A New Oppurtunity

Sometimes life just doesn't seem to go the way you think it should.  Right now, even though I am happy with my life, there are things that are not the way that I thought they would be.  Those times can give us opportunities which we would never have thought.  That is where I am today...exploring a new opportunity!

So, what is this new opportunity, you may ask?  Well, I'm glad you asked!  I recently became a Stroller Strides instructor!  I talked here about Stroller Strides and how Little Guy and I go twice a week.  Our franchise was looking for some new instructors and so here I am!

I recently traveled to receive my training (yup, that why H is for Heart and V is for Valentine merged in Tot School...I was out of town, and then recovering from being out of town!).  I did some co-teaching, and this week I taught by first class, all by myself! 

This is exciting (and a little scary)!  Leading fitness classes is something my career as an elementary teacher did not prepare me for, but I can use the fun songs and understanding of kids while I lead! 

What unexpected opportunities have you embraced?

Tot School- O is for Olympics

Did you enjoy the Winter Olympics?  I enjoyed many of the events, and especially enjoyed the activities it led us to in Tot School last week!  Little Guy is 32 months old.

The first activity was painting the Olympic rings, inspired by The Gingerbread House.  As you may recall, Little Guy does not usually like to paint so we don't paint very often.  This week he seemed eager to get started on painting each morning.

This idea for using beads to make the Olympic rings cam from Trillium Montessori. This activity was not only worked on his fine motor skills, but it also worked on his perseverance, as there were a lot of beads to string.

We have not had the dot marker out much during the last few weeks, so Little Guy really liked using it to complete his O page from the Olympics pack at 3 Dinosaurs.  When he first started, he was really careful with the placement of his circles, but that didn't last!

With the coloring pages, I got out markers in the five colors of the Olympic rings.  Little Guy chose the Olympic rings paper first, and tried to carefully draw the rings.  Not too bad!

 To practice counting this week, we did the Roll and Count from the Olympics pack at 3 Dinosaurs. It was fun to talk first about what each picture was before playing the game (I really liked the picture of the bobsledders!).

The last activity was placing pom-poms on a picture of the Olympic rings from Making Learning Fun.  There were two sizes of pom-poms, small and smaller.  It took Little Guy a little while to get started (he was more interested in squeezing a handful of the pom-poms), but was able to place the pom-poms into the circles.  This was a great acticity to practice one-to-one correspondence.

This is our last "winter" themed Tot School for a while.  Come back and see us next week!

We linked up to the Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1 (we were featured last week!).

Tot School- V is for Valentine

Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!  I hope your day was full of love and hearts and joyful activities with your little ones!

Of course, for the week of Valentine's Day, we had a V is for Valentine's theme.  The week got away from me (more on why later), so we did not do a full week of tot school and reused many of the activities from our H is for Heart week.  Little Guy is 31 months old.

 One new activity was using a heart shaped punch.  Little Guy loved punching out the hearts.  It took him a few tries to figure out how hard to push down the handle, but once he got the hang of it, he punched and punched and punched!

We added a V sheet from Over the Big Moon. I made available the V stamp, heart stamp, red dot marker, stickers, and markers for him to use.  Little Guy used the heart stamp and the dot marker to fill in the circles.

The last activity was a modification of an activity from last week.  It was a sort of H and V, where Little Guy had to differentiate the 2.  It was a simple activity, that went along a little more quickly when I sang "1 Little, 2 Little, 3 Little Valentines" (sung to the tune of 1 Little, 2 Little, 3 Little Indians).

What did you do to celebrate Valentine's Day?

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

Fun with a tunnel and balls!

It is rainy here today.  Since we are limited on our outdoor fun, I needed to get creative to use up some of Little Guy's energy.

We had a play tunnel, like this one.  We put some balls in the tunnel with Little Guy on one end and me on the other end.  Then we SHOOK!

Shake!!!!!

Do you see Elmo peeking in?

Having so much fun!

What do you do for indoor fun?