Letter of the Week(s): K

~ Peeper is 30.75 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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We spent two weeks on Kk, because I was pretty distracted for the first week, working on a big fundraiser for our MOMS Club.

I started out strong, putting together a "letter K discovery bin" for her at the beginning of the week.

I didn't get a photo of all the contents, but I seem to remember a K magnet, k bath letter, Kangaroo Eric Carle animal card, kangaroo hand/finger puppets, king, keys, Kk block, and hmm, maybe something else.

One of her favorite "toys" is her basket of hairbands. She dumps them out, then sorts them by colors. She's a big color-sorter-er.

We baked cookies not once, but twice, in preparation for the fundraiser.

She loves this Sesamse Street sketch, in which Cookie Monster and Ernie attempt to bake apple walnut raisin cookies, and she often pretends to bake them herself in her play kitchen.

For quite a while, I've been wanting to find a recipe (well, that part's easy, thanks to Chef Google) and make some with her, but she's the only one in the family who will eat raisins, and I'm not especially fond of walnuts, either.

So, when I needed to make something for the bake sale portion of our big spaghetti dinner, I decided we'd make those, keep a handful for her, and then take the rest to the bakesale.

Of course, Ernie and Cookie Monster wanted to watch. This might have been my suggestion, but she was totally into it.

I didn't get any photos of Peeper helping because, as usual, it required both hands to keep her from "helping" herself to all the ingredients, a fistful at a time, before they were mixed up, but here's the cookies, before . . .

. . . and, well, just before. I guess I didn't get a photo of the final product.

But a couple of days later, we were back in the kitchen, making the World's Easiest Peanut Butter Cookies*.

*Slightly less easy when assisted by a two-and-a-half year old.

Peeper is very into The Wizard of Oz these days. She sings the songs constantly (and gets an amazing percentage of the words right, in my opinion) and can tell you the story (with some prompting, of course) and one evening she commissioned busts of all the main characters, rendered in Playdoh. (She doesn't actually make anything with Playdoh yet, she just tells us what to make.)

Finally, the day of the big fundraiser! It was a spaghetti dinner to benefit a local firefighter who was seriously burned a couple of months ago. His wife is on the board of our MOMS Club, so we're trying to help them out as much as we can.

Peeper has been "helping" with the preparations for a few weeks, going with me to drop of donation requests and pick up donations and so on, and she's heard quite about about "Mr. J's Spaghetti Dinner."

On day, she was playing in her kitchen, cooking for me, and saying "Mama want cookie. Mama want hotdog. Mama want (whatever else she could find)." Then she picked up the plastic pasta and said "Mr. J want asketti!"

Here she is at the dinner, playing drums on her tray. In the middle of her concert, I overheard Mr. J's wife say to their three year old, "Yes, she does have knives."

Hey, they were plastic!

When it hasn't been raining (or hailing and tornado-threatening), the weather's been very nice, and we've spent lots and lots of time outside lately.

Sometimes in the rain, actually. The day of the dinner, when I got home, Peeper and Shrike were in the backyard. I sat down and Peeper climbed up in my lap to nurse. Just then, it started raining, but she refused to go inside. It wasn't heavy, so I just waited it out and, sure enough, it stopped after just a few minutes.

She was so disappointed. "Raaaaiiiin! Moooore raaaaiiiin!"

Sorry, kiddo. That one is not within my powers.

On this particular day, amongst the things she dragged outside were the old, nonfunctional keyboard and even older caller id unit that we've given her to play with, along with a V-Tech fridge magnet letter O. Then she announced "Dat's a keyboard. Dat's a 'aputer. Dat's a mouse."

I think it's time to look into getting her an 'aputer of her own. If not now, then for her birthday in October or maybe Christmas.

At the end of the two weeks, we finally got around to doing her letter crafts. She looooves doing these. As soon as I say "letter craft" she takes off running to her desk. Then, when she decides that it's complete (whether I think it is or not) she tells me to "Put it on the wall!"

This week, we did K is for King and k is for kangaroo.

Did you spot the little baby k inside the bigger k's "pouch?" I had thought about doing a Mama K kangaroo with a baby k in her pouch, but when she put on this Target Dollar Aisle crown, I knew we had to make a king.

She placed the crown, eyes and jewels herself (Can you tell?) and, those are "worms" that she's drawn all over the kangaroo page. She worked very hard on both of them.

With only a few mishaps.