Tot School - Letter "B"

 

Jimmy is 26 months old

 
Here is a recap of our first week of Tot School! I was so excited to find out about Tot School as I have been absolutely, completely and utterly lost when it comes to activities to do with my toddler Jimmy. He doesn't talk much so I decided to start with the alphabet and do a letter a week. We did the letter "B" last week. He really knows his letters, but he doesn't SAY them so we are working on saying the letter and the sound it makes.

First we used Starfall.com and went over the letter B. He really loves this site so I make sure we go over the letter of the week there each day.

Food
I tried to incorporate more foods that began with "B" this week.... we didn't have any bananas though because Jimmy will not eat them (they were his first solid food and he loved them back then, he must have gotten sick of them lol). We ate Blueberries, Broccoli, Bagels, Bean soup with Bread & Butter... I am sure there were more but I can't think of them right now!

Crafts
We made a letter "B" Bee using this project from Homeschool Creations. The only problem was using the black marker, and it is mentioned on the blog that it takes a while to dry, but the marker is STILL coming off since we used a water based one...so if we do this craft again, we will be making the stripes out of black foam and gluing them on!

We made this Butterfly lacing card. I just found a butterfly shape online, printed it out and traced it onto a piece of foam & then cut it out. 

Then I punched holes using a (dull, that was annoying!) hole punch. I gave Jimmy a piece of string I found and he played with it for a little bit, then I helped him lace it through the holes.

 We had extra string left so he was able to run around holding the end which made the butterfly "fly." That was cute but of course I didn't get a pic =(

Books
We read Who's Bugging You and Jimmy's favorite, Good Night, Sweet Butterflies. I need to get a bit more organized in the book department, need to get to the library and coordinate better!

Activities
We did lots of "B" themed activities, such as BUILD with BLOCKS and play with BOATS.

Well, thats it for this week. Hopefully I will get better at this as the weeks go by! We are working on the letter C this week I hope to do a few Easter activities to go along with it. It is supposed to really nice this week as well, so hopefully we will get to play outside a lot!

Please make sure to visit 1+1+1=1 to see what other tots are doing!

Happy Anniversary!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

My hubby and I have been married for 3 years today! It seems like so much longer though, because we started dating when we were seniors in high school, back in 2000! We've been together for almost 10 years, sheeeew! ;-)  And guess what?? He got me some of these:

Not such a big deal until you consider the fact that this is either the 3rd or 4th time in 10 years that he has ever given me flowers! Now I will say that I have always been like, "Oh that's just a waste of money, they just die, blah blah blah...." so I usually get some plants for my garden at a later date. But it really IS nice to get flowers, I love them =) And I LOVE my hubby! He is the greatest, hardest working man who loves his family and makes sure we are taken care of. I am so blessed to be his wife, I love you Jim!

I also wanted to say that I am so sorry I have been gone for the last week and a half or so. I have been sick with the worst cold EVER! I had my prenatal appointment last Monday, the 8th, and I woke up sick that morning. They cultured my throat, but it came back negative. I definitely had something though, I had a fever, chills, sore throat, bad cough, really stuffed up sinuses, lost my voice, still don't have it back completely, AND I still can't hear out of my left ear very well. I am a mess! So I haven't done much of anything until this week really. I took Jimmy to Goodwill today, finally getting us out of the house. It was nice to get out and the weather was beautiful. We also got out and played outside for a while. Hopefully I will be all better within the next couple days, I HATE being sick! Its been a million times worse too since I am pregnant and am very limited to what I can or will allow myself to take. Hopefully this won't linger too long.....*sigh*

Creepy Evening

This evening I happened to look out the window and I saw something I haven't seen on our property before. A coyote. They don't generally worry me too much since we don't have anything for them to get, except the barn cats, but what can you do? They manage to stay safe for the most part. But seeing this coyote trotting across our back field was just kind of unsettling. It was neat to see him and I wish I could have gotten closer to take better pics, but there is just something about those animals that creeps me out! I watched him follow our fence line to the neighbors property where this pic was taken.

Cody was going crazy barking at him and the horses were just watching. Jim was in the barn so I beeped him on his phone and told him to go look. You can see him peeking around the corner of the barn with the horses. Mr. Coyote just trotted right between our barn and the neighbors house without a care in the world, maybe heading to the woods or a pond up the road. It was neat to see him, but I can do without seeing him again. Just hearing them howling at night is enough to send shivers down my spine!

Finally! And I have a plan...

Little Jimmy is 2 years old and one month. He has not been showing much interest in talking or saying words, but he has known what words mean and he has been able to take direction very well for a long time. Last week he FINALLY started making sounds like he is trying to sound out words. Up until then he very rarely tried to say anything other than "Mama," "Dada," "yeah," "no," and a couple other almost words. He does know many animal noises though! That's my little nature boy ;-)  Anyway, last week I stumbled upon this neat website in my search for toddler activities. It is Starfall.com. Maybe you have heard of it. I clicked on the first big button that says ABC's and started going through the alphabet. It is very cute!

Each letter shows the capital and lowercase version at the beginning and then you click an arrow and it makes the letter sound such as "ah" for A and "buh" for b and so on...you get to the next page and you click the highlighted letter and it sounds out the word that is shown. Then there is a cute little animation. After a couple words, there is usually some sort of game, I think mostly matching types. You have to use a mouse for the games, and since Jimmy hasn't quite figured out how to control the mouse very well, I do it for him. For one of the games, either a capital or lowercase letter will pop up and you have to click and drag it to either the matching capital or lowercase letter on either side of the screen. Jimmy caught on very quickly - I click and drag I ask him "Does this letter go here?" holding it over either the capital or lowercase letter and he tells me yes or no.

As we were going through the letters he amazed me by actually making sounds along with the sounds on the computer! He has made so much progress in the last couple days I just can't believe it! He loves to go through the letters on the website but he is also now carrying around his flashcards (which he previously only cared about for the pictures) and he points to the words trying to sound out the beginning letter.

This week I am going to start focusing on a letter a week until we make it through the alphabet. If we miss a week, we will move that letter to the next week. I am not sure how this will work out once the new baby comes, but we will work it out somehow, even if this project has to get put on hold for a bit at that point. Since it is a new month, I feel like we are making a clean start. And since March starts on a Monday, that works out great! We are starting with the letter A today. I haven't quite worked out how we are going to do this, but I plan to go over the letter on Starfall.com every day, find books and songs to correspond and do crafts featuring the Letter of the Week. I am going to be using the No Time for Flashcards blog to help me out because there are awesome crafts and ideas for each letter of the alphabet showcased there. I will post about what we do as often as I can and will post pics of the crafts we do along with a link to the project on No Time for Flashcards if I use one of those for guidance.

Wish us luck and pray for me that I can follow through with this! I am so tired of not having a "plan" for Jimmy, we have just been gliding along each day doing nothing in particular. I have felt so lost up until now. Maybe if there is someone out there feeling as lost as I have been I can help them out along the way through this adventure!