January Tot School

I was planning on posting each week what we do/study in school, but it just hasn't happened.  So, here's some of what we did in the month of January.

Calendar time - the kids found the "2013" tile, the one that started with "J" and was blue and then put the numbers in order from 1 to 31.  After that we added a couple of special days - birthdays, holidays, etc.  They did a good job for the first month doing this and worked together which was nice!

Week 1 - Colors and Shapes

 One day's books to read - we do this not only during school time, but ALL the time.

 Ephraim showing off his soon-to-be new blue fish crayons.

 We sorted all of our miscellaneous crayons by color and then cut them up to melt into shapes.

A few of our heart-shaped crayons - blue and purple.

 Fitting the squares onto the present and gluing them.

 Painting craft sticks for our Rainbow fish project.

 I haven't convinced her to hold utensils properly yet.  Some days she does, but not usually.

 Painting a fish with the extra paint - can't waste it!

 Top is Ephraim's fish.  Bottom is Tabitha's fish.

After this we added adhesive gems for the shiny scales and felt lips and a googly eye.  So cute!

 Joie got in on the fun, but she's playing with her farm puzzle because I forgot the shape/color puzzle at church.

 Coloring the shape book.

Showing us the completed shape book.

 My Shape Book by E and T.  The kids each made their own initial.

Tabi laid out all her crayons so she could color her rainbow appropriately.  My kids will never forget the order of the rainbow (minus indigo) since there is a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode called Minnie's Rainbow and they sing the colors of the rainbow over and over.  The kids do too now.

Week 2 - Frog/Pond

 Using our dot paint for the first time.

 It took a little getting used to.

Here's what they ended up with!  Ephraim's on top and Tabi's on bottom.

 Playing some Uno - we don't hide our cards yet and there is a lot of helping involved.

 Coloring her dot-to-dot frog.

 Really proud of Ephraim!  He did the dot-to-dot all by himself and it counted 1 to 37!

Painting the frog we made.

 Their hands were the frog's feet.  These turned out adorable!

We had to take a week off due to illness, but it worked out just fine.  We just eliminated "football" as a whole week and tacked it on to the end of week 3 instead (to get ready for the Super Bowl).

Week 3 - Ii Cold Weather (Igloo)

 Some of Tabi's work for the week - coloring and dot paint.

 Some of Ephraim's work for the week - coloring, stamps, and dot paint.

 This week (since we were learning our first letter) we got out our letter construction kit.  You can see the capital and small "D" that Tabi made.

 It didn't take us long to build the "I", so the kids quickly moved on to some other letters - Ephraim's trying "G" here.

 Joie just liked to play with the construction pieces.

While I'm setting up (or when I work with the kids one-on-one) they love to play educational games on the iPad. (If you ask them, they are never allowed to play long enough because mean Mama takes it away.)  They do sometimes venture off into some non-educational games too, but we have such a variety that it can hold their attention pretty well.  They love to play a kindergarten math game, a number of matching games, a letter-identfication game, and a couple of alphabet games.

Our venture into football at the end of the week was not as intensive as I had planned, but we read lots and lots of books.  Ephraim fell in love with a book called "Dino Football" by Lisa Wheeler.  He can "read" most of it from memory now and it is not a short book.  He corrected me when we read it this afternoon a couple of times when I skipped a word or mixed something up.  Before we take it back to the library, I hope to record him "reading" it to himself.  We also got all the other books in the series (all prequels) - Dino Soccer, Dino Hockey, Dino Baseball, and Dino Basketball.  According to Dino Football (which came out in 2012) there should be a Dino Wrestling coming up next.  Ephraim can't wait.  I, on the other hand, will be okay when these need to go back to the library.

Hope you enjoyed our first month of Tot School!  We sure did!