Tot School!

Owen is 20 months old.

We've been doing Tot School steadily the past four weeks, using Carissa from the blog 1+1+1=1's awesome new Tot School Printables.  I didn't take many pictures of the past few weeks but I wanted to get back into blogging so I'm going to post anyway...

Ok, first things first.  Last week I had an organization fit and I decided to break up a lot of activities into pieces and put them into this awesome hand-me-down rainbw storage unit. 

So most of the drawers have activities in them, and they are in categories, such as numbers, shapes, alphabet, letter D, colors, etc.  Then I have a few other toys that I keep in mind that I want to play with intentionally with Owen during the week.  So to give an idea, in the numbers bin I have a number puzzle, some number printables, number books, and if I had number toys they would be in there too.

Owen loves this more than I expected and he keeps running back to the cart and rifling through it trying to find something to do.  What is surprising is that what he likes most are the printables that I have put in sheet protectors.  He uses a washable dry erase marker to color them.  Either he or I will point to the different elements on the page and say what they are and then he will color them.  This is a picture from today, not last week, just to give you an idea of what I am talking about.  (He likes Carissa's vocab pages the best!)

We tend to spend 30-60 minutes on Tot School, right after Daddy leaves for work.  It depends on Owen's attention span, sometimes he is crazy into it and sometimes he is just all over the place.  Some of Carissa's items are still a bit advanced for him so we try them every once in a while and then go back to the stuff he is comfortable with.

We have a little Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree that Owen puts a letter on each week

and I also check out Jane Moncure's Sound Box books every week so we read about the particular letter we are looking at.  I highly recommend these books, they are awesome and he loves them.

We do lots of coloring, which I love because Owen is adorable and announces what color he is using or wants to use.  Mostly brown and pink.  "Color Brown!"  "Color Pink"

The other big thing we did this week was our "sensory table."  A couple weeks ago we bought this sand/water table from Aldi but its been too cold to put it outside.  We played with it as a train table for a few days then I put cheerios and froot loops in it and he has been having fun doing scooping and playing.

Owen has also started to get more into pretend play this past week, driving cars all over the house and playing with his Little People sets instead of just saying what the animals are.  (I want a play kitchen!!)

Oh the other big hit is Starfall.com .  Owen is constantly asking for it but I only do it once a day. I let him choose what letters he wants to look at and then we click through them.  We also sing the song for the Leapfrog Letter Factory song (we don't have that video but we checked it out from the library once) and I often hear Owen singing "The B says Buh" etc. But I highly recommend Starfall.com! Its awesome.

I kind of feel like this whole post sounds like its very "teachy" over here, but the truth is that Owen pretty much knows the alphabet and numbers, colors and shapes already, so we are just having a bit of fun with it in a way that adds more structure to our day.  When he gets bored or disinterested we stop. 

Oh, in other news, I am pregnant and we found out we are having a boy!  The other day Owen came up to me and started hugging my tummy and saying "Hi baby tummy" and touching it and waving.  awww, so cute ;)

Ok so now that we are kind of caught up, next week I will try to do a more detailed post of what we actually do ;)  Check out the 1+1+1=1 website for more Tot School Posts from mamas across the web