Tot School - week 1

Being an elementary teacher in my past career and absolutely loving teaching my own children, we've started homeschool preschool - 'Tot Time' (see blog button on the right sidebar). And Nicholas and Celia love it. After Aaron lays down for his morning nap, I pull out some activities I planned for them to work on. For example, last week we worked on starfall.com letter Aa and the /a/ sound, then read an alligator book, and then made an alligator 'A'. This week (pics to come) we're working on letter Bb.
With spring on the horizon we sprouted bean seeds in plastic ziploc bags and wet paper towels. It took a couple days for the seeds to sprout, but they were able to check on their baby plants each day and see them growing. Normally this would be happening in the soil, so its pretty awesome to see.
I made some baby animal building puzzles which help them work on visual discrimination. They had a small animal and then all the parts and they needed to recreate the animal. It's actually quite tricky.
They practiced coloring in a picture and matching it with its name (the colors give the clues/answers) and then we played a matching game with them. They had to write the first letter of their name on each back. I didn't get a picture of Celia's, but Nicholas did almost all the N's by himself.


For fun they put Easter stickers on paper. Good fine motor control building.
Aaron woke up after a while and I had him work on putting objects in a container. He did very well. I know I'm a mom and I'm biased towards my own kids, but I really think Aaron is an intelligent baby. He catches on to things so quick and seems to put a lot of thought into what he does.

some recent examples:
1. He will find one of the drum sticks and go find the tom tom drum and drum.
2. He picked up a hair brush last night and tried brushing his hair a couple times.
3. Today he was standing up at the cabinets and I saw him search for a hand hold and test a couple before he fully put his weight into it. He will ease himself down on his knees and onto his tush when he wants to sit from standing. He will not crawl off the trampoline - he just is careful for a just 10 month old.

We sing songs, play games, play drums, and just love each other during the day too. Of course there is cartoons and free time and time when I'm just too busy making dinner or cleaning up as well. But it is so satisfying to know that they are learning something I taught them. They are learning things I taught 5 year olds. I really am enjoying it. And it is so important to make the learning fun. One of our ultimate goals is have them love to learn - and the most important goal of all is having 3 children who love and follow Jesus as well.
Meshing all my loves together - Jesus,being a mom, teaching and photography.
I've taken a whole bunch of pictures from this week's tot time... I will get them up once the week is through. :)