Easter Tot School

(Alex is 4 years, Max is 2.5 years)

My neighbor – a mom of three little ones - recently asked how I balance tot school, a baby, babysitting, and keep up with the house.  The answer is easy…I don’t!  My house gets beyond messy.  If you peek at the background of these photos, you’ll often see a full garbage can, a messy counter, or a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.  You don’t see my overflowing basket of clean laundry, waiting to be folded.  You don’t see that, while I attempt to keep the main rooms of the house fairly clean 90% of the time, my bedroom is a disaster 100% of the time!  So, take heart – I am HUMAN!  I do not have my act together!  :)

We play and learn every morning, but most is casual…playdough, fingerpainting, reading stories, doing puzzles, playing Candyland or Memory Game during baby’s morning naptime.  The rest of their time is spent playing with Thomas trains, Hot Wheels, pretend playing doctor’s office or McDonald’s workers.  That’s how it should be.  They’re little.  Life is meant to be full of learning through play!

Wednesdays are usually the only day that we sit down all together and have a focused learning time.  I generally only take tot school pictures on Wednesdays, since that’s when we do the bulk of our “school work”. The kids are bouncing with excitement when I put the baby down for her morning nap and they get to come to the table.  They love Wednesday mornings! 

This is two weeks worth of pictures:

First, the Easter Blessings pack…

Sorting uppercase and lowercase Rs

shadow matching

prewriting

 

learning to write R, r

finding and stamping R and r

circling what’s different

 

Ordinal Numbers – circle the fourth cross, cross out the third lamb, etc.
Alex is getting pretty good at these!

coloring the lamb’s bow…

circling the smallest

  

 

Next, the Easter Fun pack…

…and a smiling baby girl pic that somehow slipped in here…
I could delete it, but I’ll leave it for you to admire her cute little grin…

Eager to see what we’ll learn today…

Ten Part Puzzle

Shadow Matching

a rather hilarious attempt at a three part puzzle…

Max is 2.5 year old, can count to 20, understands one-to-one correspondence while counting, but DEFINITELY doesn’t recognize written numbers to put them in order.
(Nor do I expect him to know.)
He thinks he knows, though, and he tried and tried to get it right!

Size sequencing

 

thinking, thinking…He *almost* got it right.

 

color sorting…
Max is in love with “chapstick” right now, as he calls glue sticks.
Any pages that he can do with “chapstick” make him giddy!

Alex…my goofball!

Easter Path page

 

Do A Dot
Max only uses green. 
He doesn’t know his colors by name yet, but he knows that green is his favorite.

 

Counting Mat

 

Find & Stamp the letter
Max really wants to get these right, and often he does.
He does NOT recognize letters by name yet, but if I show him an E,
he can find and stamp all the Es.

What’s different

 

Max just learned to make circles.  I love the swirly one on top.

Count and Match

playing the memory game with Mommy

Afterwards, we gave Max all the memory game cards and he made matches.

There ya have it…two weeks of Easter tot school…
only 3 more weeks of tot school pictures to catch up on posting! :)