Welcome To Tot School!

Miss E ~ Age 24-26 months

While I'll generally be writing weekly about just the random happenings of this here stay at home mom, I do have a more specific goal: to complete Tot School activities each week. When Mr. Kuda and I decided for sure that I was going to stay home with the kiddos, I knew that I would have to have something planned each week. I'm too type A and in need of a routine/schedule not to. But the question was what the heck am I going to do with her?

Chalk drawing on Halloween

Enter Tot School. Carisa is an awesome mom who home schools her kiddos, and has an amazing arsenal of materials for toddlers through grade school and beyond (in which many materials are FREE! ohmygoodness. amazing.). Her materials, along with her gusto, gave me the courage to move forward and actually create something special for little Miss E.  But because I haven't been blogging AT ALL since I had Mr. C, you get to play catch up with me :)  I've decided to follow her format of doing a letter of the week. Miss E thinks this is hilarious, and now that we're on the letter 'E,' (her favorite letter, of course), she's really starting to get into it, and even requesting more Tot School activities.  Here's a little montage of what we've done over the past two-plus months. Hopefully I'll be able to get more specific as to what we've been doing each week as I post more often...

Miss E's Binder to hold all of her goodies,
and her "tracer," which she's obsessed with.

 I'm trying to keep things interesting by giving her a few different options each day. Sometimes she interested, and sometimes she's not. I'm really trying to let her direct us where we go.

This play dough was given to us by a friend, homemade and smelled of yummy fall spices. Miss E was hooked! We used refrigerator letter magnets to make letters in the dough, which helps reinforce the letter of the week even more. She LOVED this.

Miss E loves to trace. This was her first time, and you can really see her progress over time! I love watching her try new things and succeeding. So cool.

Here are some of the activities we did for the letter A. Miss E was really interested in it at first, but her personality is a bit strong. When she likes something, she LOVES it. When a new activity is difficult, she'll often leave it until she knows she can master it. This usually means I leave things out on her desk (accidentally on purpose), and she'll explore it herself.

Shadow matching

Simple Sequences

And now we're at E! I think doing dot art is Miss E's favorite activity. She's really starting to recognize certain letters. I'll definitely need to review each one... I haven't decided how I'll do that yet, but I need to do it soon. Maybe we'll just go over her Tot School notebook each week? Let me know if you have any ideas. She loves showing off her "work," and says, "Mommy, I did that!!" after we put them up on the refrigerator.

Too cool for school...

On this particular day, Miss E couldn't do enough Tot School printouts for the letter E. I think we worked for over an hour, and it only stopped because Mr. C woke up from his nap.  And yes, it was necessary to wear sunglasses to Tot School this morning. Don't you know that helps?

This is just the beginning! So excited you've joined me for the ride!

Until next time,

Mrs. Kuda