The Bryan Family

We read “10 Apples up on Top”.  Ellie drew her face and then glued 10 apples up on top of her head. 

Matching the apple faces.

Ellis joins in on the fun.

We played with “Wiggles” the worm for a long time.  Ellie would put the worm in the apple and then let Ellis pull it out.  They both loved this.

Feeding Ellis some “Apple Soup”.

Making an apple tree.

Do-a-dot Apples

Now that we are “settled” (for a few weeks at least), we are picking back up with our Tot School again.  We did a Bear theme for our first two weeks.  We have our “school” time in the morning before lunch and nap where we sing songs, read books, and do a few activities together.  I also leave a few activities on her table so she can explore them after her nap. 

We couldn’t have a Bear week without “Brown Bear, Brown Bear”. 

                        This tot book and others can be found here.

                          Playing with her magnetic pom-poms

Showing her bear face:

Graphing our color bears

We read the story of a little bear who forgot his manners.  His mama stamped these “magic words” on his paws.  We made our own little Manners Bear.

Painting the 3 Bears.

We made a bear out of circles.

Eleanor searching for all the paw prints:

We’ve been pretty busy lately, so we haven’t done much with our tot school.  Here are some of the things that we’ve done.  Warning:  Lots of pictures

Playing with pattern blocks.

Ellie’s first attempt.

…and her second.

planting flowers

sorting flowers by color.

coloring with purple

reading the calendar

learning our colors

learning about Adam and Eve

practicing sweeping

playing with purple clay

and painting on paper…and our body.

Besides doing things with the color yellow, we did a few Easter activities as well.  We had to go to a market in Chinatown to find Easter eggs and they only came in sets of 100, so we did a lot of things with our eggs.  We matched the colors, learned how to open and close the eggs, put little animal erasers inside the eggs and matched them, used our eggs as a scoop in beans, and played with them during our bath to see if they would float or sink.

Ellie playing with the sound eggs that I filled with various items to make different sounds.  She really enjoyed these until she figured out how to pull the tape off and open the eggs up. 

Showing off her bunny that we made together. 

…and playing peek-a-boo!

Painting yellow Big Bird.  She knows now that when we do any kind of painting, gluing, or coloring that we use her Elmo mat.  She goes to get it herself and when she is finished with what we are doing she says “done!” and then folds (wads up in a ball) up her mat and puts it back under the sink.

Creation day 6 : God made the animals.

Matching up the animals and then…

knocking them all down.

Singing “5 Little Ducks”.  Ellie loves the “quack, quack, quack” part.

Here’s what we did last week during our blue week.

Played with our blue “op-pi-tus”.

Exploring her bag of blue items.

Playing with straws while wearing baby legwarmers on her arms.  (She loves wearing these on her arms then rubbing them saying “Ohhhh soft!”

Practiced transferring beans with a spoon.

This week we talked about creation day 5 and how God made the birds and the fish.  So Ellie went fishing.

Ellie sorted her blocks (green, blue, and red).  She needed a little help but mostly did it by herself.  She then stood up looked at me and said “picture”.

She loves “reading” her picture Bible especially to look for the babies and angry King Saul.  Here is her angry face:

We learned the nursery rhyme ‘Little Boy Blue’.  I made this paper for her so she could play along with the rhyme.  The boy, sheep, and cow were separate so she could place them on the paper.  She loved to put little boy blue under the haystack, cover him up and say “Where he gone?”  “There he are!!” 

She wanted a picture with Little Boy Blue, so she said “picture” and then “cheese!!”

And that was our week.

Last week we focused on the color green.  Here are a few things we did together:

After coloring with green crayons, colored pencils, and markers (reason for the green hands and belly) Ellie dug around in the beans to find the hidden green triangles.

She did a little scooping and pouring as well.

Here is Ellie’s green collage.  She picked which pictures she wanted on the computer, and then I cut them out for her to glue down.  She loves to glue!!

Ellie found my shape cards that I use for my English class and started playing with them.  She laid them all out and then we played a find the shape game.  She can find all the shapes (most of the time…occasionally she just picks a random shape) and can name circle, oval, heart, and star.

One of Ellie’s new favorite “toys”.  She has been wanting to play with my thread spools for a long time now.  Usually I just take it away from her, but after looking at it closely thought it would be a good activity for Ellie.  I took all the spools off and let her put them back on.  She put them all on, took them off and did it again.  She played with this a few times this week.

Yes, she is sitting in her Bumbo chair.  She drags it out from under her bed once in a while to sit in it.  Most of the time she calls this chair her “potty”.

Ellie has been participating in my Sunday afternoon English classes and really enjoys it.  She also loves going to Bible class on Sunday mornings.  She also loves to color and make projects with me, so I thought I would try a little Tot School with her.  We started off with Colors.  I was going to do a color a week, but we got very behind with our 3 hospital stays last month.  The color Red was our first color.  Here are some of the things we did with Red:

Exploring her bag full of Red things:

Red playdough:

We also did other activities with Red and made a collage of red things.  (Ellie loves to glue!  She learned very quickly how to turn something over to put glue on it and then flip it back over to glue it down)  She also learned how to sign “red”.   If I show her something that is red and ask her what color it is, she will respond with whatever color pops in her head (sometimes purple or blue), but if I show her the sign for “red” she will say RED!

We also practiced pouring by pouring cotton balls from one cup to another.