tot school - let christmas begin:)

Noah is 14 months old.

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I am beyond happy to again report that this smiling face is back to normal:)

After a really tough nine days of a virus turned serious double ear infections, I'm still pretty shocked to say that we had a great week of Tot School! It just all happened towards the end of the week...

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Theme: Brown Bear Brown Bear

We finished up with our color brown this week. Noah didn't do much with the color box, but I did have several Brown Bear Brown Bear activities set up for him to do.

First, Noah did a dot painting page found here using his tadoodles markers....he did a few of the dots on his own, but needed help to do most of them. Still, I think he liked this one!

After he did the dots, I tried to continue the activity using fruit loops over the dots. Again, he did a few, but wasn't too interested. Oh well..maybe next time:)

I printed off some of the pieces to the Brown Bear Tot Pack found here (thanks Carisa!!), but had basically decided to store them away for later. He wasn't too interested in the size sequencing pieces besides trying to crumple them up, and totally ignored the color pages (I knew the other components would be too advanced too, so I didn't use them yet).

But, when I pulled out the heads & tails activity...Noah SHOCKED the pants off of me! I was in awe that he matched every single one correctly, the first time, without any help at all! Now, he doesn't actually fit the pieces together, and I only offer two sets of animals at a time for him to match up, but I was amazed that he could tell me what went with what at his age. So way to go Noah:)

I'm so excited that Noah is beginning to reach the age that I can use tot books/packs with him. I plan on using these kinds of resources a lot with him in the future!

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Theme: Christmas

Hooray for Christmas time:) I've been so excited to pull out all of the Christmas books and activities I've had saved back for Noah. We kept it fairly simple this week since he was still on the mend, but he really enjoyed what we've done so far!

First, we made a handprint angel. It was a battle to get a good hand traced, but I finally got it and put it back for future projects! Noah had lots of fun playing with the paper scraps while I cut, glued, and finished up the final product:)

I did this in conjunction with a daily reading we're doing out of a Countdown to Christmasbook. Much of the book is too advanced, but I like that it had scriptures to read everyday and a nice Christian message overall. And I'm not doing something big to go along with each day...I just like to expose Noah to the true meaning of Christmas as much as possible:)

Speaking of, Noah had fun this week playing with my good nativity set....an activity done with CLOSE supervision!

Noah also had lots of fun reading this week as usual. I'll be adding all of the Christmas books we read to our Shelfari over time, but here are some of his favorites from this week:

Rudolph's Bag of Toys by Mary Man-Kong

Christmas in the Manger by Nola Buck

Biscuit's Snowy Day by Alyssa Satin Capucilli

One last fun Christmas activity we did this past weekend was attend a Christmas concert! If you've been reading here for a while, you know that my husband and mother LOVE the gospel group Ernie Haase & Signature Sound. This most recent concert made the fifth one we've been to.

We got SUPER lucky too...they held a Christmas concert in our town this time around! We were very amazed...we live in a pretty small town, but they held it in one of the biggest churches in the area. It was a small show, but it was one of the best we've seen!

Jimmy and Noah had lots of fun in their matching toboggans:)

And overall it was just a fun, family activity to do to celebrate the Christmas season!

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That's all we've got for this week! See what others are up to at Tot School...hosted by Carisa at1+1+1=1!