My First Lapbook/Tot Book!

One of my favorite blogs is Carisa's, which hosts the weekly Tot School that Maddie and I participate in. I was recently spending hours quickly looking through her site and found all these amazing tot book files that she created (and generously shares). I immediately set to printing, cutting, gluing and laminating (by the way, I love my new laminator beyond words; I've always been a laminating maniac and now I can do so any time of the day! And, I do!).

I made the feelings one (which I'll talk about in Tot School next week) and one from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I think this technically counts as a lapbook (I'm way new to all this); I used all of Carisa's files and also added some of my own, found from here and here.

So far, Maddie loves them (which helps me justify the MANY hours each one took to create!) and works on them both independently and with me.

This is the cover. On the front are size sequencing cards of butterflies and caterpillars. Also, the velcro, build-your-own counting caterpillar spills onto the cover.

Ahhh, the inside! Seriously, for better pictures, click over here because she did a much better job of photographing it! I also added in a little sequencing activity (yellow pocket) that Maddie really likes (we've done this the most).

And, the back cover. The caterpillar at the bottom was printed on cardstock, laminated and is held down with velcro. Maddie's "job" is to put the pieces in numerical order. Clearly, she did a very fabulous job. :)

I'm really excited to make more and get faster with each one. :) They're great for working at home and even for doctor's offices and such. Check out Carisa's site for SO many more!!

Tot School Time!

I'm going to be honest and say that it's been a hard week for Tot School. Maddie has been uncharacteristically grumpy and I know that I, too, have been crabby. Just as I've sat to write this post, she and I have jumped up to go to the potty six times. Yes, six times. And, it's not in vain. She really has to go. I'm tired and she's tired, but I keep coming right back on here to share our pics!

I thought this picture summed up our week quite well. She just was off (but, it's still fun to play with the cash register!).

We made a snake for the letter s.

And we made a rainbow man (remember how everything in this house must have googly eyes) for the letter r.

And, here's our finished product!

Ugh. Public Service Announcement: Do not buy these crayons. Cute? Yes, very. Well made? No, terribly. These were one of her prizes for using the potty so well, and she was so excited for them. They, almost instantly, broke and she was so disappointed (so, in an attempt to help, I tried using super glue but that only led to me completely gluing my thumb and index finger together).

We tried stringing pasta, since she always sees the colorful yarn, but it was just too hard. I realized that it takes a lot of dexterity to get those noodles strung, so we put it away and will try again later.

We also revisited our very favorite book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. After reading it several times, we used the felt pieces to retell the story.

And, here are the felt pieces made by yours truly. I dedicated a mere two hours of my life to these tiny creations. Ha! Fortunately, she loves them and it's so good for vocabulary and language. We've also started working on sequencing, as in what he ate first and next and so on.

Oh, this was her very favorite activity this week! Inspired by My Two Happy Homeschoolers and a sensory activity she'd created for her daughter, I filled a bowl with popcorn kernels. Then, I hid about ten of her alphabet bead letters inside. She had to dig through the bowl and then drop them in the correct letter square. She did this over and over again (though I noticed that she really didn't like searching for the letter square; she'd put them in a blank box, look at me and say, "That's okay Mommy. We'll leave it there.").

There was lots of letter stamping with these cool interlocking stamp blocks. My friend got them for me and they're awesome. When she gets older, we can connect them to spell words. Thanks again Jen!

We also read Red Riding Hood this week. She loved it, though to be honest, I was a little shocked at the...well, violence of it all! I'm not one of those that really censors stuff from Maddie but geesh, a wolf eating children, hunters cutting open said wolf's stomach... A little rough, yeah?

I'd bought these magnet pieces that tell the story of Red Riding Hood months and months ago in the Lakeshore outlet (I think they were 99 cents!). I brought them out and showed Maddie and she's had THE best time retelling the story in her own words. Today, she told it to Mike and it went like this:

"Once there was little girl. And wolf. She married the wolf. Congratulations!" Ha.

This was an activity inspired by Tired, Need Sleep (This is the link for it; It's such a fabulous blog!). I bought this alphabet poster at the dollar store and made cards with the lower case letters on them (consonants in red, vowels written in blue). We work so much with capitals, and she's got those down, so I thought we'd explore the lower case ones. She was excited when I showed her, but then did two and told me it was time to "clean up, clean up everybody." We'll try it again next week. :)

And finally, we worked on a special gift for Daddy. He has to go back to work in about a week and we're all super sad about that. So, we've been busy making him some special treats that will either be given to him on his first day back at school or before (since I can never bear to wait on giving gifts!). We'll show you all the finished products when they're ready.

To see what other tots have been up to this week, hop on over to Carissa's blog!