(tiny) tot school week one

12 months

This is a long post, the first part is an introduction, scroll down for what we did this week.

Introduction

I initially planned to use this blog as a diary to remember how my daughter grew from her first day onwards, but during our first year together we were too busy helping her adjust to the world so I have only just restarted blogging and this part of my blog will only be for our learning type adventures, mainly tot school related. I have decided to link up with tot school and show what we are doing as I found it very helpful to read posts by people with little ones around our daughter's age.  I hope these posts will be of help and I will list our successful ideas and not so successful ones.   My daughter is called Luath in this blog.

I am still unsure how exactly we will do (tiny) tot school and I am sure it will evolve as Luath develops over the next few months and onwards towards tot school. As Luath is our first child she gets lots of one to one time and a lot of what we do already is fun learning, but my aim is just to focus on some skills a little more. Possibly it is to give my brain a bit of a challenge! My current idea is to have a theme each week, how far that theme spreads will depend on what the theme is and what we own. Our set up is:

General toy box -  with a few toys. It has favourites and the rest changeable and may link to the general week's theme.

General books - a shelf where Luath can access her board books (she loves helping herself and bringing them to us to read, or to look through herself). On the shelf we keep her favourites, a few that use different skills (sliding, opening flaps) and some that rotate. If we have a lot of books on the week's theme I will put some here. Non-board books meantime are kept higher up!

Learning basket - this will have a few theme linked books and about 3 toys that I will deem "learning" and again will aim to fit into the week's theme. The basket will be available for Luath to select from whenever she wishes and will be things that she can look/play with independently but they will be the things that we will aim to interact in a more "learning" way when we play with her using them. .Personally I pretty much see everything as learning, from a simple everyday object, through a noisy, plastic, at first glances ghastly toy, to an expensive educational toy. I believe it is more how you use it with your child that counts. However in my mind, for this "learning" toy, it will be something that Luath can develop a particular skill i.e. stacking cups, puzzle, practical life skill

Activity File - this will be for us to bring out and use with Luath., it will contain things/ideas that will more need our input/help and will aim to all be based on the week's theme i.e. crafts, matching cards, practical skills

from The Hungry Caterpillar
by Eric Carle

This week

This week was  an apple theme, mainly as it fitted with a celebration (wassailing) I had read about and  I wanted to start as a family tradition. Wassailing traditionally is celebrated on the old twelfth night (17th Jan)  in some parts (more south England) people go wassailing, either around houses (like carol singing) or to orchards (mainly apple trees). I thought it would be fun to start doing an orchard type wassailing to our small fruit trees. The idea is that you awake the trees, thank them for their fruit last year, give them a small offering of last years produce (cider) and to scare off any evil spirits. We only have some miniature apple, pear and cherry plum trees, no where near enough to produce cider. Luath was having a bit of a rough day, so my plan to go out and bang our pots and pans and to sing the wassailing song was altered to us doing it in the kitchen. I hope the trees and spirits were listening!

Learning Basket
Books : We don't have any books directly about apples, so I put in "The Hungry Caterpillar", "Cool as Cucumber" (a picture book about food tastes/textures) and "Signabout Meal Time" (it has the sign for apple :) ). I printed an easy reader book on apples by lightning bug literacy.

apple from signabout meal time

 

 Toys:
Apple shopping bags

 A few different balls (practise golf balls, laundry balls and a tennis ball) as apples, a small net laundry bag and a shopping bag. 

 Idea was to practise putting the balls in and out of the small bag and then into the bigger bag, which we did quite a few times in a round about way.  Luath loves bags, so loved picking up either of the bags, and walking off with it, saying "bye" as she went.  (Yes it would have been fun to to this for real but we weren't in town this week.)

Apple hanging  - picture to follow card reader is playing up
Hanging (pretend)apples onto a (mug)tree
I used the practise golf balls, used some string to go between two of the holes in the ball, and then hide the knot inside the ball (would be far to interesting!)
I knew this would be a difficult fine control skill for Luath, but she did manage a few times to put the balls on and take them off.  She was keen for me to put the apples on and off the tree.  She enjoyed shaking the tree and listening to the noise of the ball against the metal.  Of course since the tree was metal it got a lot of mouthing.
We used it as a great prop for our apple tree songs.

Nesting/stacking cups I love these, one of my best charity shop finds
Luath can nest the cups well, in order if I hand them too her, otherwise she gets a bit confused when a bigger cup won't go into a smaller one, but over the course of the week she got less frustrated when this happened and would often work out that she needed to change her tactic. We are still at the I stack, she knocks down stage, she has tried but hasn't the control yet.  However by the end of the week she was able to stack one of the smallest on one of the bigger cups.They roll in a funny way which gave us a lot of fun, especially when they rolled under the sofa.   We (I!) did some colour matching with them.

Some animals
Luath has been having fun with animal noises so I put in a sheep, duck and lion, which she can do well, a horse and a cow, which she mixes up and a pig, which she sort of gets (grunt not oink).   She adored these and got lots of play from them.  I think she has now got her cow and horse noises.
A couple of small boxes ( one with a lid, one without)

The combination of the cups/boxes and animals worked well. Lots of putting animals in and out of things.  Carrying cup with an animal inside.  Shaking a cup with an animal inside.  Hiding animals under cups or inside a box and closing the lid.

Activity File
Apple songs/fingerplays/poems
Found in our own books and on alphabet-soup
I have posted the ones we used here

Apple matching cards
From 2teaching mommies. I printed them to use during our songs, but Luath was really interested in them, so we used them to do a bit of matching/colour play/chat.  She also initiated putting the apples into the envelope, which she managed with some help to keep the envelope open.  However she got a bit frustrated,  ripped the envelope, which was a smart thing to do, as it made putting the apples in was much easier.

Apple puzzle
This was a printer mistake, I was printing out an apple picture and it did it in two parts over two pages, so I cut it out and made a very simple puzzle. Not much interest in the puzzle, but scrunching the paper was a lot of fun.

Colouring in 

A colouring in page of some apples painted by Cezanne found at supercoloring.  Luath did a little scribbling, while I enjoyed the soothing job of finishing it. We only have orange, blue and yellow big crayons so it was a unique take on the original. Luath did less crayon mouthing which was a big bonus.

 

Music
We listened to the William Tell overture can hear it here, it is the finale part, Luath got some happy and bouncy when the "Lone Ranger" part started.  The site has some activity sheets linked to some of the music, more for older kids, this is the one on William Tell.

Others
And of course we ate some apples and had some yummy apple crumble.
She had some fun helping me with some housework this week, including putting two wellies into the washing machine.  Another picture to follow

Our first week of tiny tot school was lots of fun.  Find out what others were up to this week at 1+1+1=1