Tot School: Week of October 26

Lauren is 36 weeks old. Her objectives for this week were:

fine motor control: squeezing an eyedropper, using playdough, stringing beads, lacing, spooning, painting

gross motor control: balancing while walking on a line, throwing a bean bag

recognizing and identifying letters (A,C,L,O,P)

counting up to six objects

identifying shapes

matching identical pictures

creative expression: painting, sculpting playdough

reciting songs and poems

Tot Trays
For Tot Trays this week I followed Karen at Monkeyin' Around's idea and set the activities at each of the chairs of our kitchen table. Lauren moved around the table doing the activities that she wanted to do. This worked out really well! One day my older daughter, Julia, joined us for Tot Trays so you will see a few pictures of her.


Painting with fall colors was a fun activity. An ice cube tray makes a nice paint tray. When Tot School was over I covered the tray with foil and put it away until the next day.


Orange playdough with rolling pins and pumpkin cookie cutters are always a hit.


I bought this puzzle at Target's dollar spot. She loved this tray and chose it everyday.


Stamping pumpkins with orange ink was only slightly interesting to Lauren. Later in the week I put the stamp on the playdough tray and Lauren made impressions in the playdough.


For this activity she used a spoon to transfer orange and green pom poms into a pumpkin ice tray.


The idea behind this tray is to push the chenille sticks through the holes in the salt shaker and then put the beads on the chenille sticks. I got this idea from My Montessori Journey.


Julia enjoyed pushing the sticks through the holes but did not want to add the beads.


On the other hand, Lauren loved stringing the beads onto the sticks but did not want to push the sticks into the shaker. Either way, each girl enjoyed this tray and had some practice using that all important pincer grasp.


This was a fun activity. Lauren chose a small pumpkin card and then used the magnetic facial features to recreate the pumpkin. I downloaded this from kidssoup.com. Kidssoup is a subscription site that I have used frequently this past year.


For this tray Lauren paired the matching pumpkins. Later in the week I added three more pumpkins so she could match six. The pumpkins are very similar so she needed to look closely to make sure they matched. This was another Kidssoup download.


Mommy Directed Activities
She really enjoyed playing Latches and Letters. Here is a post that explains what we did.


We sang this rebus shape song to the tune of Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. I printed this chart from the Mailbox Magazine online companion a couple of years ago when I subscribed to the magazine.

Lauren practiced counting to six during this activity. She rolled the die, counted the dots, and then placed the correct number of little gourds on the mat.

She laced a paper pumpkin. She has lots of experience with lacing cards but usually she laces haphazardly. This was the first time I showed her how to lace around the card.

For more Tot School fun visit 1+1+1=1.