Letter of the Week: F

~ Peeper is 28 months old ~

A Note To My Regular Readers: I know I'm repeating some photos and stories that you've already seen, but I want to put all our learning activities in the one post that's part of to the Tot School link-up.

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while. I'll give you a fair warning that much of my blog is PG-13, but my Tot School link-up posts will always be G-Rated.

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This was yet another pretty random week, but I talked a lot about "F words" (Not that one. Well, not intentionally.) when we came across them, and more and more (maybe because I'm paying more attention) the games and toys that Peeper chooses often seem to be of a educational bent.

For example, these days, her favorite thing to randomly launch into is the ABC song - which she can now do, from A to Z. Usually.

Sometimes it's still "A, Ceeee - Double-X, Y, Z" and sometimes she stops after "Ommy ommy P" but more often she makes it all the way to the end. And she is so enthusiastic about it - she shouts it out, and usually jumps up and down with each letter. It is just the most adorable thing ever, if I do say so myself.

(And I do.)

I do start the week of on a sort-of structuredish note, by putting together a "Letter F discovery bin" for her, which included flowers, frogs, fries, a farmer, a flip-flop, a fairy, a fish and a fish book, a frying pan, a four, a five and a couple of Fs.

I also got out the counting bears that Shrike found a while back on Swaptree.com. I was a little disappointed to find out that they are all one size, as opposed to the three sizes we had at the Tutoring Center, but Peeper loves them, and played with them several times this week.

Typically, she will pick out all the bears of one color and line them up, looking like they're all on a train or something.

She also likes to put them all in a container and then dump them all over the floor. She is two, you know.

She's actually into grouping and matching and lining up all sorts of things.

(Is this a typical two-year-old thing, or is it something we'll looking back on and say "Yeah, we should've seen the OCD coming?")

She especially likes to gather "more" of whatever it is that she happens to be playing with, and Shrike and I are often enlisted to help "Fin' it!"

This week, for example, she's put together collections of dogs, bears, Oscar the Grouches (Oscars the Grouch?), "Happy Baby" books, snowmen, number 6 magnets, letter D magnets (which she held up one at a time, identifying them as "Big one! Little one! Big one! Little one!", and things with pictures of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (also known as the "Hunnngeee papapiddow!").

That's the ones that I can remember off the top of my head. I'm sure there were more.

Once she gets them, she usually lines them up on the floor, and shows us that they are the "Same!" or a "Match!"

She also sees and identifies objects in abstract shapes, or in other objects. For example, she pointed to this dessert and said "Doggy! Looks like!"

Can you see it?

Now, can you see it?

And then there is her artistic streak. Or, at least, that's how I prefer to think of it.

I didn't get any photos of it, but I guess we've started working on money recognition, sort of by accident. She and Shrike came up from the basement, and she had a couple of coins that she'd found down there, so I suggested she put them in the change jar.

Well, of course she wanted to "yook" at it, so that somehow turned into giving her a few of each type of coin to play with. (For a few minutes, under close supervision - she's getting much better about things in the mouth, but still is not totally trustworthy.)

So, of course, we told her all the names, and have gone over that again each time she's asked to "Yook ah money!"

We wrapped up the week the way we probably should have started it - with a couple of letter F crafts.

F is for Feathers . . .

. . . and "f is for fire," both of which came from No Time for Flashcards.
She was way into the gluestick tonight.

And here's a pretty bad photo of the two of them, hanging on the "art line."