MarriedtotheFarm

Our Tot School journey started with lots of lots of research. We kicked off with color themes when he was 12 months old. We had more fun with our St. Patrick’s Day theme than with any other to date. We took a break from colors to welcome Spring and celebrate Easter. We ended our color unit with Gray week. Then we had our most educational week where we learned all about Chicks. After that it was on to shapes! Color themes are pretty standard. I was inspired to do shape themes by Kaysha at Memorizing the Moments. After that, though, it seems like most tot schoolers move on to letter of the week themes. I am not interested in introducing the alphabet this year. We spend a lot of time reading with Kent so he does have a lot of exposure to letters. He understands the concept of print. For example, he will point to a road sign in a book and say “slow” because we’ve moved his finger along the letters while pronouncing the word and he remembers. We often started our color and shape weeks with me printing the theme name on his magnadoodle and sounding it out

I love seeing Kent use his imagination and I’m fascinated with all the small world play ideas on the web. I have been trying harder to facilitate his imaginative play. Recently one of our tot trays was a square made out of Lincoln logs. For rectangle week I added some longer logs and horses from his Safari Ltd. toob. We used the log rectangle as a paddock for the horses to jump in and out of. Now for the part about keeping it real… I wonder sometimes if people think we have a perfect, strict schooling routine. Let me assure you that “tot school” is very much a fly by the seat of our pants operation on most days. Here’s what happened when the phone rang during our play session… So you see, nothing perfect here! We have fun though! 😉

Since becoming aware that clipping was difficult for Kent I have been on the lookout for new ways to strengthen his little hand muscles. These little squirt bottles turned out to be a great way to do just that. I bought mine from the vet clinic but similar ones are available on Amazon. I let him pick the colors and filled each bottle with liquid watercolor diluted with water. Then I placed two coffee filters on an old towel in a cake pan. He caught on right away and went to work. It was great to see his little hand muscles flexing. I have never before seen him so engaged in an art project! He systematically emptied each bottle and then requested to do it all over again. I moved the coffee filters to some newspaper for drying. We gave them out as decorations. An older child could cut them in the shapes, or I could have cut them in small pieces and had him make contact paper art!

… I finished these burp cloths. 🙂 I made 20, 4 of each pattern.  They are sewn with flat diapers and a little bit of flannel for decoration.  I followed this tutorial on YouTube.  We used white prefolds for Kent but he has been using them to wipe up spills on the floor for the last year so I wanted something fresh. Burp cloths were way more essential last time than I ever would have guessed.  I was very blessed to have a good milk supply and we went through a lot of soaked cloths!  This time I am prepared.  I have 4 flat diapers left so I’m going to treat myself to a bit more flannel in a fun design.  A quarter of a yard is enough for 4 cloths, and at 50% off (if the sale is still on) that’s a whopping $0.82 total.  I’m prepared with an extra dollar in case the sale is over. 😉 I’ll probably be posting more projects to keep my mind off of all this waiting I’m doing!