Tot School- S is for Snow!

Do you have snow?  We had some last week, which made for a great snow-themed week in Tot School!  Little Guy is 30 months old.

This is the first week of our letter themes in Tot School!  As you can tell, we will not be working on the letters in alphabetic order.  My plan is to make them work with themes that make sense. 

This week we tried again to start each day of Tot School by reading.  These were some of our favoirte books from the week!

Two of the activities this week practiced buttoning!  Little Guy had to button things onto a snowman and onto the letter S.  Read more about these activities here!

Another way we practiced the letter S was by stamping it.  We used the letter stamp that Little Guy received for Christmas and stamped it onto Dot Marker sheets from 3 Dinosaurs.  This was a fun activity for Little Guy to complete.  (I printed 4 different sheets, and Little Guy could complete one each day.)

Putting S's all over my snowman.

Another great activity from 3 Dinosaurs was Roll and Count.  This one had different types of winter clothing.  We completed this twice during the week, using a different color stamp pad to tell which was the new game.  Little Guy still struggles to complete this game.  He gets about half way through, then wants to be done.  This week, I took over stamping at that point in time, so he could just roll.  One thing I am emphasizing in Tot School is that he has to finish an activity before going to the next one.  I don't want him to start the habit of giving up in the middle of an activity.

I rolled the jacket.

 The next activity was spooning marshmallows into a mini-muffin tin.  This was similar to the jingle bell spooning that he did before Christmas.  He really enjoyed this activity, and when he had all the cups filled, would pretend to bake the marshmallows!  It was really cute!

Spooning out the marshmallows.

Would you like one?

 Next was some ABC practice.  Using an ABC chart from Royal Baloo and a pointer I made (I glued a foam snowflake onto a popsicle stick), we would sing the alphabet song and point to the letters as we sang them.  This helps with one-to-one correspondence, directionality on the page (moving from left to right and top to bottom), and letter recognition, all of which are important pre-reading skills.

C!

 Little Guy had free-play with his tall stackers this week.  He loved it!  I think he pulled them out everyday.  Several days he made towers as tall as he could, leaning the tower against the refrigerator when it could not longer stand on its own. 

Look at my tower!

 The next tray was completing the book "Dressed for Snow" by Becky at This Reading Mama.  Little Guy had to start by cutting out the items.  This was great practice for him, as I usually just have him cut straight lines.  Then he had to glue them onto the correct page in the book as I read it to him.

Cutting carefully on the dotted line.

What a great job cutting!

Gluing the scarf into the book.

 The last activity had two variations.  Little Guy could use his tweezers to put one sugar cube into each muffin cup or he could stack and build with the sugar cubes.  I saw this idea on H is for Homeschooling.  I did require him to use the tweezers each time he chose this activity.  He really liked using the sugar cubes.  When he stacked them, he made a variety of shapes, including some tall towers!

I can get it!

Carefully adding one more to my tower.

 What have you been up to in Tot School?

We linked up to the Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1!