Tot School Sept. 18

Tot School was mostly Field Trips this week! We had so much fun!

We went to the rodeo one night. Crumpet participated in the Boot Scramble competition. The kids throw one of their shoes into a big pile, and then they go to the starting line. They have to race back to the pile, which has been stirred up, and find their shoe. This is a terrible picture, but Crumpet and I are in that herd of people on the right, getting ready to run. We were among the last to find our shoe, since someone else had walked off with it mistakenly!
We went to an Instrument Petting Zoo at the Art Museum. This was really fun. The kids got to paint a big music-inspired mural:

Then, we watched a violin concert, and then we got to play a variety of instruments - string, wind, and brass instruments were scattered throughout the galleries. Crumpet's favorite instruments were the drums (these were outside the entrance because they were LOUD!). Here he is pounding on a really neat hand held drum.

We went to a Mud Puppies class at the local community center. This week, the kids made handprints:

And fingerpainted. Crumpet and his friend loved getting really messy! Crumpet asked to go to more, longer art classes, which is a major event. Until now, he really didn't enjoy group activities like this!

We went on our monthly Preschool Nature Walk. This month, the kids learned about plants and got to pick a few flowers for discussion:

We also went to our library story hour, but I didn't take any pictures. At home, Crumpet did a lot of gardening with Dad.

Twice a year, there is a phenomenal consignment sale in town, and I got a couple of good toys there. I found the Melissa and Doug wooden teaching clock that I've been wanting. He's too young to learn to tell time, but it has some good blocks for shape recognition, and tower building!

I found the Oreo Matchin' Middles game. He liked this, and again, they are good for building towers...

And we made a cactus out of playdoh and toothpicks:

Because we are going to Arizona on Monday! I'm so excited! This will be Crumpet's first trip on a plane in 2 1/2 years, and his first trip to the desert. We're going to have a blast!

Have a great week!

Tot School Sept. 12

Hi! We had a good week in Tot School, despite the fact that Crumpet started out the week refusing to participate in any activities I suggested.


We worked in Crumpet's Kumon tracing book. At first, he would only drive his cars through the mazes. But then he did some practice work with a pencil.
We practiced counting and adding the right number of beads to our numbered fish.

He helped me vacuum several times.

He learned a very important life skill - how to sharpen crayons! He thought this was fabulous, and of course, wanted to sharpen ALL of our crayons...

We did a lot of painting this week, at Crumpet's request. We found this giant pine cone at the playground, and he wanted to paint it.

And we did some splatter painting - outdoors!

I convinced him to do a little lacing, but he really doesn't enjoy this activity.

And we went a really great nature walk. We saw a huge variety of birds, turtles, a snake, and this guy:

And Crumpet sat on this guy:

Hope you all had a good week!

Tot School, Sept. 5

Vacation, and Tot School:

Last week, we went to visit friends who have 3 little girls. They kept Crumpet really busy, and this boy, who never sleeps, slept like a rock. I threatened to leave him there for sleep training! We had a really good visit. He "played jumprope":
And we went swimming at the awesome neighborhood pool, complete with slides and a lazy river:

And we went to a great children's museum, but I forgot my camera! Uggh. Totally unlike me...

Now we are home and back to "normal". My plan was to work on the letters M and N this week, because Crumpet still gets those confused. But, it seems, he's totally fed up with letters, so we did Nn and decided to give it a rest. I've been amazed at how many letters he has picked up by osmosis (ok, Noggin television..), rather than actually sitting down and working on it, so we'll see how that goes for a little while! I found the nest template at the DLTK website which I've been using for my letter templates. I finally looked at their other stuff, and it's great!

We did do a little game matching dogs with capital letters and bones with lower case letters. (I can't remember where I got this from - I know I googled "free filefolder games"...). Crumpet did really well with this.

We tried a sorting game that I copied from Nicole at Tired, Need Sleep. I put out a pile of cars and tried to get Crumpet to sort them by color, type (fire trucks, race cars, etc), size, etc. We used tongs like she did, to add some interest. I was surprised at how much trouble Crumpet had with this, and realized that we'll have to do some more practice with sorting exercises. He could sort by color, but other categories didn't really occur to him.

I bought a couple of games at the consignment store this week. The first was Tractor Bingo. This is Crumpet's first Bingo game, and he is great at it. I find the cards pretty chaotic, with tons of info and too many pictures so I can never find anything. However, because it's about tractors, Crumpet has the card memorized in seconds and knows right where each tractor is when I call the name!

I also bought Hi Ho Cherry-O, which is a counting game. He loves this, too.

We worked at sorting night animals from day animals. I found this worksheet at the DLTK website.

Crumpet painted a racecar bank.

And we made a giraffe out of playdoh for the One Million Giraffes project. I don't know what it is about this project, but I love it! I think it's the magic of the internet. Anything and everything is out there, you just have to stumble upon it! (Our giraffe was not green, but my photography skills are somewhat lacking, and the color came out wrong...)

And my favorites from this week:

Crumpet practicing on his new big boy bike:

The superhero cowboy:

Have a great week!