Tot School - December 20-23

Somehow Monday slipped by us without doing anything with Tot School!
Tot Trays:

Sorting Red and green bows.

This was to focus on opening and closing the jar. She has been carrying the package of small beads around for a while noew, so I thought it would be enough to motivate her. We are working on becoming more independent. While we were in between houses (ended up being for 2 months!!!!) we stayed with my parents. She learned quickly that if she whined she could get whatever she wanted from someone there. Since moving into our house (we have been here a couple of weeks now), the whining/grunting has decreases significantly! I didn't know how much more I could take of the whining!

* shaking boxes (no pic)

* snowman matching (no pic, but got from here)

So far this week we have done two art projects. If I think of it I will try to post pictures of the others that we will do this week.

We cut our own Christmas tree this year, and I saved some branches so that we could paint with them. She only mildly liked this, so I ended up giving her paintbrushes to use as well.

Hard at work decorating her gingerbread men. I was really surprised by how much she enjoyed this. We probably worked on this for a half hour or so. I got the foam pieces from the Target dollar section a while ago, and I put out puffy paint (ended up putting on a plate with brushes), glue, buttons and google eyes. She watched me as I showed her squeeze the glue and put my buttons in, and I helped her to squeeze her glue. She knew to put her buttons or eyes into the glue blobs. We will have to work on squeezing so that we can do more gluing activities.

They turned out so cute! I made one too, but I can't remember which one ;)
Art projects we have planned for the rest of this week:
*Paper plate wreath
*Applesauce/cinnamon ornament
*footprint tree
*handprint ornament (we did one for her last year too)

We made Christmas cookies too. I don't have any internet worthy pictures for that, sorry (I don't really want Bug's face all over the WWW).

Tot School December 12-16th

Soon I will add how I do my planning, and what kinds of things I plan for each week. I am still in the beginning stages of Tot-School and we have just moved, so I am sorry if these posts seem simple, or my house looks sloppy. It will get better, the playroom (office/playroom/storage/guest room) is just not on the top of the priority list just yet.

I tried to do as much of a Christmas theme as possible. I don't have the resources right yet to get too creative, but I was able to throw these things together.

One of the art projects we did this week was to decorate Christmas Trees. I forgot to take a final outcome picture, but they turned out so cute and I have them up on my cupboards for decoration.

This is the makeshift storage I have for the trays. When the cable guy came he was soooooo thoughtful to leave like 10 foot of cable wire (you can see it underneath the black shelves), so I have to deal with it for now, lol.

This week's tot trays:

Gems with cups and a spoon.

Sorting red and green pipe cleaners.

Lacing. I used the ends of some tulle I happened to have around for the "beads." Since this is brand new for her I wanted it to be fairly simple. It turned out to be really easy for her.

Lacing. She never actually let it go down on the string, it just sat on the pipe clearn like that resting on her hand.

She carried these gems back and forth. She did a lot of play using the cups, but didn't realy know what to do with the spoon.

We did some sensory play in soapy water. She just got a Kitchen Helper as an early Christmas present and has been loving it! It has turned out to be a great gross-motor activity as she spends a lot of time going up (Bup, as bug calls it), and down.

She got right to work mixing all of the colors, then spent another good amount of time collecting all of the paint brushes. She did get some paint on the paper, some on purpose, but mostly on accident, lol.

This is what she thought about this tray, lmao! She wanted nothing to do with it whatsoever. Ha ha, you win some, you lose some I guess. Stay tuned as I have pics from this weeks tot trays all ready to go!