Tot School - The Letter O

~James is 33 months~

Well, we're back on track with Tot School and this week we continued on with the alphabet - we're up to the letter Oo!

Art & Music:
I just love owls and when I saw this idea on No Time for Flashcards, I knew we'd have to do it, too! We also made an orange octagon O. Nothing fancy, but it serves its O purpose. :)







We listed to some opera music. Che Soave Zeffireto from Mozart's 'The Marriage of Figaro' has been a long time favorite of mine, so we listened to that song most often. We are a music loving family and enjoy a wide range of musical genres. We're trying to instill in James an appreciation for all different types of music, too. It must be working because he will start swayin' to anything from Bob Marley to Bach to Blondie! :)

Letters & Numbers:
We read the O book from the Alphatales series and made lots of O's and words with our snow playdough.

James has been really interested in spelling lately. Which is amazing to me because I thought spelling was a long ways away for us, school-wise. But, as it is practiced in the Montessori method, children learn to spell before they learn to read, so I suppose it's something we really need to start offering to James.

I made this snowman activity using counters and buttons (print out from Kidsoup). James had fun decorating the snowman with the buttons, but took little interest in the whole counting aspect of it. I don't think it's too advanced for him because he did really well with something similar I made in December. Ah well, we'll try it again another time.

The above activity aside, James is a counting machine. This guy will count anything that can be counted! It seems numbers (and letters for that matter!) are his "thing". He can count by rote to 30 no problem and easily identifies all of the same numbers when he sees them written. In addition to spelling, I'm going to start offering a lot more number related activities going forward.

Science & Nature:
As part of our O week we went on a field trip to the ocean. James is in absolute heaven every time we go to the beach. If he could live there, he would. :)

I also put together this ocean shadow matching activity, which James LOVED. Print outs from Kidsoup (again!).

We also went hunting for things for our nature display. I love going for walks with James because he stops and notices every little thing. It can take us 45 minutes to walk half a mile. :)

Practical Life:
Here are the activities that were on our PL shelves this week:
From L-R:
Pouring oatmeal
Open and close basket
Spooning lima beans
Transferring pom-poms - this was also a great pattering activity!
Sorting foam tiles by color
Button snake

Our new classroom setup made our school week just that much more enjoyable! James absolutely loved having everything accessible and I found he revisited several of the Practical Life activities time and again, improving his skills with each pass. The only thing he completely, flat-out ignored was the button snake. :( You'd think it was a pile o poo sitting in the basket, the way he avoided it!

Oh and we did have one little accident - those lovely blue glass egg cups broke while in transit from shelf to work table. They were only a $1 or so at the thrift shop, so it wasn't a big deal at all. But I sure did think they were pretty. :( On the bright side, the breakage created another PL activity for James - sweeping! James took this job very seriously and kept saying, "oh well, too bad..." :)

James also had (a lot) of practice peeling Clementine oranges. We worked with oranges to make some potpourri, too!

Other activities:
I found this cute activity on Kidsoup. It's great for improving those fine motor skills - the child has to place a Cheerio (or any small thing) onto the tiny circles on the tentacles. Knowing James as I do, I made sure to provide enough cheerios for the octopus AND James' tummy. ;)

We had a blast exploring the sensory tub and pretending to make it snow (i.e. throwing cotton balls in the air).

James colored this O coloring page using his crayons rocks from Santa!

We worked with our Montessori materials, too, but I'm going to post about those lessons (and our Practical Life stuff) separately going forward. Nicole is now hosting 'Montessori Mondays' and I plan on linking up to that each week.

There you go - our 1st school week of 2010 was busy and fun! And I just want to say that I know these posts are long (I can't get around it), and that I'm very appreciative to those of you who take the time to read through it all!!

Now go and click the button to the left to see what others are doing with their children! :)