Starting Tot School

LittleMiss is 27.5 months old

Although I am not a career teacher, I still consider myself an early childhood educator. A lot of what I do at home with my kiddos is based on what I learned at college. I love working one-on-one with LittleMiss and teaching her.

I've found some good websites to follow and to be encouraged in pursuing teaching my kiddos from home. I found one blog and website that has been such an inspiration and resource for me, 1+1+1=1. I started my search for good blogs and resources months ago and started collecting early childhood supplies and educational toys. I found it overwhelming at first, because there are so many options and resources, and it can be expensive. I had to readjust the way I was thinking about it and as Clay likes to say, "eat my elephant one bite at a time." I slowly been working learning into our routine at home and am loving it! LittleMiss loves it too. She has such a thirst for learning and I want to encourage that.

LittleMiss attends a preschool two mornings a week. Honestly, I miss her when she's at preschool, but she loves it too much for me to take her out. I started following her school's letter for the week and extending the letter she was learning at school to home. This week was a review of the letters they have already learned at school, but we started the letter "M". Below are some pictures of some of the learning activities we did together.

Play dough was her favorite activity this week. We used the printed out "Mm is for mouse" sheet laminated and we started this week with me making the letters with play dough and to add some sensory play I gave her glass beads to squish into the play dough. She loved it and kept asking for more beads.

After a few times of doing it myself I handed her the rolled out play dough and she made the letter "M" with them. You can see where she pushed the play dough down to make it stick. She was so proud of herself when she finished it! She's also been trying to use the play dough scissors it's been a bit of a frustration for her, but I just keep encouraging her to perservere.

This is dot art on the shape "hearts" on a mouse.

Tracing the dotted lines between the capitol "M" and lowercase "m"

Placing glass beads on each number as we call out the number. Number recognition is something we are working on.

Using her fine-motor skills to transfer pompoms with tweezers.

Pouring beans was another one of her favorite activities. I learned a few things after doing this a few times: one, I need to buy a smaller pitcher, and two, use less beans! It was still fun and educational, so we did it as many times as she wanted, we just picked up a lot of beans!

I inherited a citrus juicer, so I've been making fresh squeezed orange juice. LittleMiss has been interested in this as well, so she wanted to help. She handed me an orange slice when I needed it, but then started licking the oranges.

Yummy!!!