutest little foamie fat fish that you put into fishbowls. We used the numbers 1-3, the numbers we are working on. An added bonus that Luke discovered is that it also is a great (and hard) puzzle. The fish came in the box not removed from their packaging. Luke found the foam in the garbage, got it out and proceeded to spend 45 minutes fitting tricky, similarly shaped fish into the form-he amazed me and accomplished this after a lot of hard work.

I also found this workbook on a shelf in my room. I copied pages and thought that it would be something to keep the littles busy while I worked with the big kids. Kimberly enjoyed coloring the whole pictures, filling in the paths, and playing with toys on the lovely mazes, but Luke, on the other hand,

would only use a pencil (like the big kids) and carefully followed the maze, (usually correctly) and then asked for more. I may need to figure out the cost of color copying the pages out of these books, or just buying new copies every now then.

Make sure you visit the other Tot-School posts from this week.

If you could also say a pray for this lovely family who started the Tot-School posts. Carisa's husband Frank was diagnosed with cancer this week, so they can use all of our prayers. Here at Ten Kids and a Dog we know that prayers can lead to miracles. Carisa is also expected her and Frank's third child-so say a prayer for everyone, including this little blessing.