DIY Pocket Calendar

After hearing that Target sells pocket charts in their Dollar Spot, I waited all year (okay, a few months) until September to buy some. What a steal! After realizing how frequently my daughter was snacking throughout the day, I pulled out one of the pocket charts to create a flexible daily schedule. We drew pictures to represent the words, and my daughter loves it. We've been using it for a few months, and it works great!

 I had been intending to turn one into a calendar for next year, but Sora is currently obsessed with the days of the week. Every night at our evening pre-bed snuggle, she says, "Let's talk about tomorrow." Which is quickly followed by, "Let's talk about Tuesday (or Wednesday or Friday)."

To help her comprehend this better, I dug out my extra pocket chart, drew lines to divide it equally into seven sections (just under 2" wide), and sewed all but one pocket.

 It worked perfectly, and is a great addition to Sora's "cabinet of learning".

Tot School: W is for Winter

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(Sora is 34 months old)

We have had to restructure tot school lately with the addition of the 16 mo. old that we now watch 3 full days per week. This means that we've gone back to the basics a bit, but Sora doesn't seem to mind. While she still has her trays and sensory bin, they are mostly away while he is awake in favor of younger trays and a more simple sensory bin. Their favorite bin at the moment is just a tub full of dried oatmeal. They've also really enjoyed a bin full of pom poms as well.

With less attention on structured activities, Sora has done less "paperwork" and more activities, which I think we both are enjoying.

 She's really taken to her "big kid knitting" project, inspired by this idea.

I've incorporated some of her tot school into our advent chain. Here she is making an ornament. I can't remember where this is from, but it's such a simple idea that worked so well for her age!

 She also pulled the "play with snow indoors" chain, which meant she and the younger toddler got to play with a tray full of shaving cream. They both loved it. Later that same day, she got to paint with shaving cream mixed with elmer's glue. I painted a snowman, while her painting was more free form.

 Here we are building a snowman and then playing roll for a snowman.

 Sora loves to cut! I found some scissors made by Melissa and Doug that are the safest safety scissors I've seen. Which is a good thing because she's already tried to cut her hair with them. They don't work well on actual paper though, unless they're at just the right angle.

 Sora loves all gluing projects. We made a card for her uncle who turns 40 soon.

 In preparation for winter, Sora and I (mostly I) have been stringing cheerios to make a garland to hang outside. We eat some, we string some. This is a project Sora loves "watching".

 And this is actually from last year, but I was impressed when we pulled out our ornaments from the basement and Sora said immediately "I made that star." Okay, it was a pretty lucky guess, but it looks like a great project to try with the kids again soon!

Tot School: L is for Leaf

Not many pictures this week, but Sora had a great time doing a lot of projects!

 From left: Leaf "finger" painting, leaf rubbings, kit from Michaels, Cork painting, L is for Leaf, Masking Tape L, kit from Michaels, Lego painting, Leaves glued on L

For felt fun, we had a tree with removable leaves and did a lot of fun rhymes and songs with the leaves.

I taped an L to the floor and we did L things - long jumped, lay on it, licked it, touched it with our legs and lips.

Sora's trays were a big hit this week! She loved having access to play dough whenever she wanted. I put 1 color of play dough at a time, in an easy to open and close container, complete with roller, play dough scissors, and 3 fall cookie cutters.

She also had a ribbon weaving tray, Halloween stickers, and a small pumpkin with a washable window marker to draw faces on.

Resources:
L is for Leaf from 1+1+1=1
Busy Bees Fall from Totline
Fall from 2 Teaching Mommies (Sora loved the leaves song that we sung to the tune of Clementine)

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Tot School: Y is for Yarn

One of my first crafting loves was knitting. In fact, I've been so obsessed with knitting this week that I haven't had any finished products to blog about.

I've also been struggling a little with the intended outcome of our tot school. I'm sure I'm over thinking things, but I really don't think I need to be forcing Sora to learn her alphabet or numbers at 2. I do want her to have fun and a little structure in addition to her usual free play, especially since a formal preschool is not really in her future. I know she loves doing our "projects", so for now I'm backing off a little on the letter focus, although still playing the games and doing the projects we have been doing. I'm also going to try to incorporate more imagination into our tot school.

What better way to start then pretending to sheer a sheep, wash its wool, then spin it on my spinning wheel. This toy is mine, so Sora never gets to play with it and was very excited to have a turn. I think she was frustrated that she was just pretending while when I did it, it actually worked.

 Sora also made corn prints and made her own deviled eggs. She loves eggs and did almost every step herself: putting the eggs gently into the pot, covering with water, turning the burner on, and peeling an egg. I peeled most of them, otherwise there wouldn't have been any intact to make into deviled eggs! She picked out the mustard with a taste test (she preferred plain over brown) and helped mix the yolks and put the deviled into the eggs. She also loved eating the eggs.

