Tot School

17 months old.

We don't have too many photos this week. A lot of our activities were outside, and I forgot. Oops!

Kael did a fabulous job of steering his race car shopping cart around Home Depot, while we picked up some projects for Kai (to practice his handyman skills). Kael enjoyed looking all over the store, helping pick out parts, and watching the wood get cut.

There were many trips to the park this week. Here is one of my favorites from our playdate with the Hansen's.
This next activity was sort of designed to serve two purposes. The first was just to enjoy playing with water and noticing the difference between the warm bowl and the cold bowl. We are really trying to increase Kael's baby sign language vocabularly though, so I thought this would also be a good way to work on the "hot" and "cold" signs. He did watch while I repeated the signs over and over, but he did not try to copy them yet. He really liked splashing around and dipping his cars between the warm water and the ice water. I tried to find our little cars that change colors with different water temperatures, but since Kai was not at home on this particular morning, I couldn't tell which ones they were.

After he was done playing in the bowls, he rolled the wet cars on his body. He said "voom, voom." It was so cute!


Another trip to the park. Lots of gross motor practice on this day.

The steering wheel is by far his favorite activity.



He also enjoyed some finger painting.


Here's his final product.

We spent a lot of time working on body part identification this week, but I did not get very many pics. Here are some of the things we used.

Kael loved the face plate activity from Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready despite Mommy's primitive drawing abilities. I touched a part of his face and named it, then drew it on the plate. He thought it was hilarious.

He also enjoyed the body board book. He seems to like the DK board books over actual stories right now, I think because he enjoys seeing pictures of real babies. We used the Linguini doll to name his parts.

So far, "nose" is the only body part Kael will point to, but I think he is close to doing "hair" and "bellybutton." We are also working on getting him to point to other people's noses in addition to his own.


To see what others did for Tot School this week, go here.

Tot School

We worked a lot on animal sounds this week in tot school. We took the kids to feed the ducks in hopes of inspiring Kael to answer "What does the duck say?" When prompted, he did say "ack" once, but he hasn't done it again, so I'm not sure if it was just a coincidence.

Playing with play-doh at home.

We ended up doing several field trips last week, mainly because my sister was in town. These pictures are from Legoland. Kael has been there several times before, but he is just getting to the age where he is really start to appreciate it all and engage himself in the activities.

After we got home, we also played Legos. In this picture, Kael is waiting for Kai to finish building a tunnel for his little car to go through.

After the tunnel, he decided that the tub was more fun than the blocks.

This next activity was recommended by Kael's developmental therapist to help with his self-feeding. The idea is to dip the spoon in peanut butter, so that the cheerios have something to stick onto making it easier for him while he uses a spoon.

He did pretty well with the concept and was successful in getting several Cheerios to his mouth. However, it didn't hold his interest for long..I think partially because he doesn't really like Cheerios all that much. He was more interested in feeding Kai and Mommy. I think next time I will try some Honey Nut Cheerios to add a little more flavor.


Here Kael is touching the ice wall in the Arctic exhibit at Sea World.

Kael played with several balls. A ball of any type is by far his favorite toy.

We tried the pom pom fill and spill that I have seen on several other blogs, and it was by far the hit of the week. Kael did this activity for at least a half an hour.

Kai wanted to try this out too. So Kael put some of his pom poms into his brother's bottle.

My favorite pics of the week:

See what other little ones did for tot school this week.

Our First Week of Tot School

17 months.

We had our first week of Tot school this week. Kael seemed to really enjoy most of it, and I was very happy to spend some extra time playing with him. I first found out about Tot school while searching for ideas regarding what to do with Kael during this next year, as Kai and I worked on school work. It seems so perfect because there will be plenty of activities to keep him occupied and also give me some time to just focus on Kael. Click here to learn more about Tot school.

Day 1: Exploring his activity cube. He especially liked the bead mazes and pounding on the music side.

Kael is already pretty good at this poppin' pals toy, but the red ones sometimes give him trouble. So, we pulled it out for some fine motor practice. He loves when one of the little animals pops up, and we say "hi" to it.



Practicing pouring outside by the little pool.

Oops, he missed.


Pouring into the big pool is much easier.

He also really liked playing with his bowling set. It was fun to watch him figure out what to do. At first he wanted to knock them down with his hand, and then he kept throwing the ball at the pins instead of rolling it.

Day 2 did not go as well. Kael really felt like running his own schedule and wasn't really interested in any of the activities that I brought out for him.

Here is the reaction I got when I suggested we look at one of his Elmo books.

Later in the day, I tried some more fine motor activities with the Cheerio activity book. He was way more interested in throwing the Cheerios than in actually doing any of the activities.

This action shot of him launching a Cheerio is a little blurry.

He did get really excited when we played with bubbles at the park, though even these old favorites did not hold his attention for long.

Day 3: The shape sorter, and Kaels' mind hard at work-

1) Getting frustrated that the star shape will not fit into the circle hole.

2) Ok, let's give another one a try

3) Yay, the circle going through the circle hole!

4) The triangle in the triangle hole....getting better at this.

And just for fun, here's a pic of Kael playing Peek-a-boo in his Nemo tent.

We had a great week! Check out what other little ones did for Tot school here.