Tot School: Red and 'A' Lesson

Okay so......tot school? 

What is that? 

Today was our first tot school lesson. Everly has been talking so much more and has started to recognize colors, shapes, numbers, and just things in general. My background is in teaching and I always imagined teaching my kids. Now that she's become more interested in these things I thought it'd be fun to start some sort of school. She's too young to go to preschool but I thought it would give us something to do and add a little structure to our day if I started a sort of mini-preschool program with her. I went to Pinterest and found a plethora of ideas on what's called tot school. The blogs I found were for kids all over the age of two. Everly isn't quite two yet but I figured we're only a few months away so I could make it work. 

I did some Pinterest research and started to plan. I began by making some core objectives/goals. From there I created my first lesson plan. I decided my overall goal for tot school is:

 To teach colors, shapes, letters and numbers three days a week.

We started with the color red and the letter 'A.' After I created a lesson plan I knew what activities I had to prepare and I spent a day or two preparing the next weeks worth of lessons. I thought it would be good to begin on a Monday anyway and that gave me the time I needed to get ready.

We started off with our red lesson by reading a page from one of Everly's books about red.

I had gathered a bunch of her toys that were red and put them in our red bucket. I let her pull out each toy and we repeated 'red' each time. I think I ended up saying red 65 times throughout.

One of the things I made was a little color matching game. I got a manila file folder and just grabbed some images off Google of things that are red. I colored them and made two copies. I glued one to the folder and laminated the other one. I stuck Velcro on the back of the laminated copy so we could pull them off and on.  (Yes her arm is out of her shirt. That's just how she likes to wear her clothes lately.)

Another little fun activity I made is a pom pom activity. I bought a bag of pom pom's around Christmas time for a little Christmas party we had and Everly has loved playing with them. I used a toilet paper roll and wrapped it in red construction paper. I taught her to drop the pom pom's in the toilet paper roll. I think she actually likes this one better than the manila folder activity.

Everly is obsessed with stickers. It's literally one of the ONLY things that will keep her still and quiet (it's what we use during church). So I bought a pack of the traditional star stickers. We used the red ones to stick on a page that was also a lead in to our next topic 'A.'

Then we began talking about the letter 'A.' I began with these cute little worksheets I printed off Pinterest. We started coloring and I helped her trace the letter. Again I was repeating 'A' multiple times while we were doing this activity.

Everly got these cute little Popsicle letter's from my parents for Christmas. So I pulled those out (they just happened to be red as well!) and I pointed to each letter and repeated 'A.' She grabbed the Popsicle and her baby and started feeding her baby.

We colored the worksheets and the moved to her room. I wrote the letter 'A' on post-it's and hung them in her room. The idea was she would find them and collect them. She literally didn't care one bit. I think she may be a little too young for this activity.

Most preschool's and even kindergarten's have circle time. I thought it would be fun to begin to introduce this idea now. I grabbed her 'play quilt' and I had made these Popsicle sticks with her favorite nursery rhymes on them. I let her choose one and then we sing a song. That's how we ended the lesson.

All in all the whole lesson was probably no longer than 15 minutes. Each activity didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It moved very fast (which I expected and had planned for). But it was really fun to teach Everly and work on some learning activity's. I found after we were done that she was in a much better mood to play and we enjoyed playing with her toys for a little while. I'm so excited to continue with our tot school. It's super relaxed and nothing special but it should be fun for us!