tot school - letter m - 27 months

We are finally back in our house after our great house disaster. It feels good to be back. My husband is busy dutifully trying to fix up our house and put things back in their place while I'm busy, of course, planning and prepping Tot School. Ethan has made it clear he's missed his Tot School classroom and we're ready to change up activities weekly again instead of bi-weekly.

Even though we were displaced for a few weeks, I made sure to cling to as much normalcy as possible, even if that meant setting up Tot School on my mom's dining room table -- which I did. M week went on and while it was different than our classroom, it was still a pretty great two weeks.

Letter M Magnet Board

I hijacked a few of my mom's baking dishes to ensure Ethan's makeshift Tot School included his usual favorite activity: the magnet board. It's been really cool watching his vocabulary grow and the way he uses his magnet board words in everyday sentences (not that any were particularly challenging this week).

M&M Letter M

Oh, the M&M tray. This was a huge success and Ethan loved it. It was hilarious to watch him do this tray because as determined as he was, he would almost wince when having to put the M&M onto the paper and not in his mouth. He slipped up a couple of times and after smiling one chocolatey smile would continue working at his letter M printable.

Letter M Traceable

Ethan went from absolutely hating tracing to requesting it every week in Tot School. He's getting really good and being able to stay on the lines to trace the letter. Of course, when he finishes tracing the letter, he's happy to scribble all over the page. Dry erase markers were always my favorite school supply, too.

M is for Monsters

This one was a huge hit. I found some stock images of cute little monsters and added a shape to each one using MS Paint. (My mom's computer isn't exactly high tech, but I'll take what I can get.) I printed out little cards with the corresponding shapes and Ethan got to match those with the monster sporting that same shape. He already knows his basic shapes but still really enjoyed this activity and would be really proud each time he completed it. He did have a little trouble with the square and rectangle at first but nailed it pretty quickly.

Monkey Marble Tray

This was another great printable from Confessions Of A Homeschooler. We used marbles to place in the empty circles since it was M week and I was lucky enough to find a big bag of marbles at the dollar store (score!). Ethan really enjoyed this activity until, towards the end of our week, he got a hold of some glue and glued down the marbles to the printable. It was a beautiful art piece, at the very least!

Money

This tray was for Ethan to get a closer look at money. He had no trouble with a dollar or a penny ("the brown money") but the others got him a little mixed up. He enjoyed sorting the money and studying them to place them in the correct spot on the paper, but this was his least favorite activity of them all.

Monkey Magnet Tray

This was just a fun one for Ethan to play with magnets. I gave him some monkeys and some banana trees and he had a blast playing with the monkeys, especially making them swing upside down on the trees.

Making Musical Instruments

I put together a big bin of reusable items (empty coffee cups, containers, boxes, toilet paper rolls, rice, dried beans, rubberbands) that we could turn into musical instruments. Ethan loved scooping the rice and beans into the coffee cups to make shakers and we enjoyed listening to the different sounds they both ended up making. He filled the toilet paper roll with little bells and we used aluminum foil to hold everything inside. Once his instruments were made, Ethan went to down painting and decorating them. When they were dry, we put on some music and had fun playing along with our new instruments.

Arts & Crafts

I found a bag of plastic masks for a dollar at Wal-Mart and Ethan had fun gluing things onto them and painting them. However, he didn't like wearing them -- so once decorated, they didn't get much use.

I also had printed some Twisty Noodle printables and Ethan had a blast painting. We definitely missed all of our fun, messy arts and crafts projects and I can't wait to kick this up a notch for upcoming N week!

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