Letter of the Week: J

~ Peeper is 30.5 months old ~

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

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while, and have a look around. 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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After our little break, we finally jumped back into the Letter of the Week where we'd left off. We didn't do a whole lot of structured stuff, but Peeper seemed to remember the concept of having a letter of the week, and she remembered about discovery bins and letter crafts, and was happy to do both.

We didn't actually get around to making our letter crafts until the end of the week, but it seems that I should open the post with them, so here they are: J is for Jellybeans and j is for jewels.

The jewels are stick-ons that I found at Target, and the "jellybeans" are hole-punched from colored construction paper. But we ate real jellybeans while we were sticking them on.

And here's our Letter J Discovery Bin: Jj book and animal card, J magnet and j tub foamy, jingle bell, jellyfish, jammy shirt, and a jacket (technically a shirt, for her dress-up monkey) all jammed into a jack o' lantern.

Here are a couple of the 1+1+1=1 Tot School Printables "letter pages" (as we call them) for J is for Jellyfish. On this one, she colored each of the small jellyfish on the Js, and we talked about which is the "Mama J" and which is the "Baby J."

And here, we talked about some other J words. And you know me, I looked at this page and thought, "Huh? Baby doesn't start with J! Ohhhh. That baby."

She also enjoyed the sea creature vocabulary development cards.  (Look, I even managed to laminate them!)

We also ate some jellybeans and a jelly sandwich and talked about things that our bodies can do that start with J - like jump, jiggle, jerk and jog.

Not J-related, but this week, we also got the dirt and the plants into our garden. Now, we'll just have to wait and see if we can keep Peeper out of it.

After the bed was built, and we'd talked a lot about the garden, but before it had dirt in it, she started pretending to grow things over in another planting bed, where the dogs have dug up a nice, cool hole under a bush.

She picks up handsful of dirt and brings them to us, telling us that they are strawberries or some other produce. But usually strawberries.

We have some other containers available, and we're thinking that we might need to give her her own little plot to do with as she wants, but I'm a little worried that she'll be disappointed if nothing grows, because she's scooped out all the dirt, or picked all the flowers or something.

We're going to have to have the "don't pick anything off the plants in the garden" talk a few times, I can tell. She's already eyeing the flowers on the pepper plants, and we're not going to get many peppers if she yanks those off now!

Now, I'd better go read up on the letter K and make some plans!