Tot School: Letter O

Littlemiss is 28 months old

Littlemiss loved "O for Ostrich" this week! I started putting her alphabet coloring worksheets in sheet protectors in a binder. I got the idea from Carissa on the Tot School website. This worked really well this week and Littlemiss actually wanted to color them. She likes to "speed color," so she can flip easily through the pages. The most important thing is that she really liked it. By the end of the week she was asking for her notebook!

I can see a big leap in Littlemiss's imaginary play this week. I really enjoy watching her imagination and creativity develop. My desire is to find activities that challenge her imagination, creativity, and independent thinking skills with her play. I have a long way to go, and will just keep making small steps towards encouraging activities like this.

I've been trying to find a good balance and routine for Tot School during the week. At first I tried to make it work in the mornings, but we are so busy in the mornings. So, I settled for the afternoons after her nap, and it seems to work for us. I know there is no such thing as a set schedule with kiddos, but this is working for now.

This week was O for Ostrich and the theme was African animals. Tot trays for the week, from left to right: puzzles highlighting African/Safari animals, cutting paper, play dough tools, M&D tangrams, sorting "X's" and "O's", and a gigantic Safari puzzle. The two activities she didn't care for were the sorting activity and gigantic puzzle. I tried to put the gigantic puzzle together so Jemma could look at it, but it was taking too long and Jemma kept stepping on it, so I just put it away. Not worth the effort and time.

Her magnetic board this past week had pictures of African animals and letter building "O's" Littlemiss named her "O's", "Mommy O" and "Littlemiss O." Melted my heart :)

Matching her Safari Toob animals to the animal pictures. She loved it and would do it on her own during her independent play time.

Building the letter "O."

Practicing using scissors. She is still working on this and gets easily frustrated, so we are taking this in stride. I pulled out all the lion and giraffe stuffed animals we had for her to play with this week. She attached to this lion, who she called "Baby Lion." Everything is a baby these days.

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Feeding Baby Lion.

Talking to Daddy on the phone since he had to work a lot this week. She is "roarrrrrrrrrrrring" at him in this picture. We often "roar" back and forth around our house affectionately at each other. It's one of those weird/funny things we do. When we "roar" at Littlemiss now she puts her hand on her chest and says, "OH, you scared me!" It's hilarious.

He coloring is changing. I love to see her develop this skill! She pointed at the picture and started talking about someone, but then quickly lost interest in telling me about it. I just can't wait for her to draw her first person! It will be an awesome milestone!

Tracing the letter "O" with her left hand...

...and tracing the little letter "o" with her right hand. She alternates between both hands. I would have to say she favors the right hand, but continues to write and work with the left hand as well.


LOVING her Tot School notebook! She was coloring small dots at the end, and beginnings of the numbers. Her idea, not mine.

Doing her "O for Octopus" craft. She was sick with the stomach bug and wasn't at school this week, so I picked up the letter of the week craft to do at home.




Coloring the ostrich's. She likes to impatiently scribble on them. She would find the matching crayon to the correct colored word, and then color the ostrich.


Littlemiss's started doing a lot more imaginary play. We often go along with her role-playing and imaginary play. She, for whatever reason, will ask Clay or I to pretend cry so she can comfort us and tell us it's ok. We then ask her to pretend cry. We play this back and forth. This day I asked her to laugh, and she threw her head back and laughed. Pretty good little actress!


To encourage Littlemiss to persevere through her frustrations with the tangrams we have been taking turns placing shape pieces. We started out doing this giraffe together, but after a few turns she wanted to do it herself.


Showing me her work. So proud of herself!


Matching her Toob animals to the animals on a puzzle.



Marching African animals on orange play dough "O's". She often throws her arms up in the air like the picture above when she's finished something.


I cut out her ostrich's and she glued them onto a piece of paper. She really likes doing this so we are getting into the routine of doing each week.


This week I introduced a Valentine's Sensory Bin. I collected a lot of the items from the dollar section at Target and the Dollar Store. Instead of using rice or beans as the base of a sensory bin, but for this bin I used fake rose petals (from the $ store). Looking back I think it may be better to have less items in the bin so she can focus on a few things.



The first thing she did was just dump the whole bin out, which I don't have a picture of. We played with this a few times this week, because I wanted to see if she would engage more and if her play would become more complex. By the third time she played with it, we were sorting hearts by color and size (my idea), and she had moved past the sound-clappers and was playing with other items. I'm going to keep letting her play with it for the rest of February and see how her play develops and grows.

She wanted BooBoo to play with her and handed him one of the sound-clappers. I can't wait til they play together one day soon :)

She's so cool.

I put these socks in because I knew she would put them on her hands and play sock puppets.

Dancing around with the garland wrapped around her waist. She called it a tutu. This is one of her signature dance moves, putting her hand on the ground like that. She calls it ballet and ends her twirls like this. I have no idea where she got it.

She loves to hold him face to face.

Getting some tummy time.