Tot School: Letter R

Littlemiss is 29 months old

A wise woman reminded me recently to make the development of Littlemiss's soul/spirit the priority over her mental development. As a society we tend to worship the mind and focus on being smarter, especially with our children. I will admidt I love challenging Littlemiss's mind and watching her learn. It is such a joy to watch. I need to be reminded that being smart and challenging the mind is good, but spiritual development is more important! I know this to be true in my own life, but I hadn't consciously made it a priority when teaching Littlemiss. Tot School will stay much the same, but I'll be working on balancing teaching her mentally and spiritually. My goal is to simply be more purposeful in teaching Littlemiss about God. To begin I've incorporated scripture into each week. We talk about the verse of the week over breakfast, in the car, when we're out walking, etc. If Littlemiss can learn all the words to "Itsy Bitsy Spider," then she's old enough to memorize a Bible verse! Talking about God is becoming a natural part of our day. There are so many opportunities to talk about God's truth's. These aren't things I've necessarily taken pictures of to share on my Tot School post, but just wanted to share a change I'm trying to make in our home.

Due to my lack of motivation and pure exhaustion (Clay was out of town from Tuesday through Saturday evening) we only did Tot School for a few days.

On top of the learning center is her Noah's ark that makes all sorts of sounds (one of her all time favorite toys) and items that begin with the letter "r."

Tot Trays (left to right) top: play dough, pipe cleaners into cheese shaker, "R" & "r" sorting. Bottom: colored pegs, Noah's ark sorting, Learning Resources sorting set.

Pipe cleaners and cheese shaker.

Colored stacking pegs.

Rainbow "R" & "r" sorting from COAH.

 Littlemiss's Rr coloring pages for the week. She colored the picture of Jesus at preschool. I had to include it because it cracks me up. It looks kind of freaky with Jesus's red eyes, but she was just coloring all of the different parts of the face: eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, hair.

Looking at and talking about all the items that begin with the letter "R."

So proud of her coloring. I love that she takes about 20 seconds to color it and then she's done! She's not that into tracing or coloring for long periods of time.

I love the concentration she used to place every single red dot.

She's started screwing on and off the tops to the dot markers.

The stacking pegs were her favorite toy all week. She stacked them over and over again. She even sorted them by color and stacked them on her own. She'd get so frustrated because she couldn't stack all of them at one time without it falling over. She climbed up on the table herself, of course.

Sorting by object.

Sooooo proud of herself! I was impressed with her ability to sort them by balls, then crayons, then animals, and then fruit.

Sorting by color.

She loved doing this activity as well.

She could sort them by "little r" and "big R," but she got so frustrated because the cards moved around when she would stack them. So soon after this picture she threw the whole activity on the ground. She avoided this activity the rest of the week. Oh my.

This is my favorite picture of the week. After stamping the letter "R" and "r" she pressed the stamps into her cheeks. Hilarious. She obviously didn't want me taking her picture.

One of my best friends, Christina, who also happens to be a librarian came to hang out. She of course read books with Littlemiss.

Littlemiss loves to read to us now.

Littlemiss's rainbow. I cut out the colored paper and gave her each color paper one at a time. I showed her the picture of the completed rainbow so she would know what a rainbow looks like.

Rainbow rice!!! I got the recipe to make the blog Share & Remember.

The red turned out pink, so this is POGYBIV.




She loved just pushing and pulling the rice.

It sure does make a big mess. It's totally worth the 15 minutes of quite though.

Rainbow shaving cream. I can't remember the blog I saw this on. I didn't have enough food coloring to make it all the colors of the rainbow, but it was just as fun. I did this while Littlemiss was in the bath.

I had to encourage her to touch it for the first time, beause she wasn't quite sure about it at first. No worries she warmed up fast.