Tot School - Letter O

Well, here it is, a random time to post my tot school! But this week, I totally have an excuse. My kids have been sick for ten days now, combined, and it is rotten!!! Natalie has never been sick before, other than a cold, so she was rather miserable, and she had an ear infection, and has been on antibiotics, but is now feeling better, but still needing more attention than usual. Zachary just got the cough this weekend, but he was up several times for two nights in a row this week with his cough - croupy the first night, a little better the next, and finally slept through last night - what a relief! I took him in to the dr. this morning, and he also has an ear infection, so he's on some antibiotics now, too, hopefully he will feel better soon!!!

So, now that you've heard my childrens week in health issues, let's get on to the tot schooling, shall we? I've really given up on organizing & planning any structured activities for Natalie, she just does what we do alongside us, and it works okay. She actually loves it! So here we are, all learning together! :) Our letter this week was O, and here is our morning board:

Here is Natalie playing with a bottle cap game that a friend gave me for each of the kids - the letters of their names are on the milk caps & they are in a Parmesan cheese container - great learning activity! They both love it! :)


One of the really exciting things that was in our KidFest goodie bag - Wikki Stix! I have wanted these for a while, but just haven't bought them, but with getting 2 goodie bags for 2 kids, we have a few now - enough to use them with our playdough mat and make letters!!! :)

Natalie enjoyed playing with them, too. :)

We made an O!

Playing the spoon letter matching game! Each spoon has a lowercase or uppercase letter on it - one set is white, one is clear, and you match them up!

Zachary is matching the spoons with some letter flash cards.

Here we are making our O letter collage - O is for olive! Not real olives, silly - paper olives! If we would've had a more oval-shaped larger punch, they would've looked more realistic, but it works. :) Z was excited that he could use the big circle punch for the green circles - regular hole punches are too hard for his little hands.

Then we punched out a middle circle of each olive, and glued them on...

Our finished product - we glued small red hole punches in the middle of each olive. This was a fun craft!
We So here is a quick picture of our letter wall - we need to get our G back up, but here are the rest of them - love looking back at what we've done! :)

played with his toolbox this week, and discussed the difference between nails & screws & how to use a wrench - he loves this set & has a lot of fun with it! :)

We used some little rubber stamps & an ink pad to stamp a Valentine's Day card for Daddy. :)


Z loves stamping! :)

Here is our creation - I saw the idea to make hearts out of your fingerprints over at the Frugal Family Fun Blog recently - so cute! :)
We painted with corn syrup & food coloring on waxed paper this week - it made some neat sun catchers for our windows this Valentine's Day & was a fun project for the kids. Here's my red, yellow & blue corn syrup 'paint' all made up & ready!

Zachary painting on his waxed paper heart.


I did this one! :)
Then you put another heart of waxed paper over it & voila! Zachary's finished heart:

hanging in the window after we let it dry for a couple of days:

My finished, dried heart, hanging up:

Natalie got to paint some, too! :)
She mostly made a mess with the paint, but it was cute. :)

and she ate it! :) Funny girl. :)
Here is our octopus - we made him from a toilet paper roll - I found this idea at this great new craft site I discovered called Artists Helping Children - here is a link to the 'octopus crafts' page - there are SO many crafts to pick from - it is awesome!!! :) I will definitely be using this site in the future to find our craft projects!!! Zachary drew this face all by himself - we could've been more crative, I suppose, painting the octopus, etc, but this was good enough. :)

An d we dot-painted with Elmo & the number 4! This sheet is from Making Learning Fun.
And I forgot to share these toilet paper roll snowmen that we made a couple of weeks ago - they are SO CUTE and I got the idea here! :) Zachary helped me paint them white & helped draw on his face (the one on the right), but I did most everything else. :) Aren't they cute, though?

Natalie has been doing lots of fun things lately - including eating with a spoon! Well, sort of. :) She likes to have her cereal in a bowl with milk now & tries occasionally to eat with her spoon - it is cute. :) She calls everything that is edible a 'ca-ca', though this week she asked for her daily morning banana by saying, 'ba-ca-ca' so of course I thought that was genius. :) At the grocery store today, she kept reaching for everything, saying, "ca-ca! Ca-ca!" :) Her newest words are 'ball' and book' which sound exactly the same - "Bah." :) And if you ask her where her belly is, she makes a Pffffffbt sound - because that's what bellies are for, right??? Cutest ever! :)

Well, at some point, I'll be back with the few pictures we have from this week of Tot School - yes, we are forging ahead even through the sickness - gives us something to do other than watch TV! :) To check out what other people did for Tot School this week, head on over to 1+1+1=1! :)