Activities

 Aaliya is 2 years and 3 months old

We started our week with Carissa’s Tot school Let­ter E print­a­bles but this week they weren’t as big of a hit as they nor­mally are. I think Aaliya wanted to do some­thing dif­fer­ent so I adapted to her inter­ests and didn’t push her to color or do the activ­i­ties she wasn’t inter­ested in. I am sure after giv­ing it a short break she will find new inter­est in the let­ter print­a­bles.I then took out my Bar­ney Tod­dler Pack and this was just what she needed this week. There is no bet­ter way to lure a child in then to use a favorite TV char­ac­ter. She really had a blast doing the activ­i­ties. I was amazed to hear her answers to the “Which is Dif­fer­ent?” activ­ity.
In the pic­ture on the above right I asked her what was dif­fer­ent. She pointed to pink baby bop.
Mama: What’s dif­fer­ent about that Baby Bop?
Aaliya: Mama the COLOR! (as if it was the eas­i­est ques­tion ever).

She did the full Bar­ney sequence. After she said she was done I asked her to check over her work. She then found her mis­take and cor­rected it.

She did some more Kumon Cut and paste pages as well as bal­anc­ing the mar­bles on this bath type mat.

I finally found some nice dot paints and the kids loved the new art mate­r­ial. They enjoyed dot paint­ing the elephants.

We did activ­i­ties from the Itty Bitty Book­worm Sep­tem­ber Bai­ley Cur­ricu­lum. This was also some­thing both my kids really enjoyed this week. We read the book “More, More, More Said the Baby” by Vera B. Williams every day this week. After read­ing the book we did one activity.

When I first down­loaded the cur­ricu­lum I took a quick look and was sort of over­whelmed with the amount of ideas in it. I had no idea how I would com­plete every­thing but once I sat down and really looked at it I decided to just fol­low the sug­gested daily activ­ity sched­ule. I was so sur­prised to find how easy the whole cur­ricu­lum is to actu­ally use. Every­thing is pretty much set out for you and there is not too much work on your part. Most of the extra activ­i­ties have the print­able pieces already set out for you. You do not have to do all the activ­i­ties but the sug­gested activ­i­ties were def­i­nitely things you will want to do. I am extremely pleased with this cur­ricu­lum and wish I had actu­ally started it with Aaliya a few months ago.

Here are two activ­i­ties they did from the Bai­ley Cur­ricu­lum this week:

Here Aaliya was sort­ing clip art into the baby or big kid sec­tion. Deen joined in here too.

She then col­ored her baby car­riage and added her pic­ture as the baby. She gig­gled so much when she saw “Baby Aaliya”.

I was going through past posts when Aaliya was sit­ting with me. She saw my lady­bug print­able and said “LADYBUG!! Mama get that one for me please.”

I have no idea why I hadn’t thought to do it before but I printed it out for her. Unfor­tu­nately I used the wrong size hole punch and made the black cir­cles a bit too small but she still did fine with the activ­ity and really enjoyed show­ing off her ladybug.

She used her Tot Trays. On the left she is trans­fer­ring beans. This was def­i­nitely her favorite tray from this week. She used this tray numer­ous times in the week.

She also prac­ticed her cut­ting with the Melissa and Doug birth­day cake.

Aaliya’s big brother Deen did this color wheel activ­ity but after he was done with his turn she came to me and said “Mama, my turn! My turn!” I hadn’t intended on giv­ing her a turn since this would be a bit hard for her to do. I let her trans­fer drops of color from the drop­per to the wheel and she did bet­ter than I thought she would. She enjoyed doing a big kid activ­ity. I enjoyed watch­ing her deter­mi­na­tion and concentration.

My Before Five in a Row pack­age finally arrived so I wasted no time. I imme­di­ately started print­ing and search­ing the web for ideas.
Aaliya and I “rowed” the Run­away Bunny this week and it def­i­nitely proved to be fun for Aaliya. Deen on the other hand really didn’t care for the book and did not want to lis­ten to the story more than once. Aaliya on the other hand lis­tened to the book one or two times a day and loved act­ing out the scenes. She kept run­ning away from me and say­ing, “Mama, I’m run­ning away like run­away bunny. Come catch me!“
I found the most amaz­ing idea from Michelle at Delight­ful Learn­ing. Her web­site is one of the best resources for ideas for Five in a Row. For every book that Michelle and her fam­ily rowed she would ask her child to nar­rate the story and draw a pic­ture. She would then type it all out, print it out, and put it with their Five In A Row set. After see­ing that I decided I HAVE to do this.

At the end of the week I asked Aaliya a few ques­tions about the story and had her tell me about the story. This will hon­estly be the best mem­ory keeper!

Nei­ther of my kids can draw yet so I attempted my first bunny. As you can see I did not take art in school. It was still a fun expe­ri­ence though.

To see what oth­ers did in Tot School this week click here.

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