Tot School-First Week

Lyla is 26 months old.

This was our first week at attempting tot school. Most of it didn't go anything like I expected. I have a 4 year old daughter who just started the Raising Rock Stars preschool curriculum and I have other planned activities to do with her at the table. Lyla wants to be a part of that (which I knew would happen) so we are doing tot school during that time. I sit between them and try to help both of them. It took a few days to figure it all out but by the end of the week it was going more smoothly. I was surprised at what Lyla enjoyed and what she didn't.

She usually loves puzzles, but not this week. Play Doh kept her attention for a whole 2 minutes.

Pouring rice turned into throwing rice, everywhere. Coloring lasted for 1 minute. Except with a pen she found, that she used to color her legs :) The bears and cups ended up on the floor and then she refused to pick them up!

But she did enjoy several other activities. She liked putting spaghetti into a salt shaker.

She loved putting stickers on a piece of construction paper.

She liked stringing penne pasta onto a chenille stick, but she needed a lot of help from me to complete.

Her favorite activity was tranferring pom poms from a bowl to a paint tray with tongs (she barely got the hang of those). She did this over and over. Then she counted them with me and identified and named the colors.

I got out nuts and bolts for her to play with and tried to show her how to do them but she didn't get the hang of it. Big sister tried to teach her how to do it too! So sweet!

She didn't like this puzzle earlier in the week but I brought it out at the end of the week and she enjoyed it then. She was pretty independent with it.

We put some of the shapes in an empty Kleenex box and she had fun pulling them out.

She is sitting in on the Rock Star stuff and is enjoying it. She sang songs with us and listened to the stories.

For fun this week we spent a lot of time outside in the water. We went swimming in big pools twice this week which she loved. She is quite a daredevil in the water!

But she also enjoys her kiddie pool.

She also likes helping me drown the plants, I mean, water the garden!

I learned a lot this week about planning and organizing. I hope the next week runs more smoothly but we'll see! I know that tot school is supposed to be one on one focused time but I just couldn't make that work. It worked better having both girls at the table working. I am going to try to make time for one on one play next week.