It's just the beginning

With Reid's first birthday only five days away, I have started to plan lessons and activities that I want to do with him as I teach him things during our days at home together.

Tot School will be a structured playtime that exposes my toddler to early learning practices. He will PLAY and learn simultaneously. We will focus on gross motor skills and fine motor skills, but he will be immersed in PLAY and Reid will take the lead.  When he's done, we're done. 

To start off this new tot school blog, I'll give a little run down of activities we have engaged in this week:

1. shaky pasta: we took uncooked rotini pasta and practiced putting it in an old soda bottle. he did extremely well with this task, missing quite often, but feeling very proud when he was successful and understanding that he had done it right. of course, post lesson, we shook and shook and shook that pasta so loud that we had to put on music and pretent it was a maraca.

2. stacking: as good as he is at taking things out, we're not as good as putting them back so we worked on taking the colored rings of the stacking toy and putting them back on. we've been working on this four about five days and today he was a pro at it! A lot of something is a good thing- continuous repetition with toddlers is key to their learning process.

3. gross motor skills: we took the walker and the fire truck up and down the long hallway in the apartment building. he was all tuckered out at the end, but babbled the whole time! he was so excited when he got to the end but got a dazed look on his face when i turned him around- classic!

4. drawing: we practiced with crayola's tadoodles crayons- needless to day we are not quite ready for this yet. I am willing to expose him to the coloring process and talking about colors, but his idea of coloring is throwing the crayons on the floor. We will probably hold off on this activity for a little while and instead let him watch mommy color and gain interest in the activity before trying again.

5. music: we attended music class on tuesday! At home, we played with our drum and used everyday house things such as  wooden spoons, tupperware, and a pot to make new music. we sang new songs and tried to keep a beat.

6. blocks and balls: we rolled balls back and forth to each other. he's started to understand this more and more and loves this game when it first stars. he loses interest fast in this but has started using the back side of his hand to roll the ball back to me, which is a start and he'll only gain more confidence in it.

7.