tot school - letter u

Noah is 18 months old.

We really had a fun week! We learned all about the letter Uu and the weather...I'm not sure why I chose this letter, but I knew I didn't want to keep going in order so we could be sure and do Ee Easter week. So anyway, we learned about Uu and had lots of fun with it:)

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Uu is for for Umbrella

(...and weather, even though it doesn't start with a U:) )

Our only book for the week was Itsy Bitsy Spider by Katie Toms...we never made it to the bookstore or library for more. But we read our book a lot and did the fingerplay about a million times this week. This has always been his favorite fingerplay, and he got very good at doing it along with me by the end of the week.

I printed two activities from Home Grown Hearts (here) for the letter Uu and umbrellas. Noah had a hard time with the letter sorting since the upper and lower case look alike. I tried to help him see that the lower case u has a little tail, and that seemed to help a bit. Mostly, though, he liked playing with the raindrops:)

Noah did great with these! I didn't do all of the colors provided and I also decided to not individually cut out each rain drop...mostly because I was too lazy to cut that much:) We had not reviewed colors like this in a while (since we did color boxes several weeks ago), but Noah still knew every color no problem and really enjoyed this activity.

We did LOTS of art projects this week, and Noah was very into all of them:) First, we made our letter page...

He gets frustrated with glue sticks (I guess he thinks they're like markers and gets upset when the markings disappear), but I was out of white glue that day. He still did most of the gluing on his own, and LOVED making the raindrops with paint. He also boycotted coloring the umbrella despite my encouragement except for a few stray purple marks.

Even so, Noah was very proud of this particular letter page and talked about it a lot over the week:)

Next, Noah made a rain cloud...idea on this post from The Shafer Family (LOVE that blog!). We used rice to fill up the paper, so Noah got to practice using a funnel. He loved that, and it was great pouring practice.

He also really enjoyed gluing on the cotton balls...using white glue of course:)

I love how this one turned out, and Noah did as well. He loved shaking it around, making the rain sounds.

This one didn't turn out as cute as I hoped, but it still got the concept across. Noah made a windsock (idea here) using construction paper, tissue paper, leftover stickers, and a pipe cleaner. Even though it wasn't the prettiest thing we've ever made, Noah enjoyed hanging it different places to "test" for the wind. We had fun making our own wind and blowing the streamers when we were inside too!

Last, Noah made a handprint sunshine. I try to incorporate at least one handprint activity in each week just because Noah has come to love making handprint art:)

Other Uu/umbrella/weather activities we did this week that I didn't get pictures of included...

*Starfall letter Uu...these are always one of Noah's favorite activities!

*Rainy day walk around the driveway using our umbrellas:)

*Pretending to make it rain in the bathtub

*Warm clothes/cold clothes sorting with a few lingering winter items in Noah closet

Finally, earlier in the week, we had beautiful, really warm weather (unlike the cold & rainy weather today) and really enjoyed the sunshine:) Noah learned to climb up on his outdoor castle on his own (kind like a mini rock wall for the foot part)...

...and learned how to go down the slide by himself.

He was QUITE proud of his accomplishment:)

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That's all for our week! See what others are doing for Tot School and share your own ideas at 1+1+1=1!