 Afterward, she did all of her dishes. She loved this part too and now wants to help every time I wash dishes.

 She made a stand up sheep by gluing cotton balls to a folded sheep cut out.

 And rolled dice to glue pieces onto her farm scene.

We also made a game with the dice from one of the farm printables. She wasn't too interested in the game this week, but I think she will like it more as time goes on.



Of course, every time I knit this week, Sora did too.

 She gave her mermaid a bath,

 which quickly turned into her doing her own dishes,

 and pretty soon, everything washable in her entire kitchen was involved. As was a lot of pouring water from container to container.

 It was a perfect segue into her helping mop the floors. Sora worked on a lot of practical life skills this week.

For trays this week, Sora had (from top left): memory game (farm related pictures), buttons to string by color onto pipe cleaners, sorting pictures and letters (with 4 different letters that we have recently done), farm magnet book from last week, and farm magnets on a magnet board.

We ended the week with a long power outage, so we went to town more than we had planned to stay occupied (and warm).

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Tot School: G is for Goat

We kicked off Farm month with a bang! We actually had so much fun that I couldn't wait to do a bi-weekly post. 

Sora loved her new tot trays. She had (from the top left): farm animal lacing, Boggle Jr (only farm related cards), Farm Magnet book (a present from our big road trip), parmesan cheese container with egg skewers, and farm pieces for her felt board.

Here's a closer look at the farm sensory bin. It includes the fence from the zoo, wooden farm animals and kids, 2 small containers, chopsticks, 2 trees, and a lot of bird feed (which is mostly peanuts and corn).

We only did official tot school three times, but we did a ton of activities. We did sponge painting with farm shapes.

 Made green paint in a bag by mixing blue and yellow paint, then painted a big G green.

 We got some puzzles from the library. Here is Sora enjoying her farm floor puzzle.

 Coloring goats.

 Mid-week we added a pond (piece of blue felt) and a barn (small milk carton covered with red construction paper with a door and a window cut out) to our sensory bin.

 Sora loved telling various stories with the felt pieces from the library.

 Counting farm items.

 Singing a song with the puppets I made.

 Counting farm animals in the fence. I made up a story which involved adding and subtracting animals from the fence and Sora helped me count how many animals were in the fence at any given time. 

 We also made brown paint and painted "mud" on a pink pig.

One of my favorite non-pictured activities is when we went outside and picked grass to glue on a picture of a cow. I used adhesive spray on the paper and she just went to town with the grass. We did this right after talking about what cows ate, and she was really into it.

Sora doesn't watch TV (except football with her daddy), but I did find some great videos on YouTube that were short, farm related, and totally captivating. There is a series from Go Babies called Alphabet Road F is for Farm. Sora was a big fan. She also loved watching the Sesame Street podcast on the letter G (which she occasionally gets to watch in the car). Both the Sesame Street podcast and the Alphabet Road movies are 3-8 minutes long with no advertising, which is perfect for us.

Resources used:

G is for Goat from 1+1+1=1

Totline ABC Farm book (from the library - I love these books!)

On the Farm from 2 Teaching Mommies

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Tot School: M is for Monkey, Z is for Zebra

After being slightly disappointed in our local zoo, we headed to a larger zoo further away for another tot school field trip. Sora actually fed the animals, which totally surprised me.

 Somehow I neglected to take any pictures of our "M is for Monkey" week! The highlights included a lot of 5 little monkey variations, with the felt board version being the most popular. We got a Monkey Felt kit from the library which also had a cute felt story about a monkey who drew a picture for his mom and then all the other animals told him to change it and it ends up looking silly. Sora was a big fan. We did thumbprint monkeys in trees and Sora loved doing it all by herself. Even the 13 mo. old that we watch one day a week joined in on the fun.

For Z is for Zebra week, Sora decided everything with stripes was zebra.

Here she is using some pompom magnets to do counting on our magnet board.

 This is part of our general zoo themed activity kit that we did all month. Sora was surprisingly good at deciding who ate what.

 Sora is finally starting to get better fine motor skills and really enjoyed using the mini-clothes pins on these cards.

 Using the magnet page with buttons.

Matching heads and tails. This was cute, but there were only 3 animals, so it wasn't very challenging.

 Coloring in her zoo tot book.

 Matching zebra colors in the pocket chart.

 Gluing stripes on a Z. One of her favorite activities all week.

So there's our past two weeks in a nutshell. The trays were a little lackluster and she was totally over the sensory bin. We're switching to a farm theme tomorrow and I think we're both ready for a change!

Resources:
M is for Monkey and Z is for Zebra from COAH
Zoo Tot Activities from 2 Teaching Mommies

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