Tot School: Letter D

~Caden is 24.5 months~

We had a good tot school week with the dinosaurs. I knew the dinosaurs would be a hit, since Caden is fond of the dinosaurs.

Theme

This tot school post is brought to you by the letter D for dinosaurs, the number 4, the color yellow and the star.

Progress Report

Caden’s vocabulary is really starting to take off now. Some new words I heard his say this week include: “kiss”, “lay” as in lay down, and “couch”. Caden is also starting to realize objects can be described by color. When I ask him what color something is he says “green”. Then I correct him and sometimes he repeats the color I said. Caden has also asked me what color an object is. Caden can also identify the star shape some of the time.

Printables

This week I changed things up a bit and used printables from Confessions of a Homeschooler’s PreK curriculum. I also used a scissor practice page from 3 Dinosaurs’ Dinosaur pack and the number 4 dot marker page also from 3 Dinosaurs. In the pocket chart I included several dinosaur play dough mats from twinkl, dinosaur 2-part vocabulary cards and dinosaur parts card from the Dinosaur Pre-K pack from Over the Big Moon.

Caden likes to “color” as he calls it. One day he scribbled and drew circular lines on the pre-writing pages that I laminated for him. Another day he colored on the dinosaur coloring page for a few minutes with a colored pencil. He was really more interested in coloring on my lesson plans that I was working on.

I found these scissors that I had wanted from Amazon at a local shop so I picked them up last week. When I first showed Caden he quickly got flustered when he couldn’t figure it out. This week he allowed me to show him how to use them and he was actually able to use them to cut up a strip of paper! Now he didn’t pay attention to the “cut here” lines, but he was able to work the scissors to cut the paper! He was very into it and spent a good amount of time practicing.

Caden liked to use stickers on his dot marker page this week instead of the dot markers. He placed several stickers on the page, but I had to help him peel the stickers off the sticker sheet. I tried to direct his placement of the stickers onto the circles but he wasn’t interested in covering the circles.

Tot Trays

I set up several tot trays this week, but again Caden paid little attention to them. I think it may be because many of them are 2D and flat, not really attention grabbing. I am working on a solution for this. But I will share with you the trays I made using the printables from Confessions of a Homeschooler anyway.

I really thought Caden would be interested in the size sorting dinosaurs since he is always saying how “big” something is, i.e. “big truck”. And he briefly looked at the colorful dino puzzles, but his only lesson there was if you scatter them all over the floor, mommy will make you pick them up. And the lacing card, well, I guess he’s just not ready for it. I will try again in a month or two.

Caden did play with the ‘D is for Dump Truck’ tot tray for a bit. I printed out the letter ‘D’ road from Making Learning Fun.

I also printed off this cute Leaf Eating Triceratops from Making Learning Fun. This is a counting game, you can feed the leaves to the triceratops and count them as you go like we did or you can print off some number cards for more of a challenge. To make this game, I printed the triceratops and leaves into cardstock. I colored the triceratops to make him more attractive. (Tip: the triceratops prints off in the grayscale. I did a quick print so he wouldn’t be so dark.) Then I laminated both pages and cut them out. I used clear packing tape to attach the triceratops to a cookie box wrapped in construction paper and then carefully cut out his mouth using an exacto-knife.

Caden enjoyed feeding the dinosaur as I counted the leaves.

This week I added a magnet board activity. I taped a laminated dot marker page from the Confessions of a Homeschooler pack to the magnet board and gave Caden some pompom magnets to place on the circles. In the past Caden was not interested in this type of activity, but this week he was entertained by it for a few minutes.

Sensory Bin

I didn’t take any good photos of the sensory bin this week, but it’s mostly the same, just with ‘D’s and objects that begin with the letter ‘D’, such as dinosaurs, ducks and dogs. I had a hard time thinking of other ‘D’ objects.

I picked up this stuffed duck before I switched to ‘D is for Dinosaur’, I was planning on doing “D is for Ducks”. But Caden likes this duck so much (see photo of Caden kissing the duck) that I decided to include it in the sensory bin.

I also included some dragonflies from our insect toob. He was very interested in the dragonfly. He kept calling them ‘ant’, he calls all bugs ‘ant’ or ‘pider’ (spider).

Creativity

Caden got pretty creative with play dough this week. He helped Daddy make a play dough dinosaur and he did this…

Who says markers and play dough doesn’t go together? This is also how he got the blue mark on his face you may have noticed in the above pictures. 🙂

Extra Fun

 Other fun things we did this week include…

Taking the fine motor Christmas tree out of Mommy’s supply closet…

Watching the snow fall…

Reading a new Cars book…

Watching LeapFrog Letter Factory…

And stealing Mommy’s camera.

We also participated in week three of the Gross Motor Challenge. See post here.

For more Tot School ideas please visit:

© 2013 – 2017, Stir The Wonder. All rights reserved.