tot school - letter f - 23 months

F week ran a little long. My husband had a bunch of consecutive days off work for our little trip and the holiday weekend so I knew it would be hard to keep a focus on tot school if I changed things up. I was a little nervous going into this week after the flop that was E week but, to my surprise (isn't it always?), F week was awesome! Ethan really enjoyed all of our activities this week and things just went a whole lot smoother. It feels good to be back!

THE FACE GAME

The point of this tray was for Ethan to place the facial features in their correct position on the face. I ran out of laminating sheets so I was worried it'd be a little hard to pick up the smaller pieces, like the eyebrows, but Ethan handled it beautifully. He really loved making faces over and over and over again!

FEATHER SWEEPING

I had a bag of feathers on hand (yeah, random!) so I thought it would be fun to use them. I scattered them on a larger tray and Ethan's job was to sweep them onto the space marked "feathers." This was his least favorite of all the trays this week, as the sweeping activities usually are, but he still enjoyed it enough and asked to repeat it a few times over the week.

SENSORY BIN

The sensory bin was kind of lame in the sense it was filled with firetrucks and frogs. Oh, and a couple of fish here and there. I felt like I was scrambling to fill it since it completely slipped my mind. Ethan just kind of pulled everything out, glanced at it all and tossed it aside.

THE FROG POND

Oh man, Ethan loved this one. I had filled a little fish bowl with some blue paper "water" and used construction paper backing to get little frog print-outs to stand. Ethan has really been into mastering these tongs lately so he was able to try to place the frogs into the frog pond where they were trying to go. He thought this was the funniest activity ever. By the end, he was really doing great with the tongs!

CAPITAL AND LOWERCASE F FISHING GAME

For this one, I printed out some fish and labeled them with either a capital or lowercase F. I took two stirrers and turned them into fishing rods using magnets -- one marked with F, one marked with f. Ethan's job was to use the F rod to pick up the F fish and use the f rod to pick up the f fish. He figured it out quickly and did this several times correctly before deciding it was just fun to use one fishing rod and catch all of the fish.

ARTS & CRAFTS

I had some oven bake clay on hand, so Ethan and I made some fish out of clay! We painted them when they were dry and now they're sitting in an empty fish bowl on our tot school shelf. So cute! I loved this activity because as I was making my two fish, Ethan was observing how to mush the clay and was so proud of the three fish he made! I think he did an excellent job!

We also made a bunch of other art this week, painting and coloring in his coloring books he finally has a huge interest in.

I love that now Ethan has begun to draw things and tell me what he's drawing. He's done this in the past, but mostly a recounting of something that actually happened -- as in, he'd tell me that he was drawing a picture of him at the beach after we came home from the beach, or a picture of Aunt Megan dancing after her recital. This was the first time he was making up these random scenarios -- like daddy hanging out with Abby Cadaby -- and drawing them. It was so cute to watch!

LISTENING STATION

As usual, Ethan really loved his music station this week. We listened to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in honor of F week and Ethan had a blast jamming along with his musical instruments.

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