Tot School

Lucas is 33 months. Gwendolyn is 11 months.

(We had a pretty slow Tot School week. There was lots going on, so we didn't have much time for sitting down and learning - it was mostly Life School. We went berry picking one day, had a surprise visit from family another day, and went on a day trip/had a doctor's appointment the next day. It was a great, fun-filled week!)

::Games we play
jar bowling - Lucas stands the jars up in a line and throws a ball at them. With a lot of enthusiasm :)

cap jump- We line up the caps from Gwendolyn's bottles in random patterns and jump over them. Kind of like hopscotch with caps :)

ball in a jar - need I say more??


::New toys
a felt board with some random felt pieces for it. So far, Lucas will take the pieces off, put them in a neat stack, then ask me to put them all back on. Gwendolyn pulled pieces off and chewed on them. They both seem to like it.

:: Fine motor skills
Gwendolyn is taking blocks off of her stacking train. And taking the train apart. She keeps trying to put the blocks back on, but can't quite get them on yet. But it's still good practice :)

Lucas is still loving his nuts and bolts set. He plays with it just about every day. We got him a toy screw driver to use with the bolts. He LOVES it!! He is really starting to get the concept of turning to the left to take things off and to the right to put them back on. He rarely turns things in the wrong direction any more. He's still working on holding the nut while he turns the bolt, though.


:: Fun with pasta
Lucas is filling up a recycled sugar container with penne pasta. (He's sitting in his highchair rather than on the living room floor so that Gwendolyn can't reach and lick every piece of pasta)
I set up an activity for both kids on the living room floor with just a few pieces of pasta. Gwendolyn took an interest as soon as I set it up :) I barely got a picture before she crawled over to investigate. Mostly, both kids liked eating the uncooked pasta. But there was a little bit of putting the pasta into the straw holes of the cups from Lucas. And Gwendolyn liked dumping her open top cup on the floor and refilling it one piece at a time. After she licked each piece.


:: Life skills
Lucas has been practicing buckling and unbuckling his new car belt. And trying to put it on himself. He's getting so good at it! Gwendolyn is a pro at unbuckling the belt and taking it off of Lucas whenever he's not looking :) Right after I took this picture, she snuck up on him and tried to play with the belt.


::Random play
we have an entire bucket full of bracelets that Lucas has made. Both kids love dumping it out and looking at the bracelets and wearing them. This activity helps us work on color recognition (what color is this bead?) and counting (how many bracelets do we have?) and practical life skills (let's put all of the bracelets back in the bucket because we're done playing).


::ABCs
Lucas colored Hh with a horse and house. And Ii with an igloo. We cut out the letters once they were finished and glued them to a piece of paper. And hung them up to look at. We talked about these letters all week and pointed them out whenever we saw them.
we also played the Starfall game on the computer often. It has become a frequent request of Lucas's. Gwendolyn even sat in for a few letters earlier today.

::Spanish
we checked another Spanish book out from the library(I can't remember what it is right now..) and read it many times. And worked on our Spanish word for the week (book/el libro).