My Little Artist

The weather is dreary today, the baby is sick and fussy and our 3 year old is bored out of her mind. I decided she needed a project. I pulled a canvas out of my art supply closet along with some paint and brushes. I dug through my husbands tool chest for some tape and I made a big letter A on the canvas with the tape. I then set my daughter up with some paint on the back porch. She had a blast painting the canvas and mixing all the colors. When the paint is all dry we will remove the blue tape to reveal the letter A for her name Addison. It was a fun project and killed about an hour of our time today. Now I don't feel like such a failure of a mom today because in my little girls mind she just got to create a masterpiece!

Back to School

After a long Holiday break we have started back to Tot School today. I decided we needed to get back into the swing of things before baby brother arrives. That's right in one month from tomorrow I will be delivering our baby boy via c-section. I'm very excited and ready for him to be here already. My wonderful mother will be arriving February 1st to help me with our little Addison and the new baby for a few weeks. This past weekend I printed out all of Addison's school schedules and worksheets for the next 8 weeks. I figured I better get organized before the baby arrives. She had a blast today getting back into a routine. We focused on the letter C today. She colored a C for Cat worksheet, made a cat out of her hand print with construction paper and glue and decorated a cutout C with sticker gems. That was her her favorite project of the day. She spent about 30 minutes sticking all the gems onto the letter C. We hung all of her projects of the refrigerator for daddy to see when he gets home. We also watched some Animal Planet Cat 101 videos on the Ipad.

Tot School Week 2

Here was our lesson plan for week 2. I decided it would be easier for me to just post about the whole week instead of individual days. Less work for me I should say.

Our focus this week was the letter B, the sound of B, Big B little b, B is for Bear, the color blue, the shape square and the number 2. We took Addison to the local sporting goods store to see the big stuffed Kodiak Bear she loves so much. We watched videos on all different bears. Our Bear craft this week was coloring and gluing a bear face to create a large magnet for the refrigerator. She really enjoys hanging her projects on the refrigerator so she can show daddy when he comes home from work. She loved the videos of polar bears climbing out of their dens with their cubs. I also incorporated a fun craft with glue and cereal into our week even though it wasn't on the lesson plan. I drew a big B and a little b on a piece of paper and she glued cereal around the letter. She loves when I put the glue dots and she attaches the cereal. We also learned about bananas this week. I didn't end up baking with bananas though because this pregnant momma had a craving for chocolate. We made some cracker candy instead. I know it had nothing to do with our lesson plan this week but we had fun making and eating it. Here are a few pictures from our week...

Tot School - Week 1, Day 2

Today A is for Apples so we learned all about apples and since our shape of the week is circles we also focused on circles. Today is our second day of Tot School. Since we are only doing 4 days a week we took yesterday off to play with friends. We had a very busy day yesterday. This morning we went swimming at the indoor pool on the Coast Guard base so we did our Tot School in the afternoon.

Since our focus today was apples, circles, the color red and the letter A we did some apple and circle painting with the color red, looked at pictures of apples on the Internet and had a lesson on how apples grow. We also worked on the sound A makes. If anyone is interested in teaching their tots phonics I highly recommend purchasing the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD. It's amazing! They have a song to teach the kids the sounds each letter makes. My daughter has been watching it for a while now so she already knows most of the sounds and she is only 2 1/5.

Here are some pictures of our lessons today...