Letter of the Week(s): N

~ Peeper is 31.5 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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We spent two seeks on Nn, because in the middle, Peeper and I went to Texas for our quarterly visit with my family, and my 25th high school reunion. She was, as always, a great little traveler!

Our letter crafts: N is for Newspaper and n is for numbers. (Both ideas came from No Time for Flash Cards.) After I helped her to get the letters all gluey, she stuck everything on.

And here's her "ABC box" for the week. This was a tough one: N magnets (serif and sans serif), nine magnet, n tub foamy, Nn book, N block, Nn animal card (narwhal), neckerchief, and necklace.

Her necklace was hiding inside the neckerchief.

Looking at her favorite page in the Nn book.

Since she did so well with finding the numbers last week, I thought I'd try something different with the cards. I asked her to put three puffies on the "3" card. Instead, she gave the ladybug eyes, put some puffies on some of her dots, and stuck some others on there, too. Oh well.

Just hours before we left for Texas, Homeschool Creations released a Wizard of Oz tot pack. You know I had that sucker downloaded, printed, cut and laminated in time to sneak it into my carry-on bag! Most of the pages are over her head (trace the letters to spell "Dorothy," for example) but I did print a few and, more importantly, I did the cards for the various characters.

She looooves her "Wizard uh Oz cahds!" and has asked to play with them many times. She identifies the characters and sorts them out and and I'm not even sure what else, but they keep her occupied for a while, and that's fine by me!

She has a bit of an obsession with tracing, and being traced.

She has alo, apparently, given up clothing for the summer.

Several weeks ago, I gave her these straws in a parmesan cheese jar. She enjoyed dumping them out, and even sorting them by color, but when I suggested that she drop them through the little holes, into the jar, she had no interest, and even got kind of ticked off about it. I guess she just wasn't ready for that yet, because now, she's all about it. She picked up every single straw and poked it in a hole. 

I put my new (to me - Thank you, Craig's List!) color printer to good use with these "letter pages" (as we call them) from Confessions of a Homeschooler. Here, she's matched up the "Mama" and "Baby" letters. (Actually, the other day, she identified a letter as "Capital __", so maybe she's rolling her little eyes at me when I talk about the "mamas and babies.")

And, after we got home from Texas, Carisa from 1+1+1=1 got on a roll and release several letters of her tot school printables at once. Now she's ahead of us, (we were a few weeks into the alphabet when she started doing them) so we're looking forward to having her materials available for the upcoming weeks!

Her N is for "net" and the vocabulary development theme is insects and other creepy-crawling-flying things that one might catch in a net.

This is the first time I've given Peeper this kind of a Montessori-style matching page with her vocabulary cards, and she did a great job of matching up the cards to the pictures on the page. She didn't quite get that she was supposed to put them in the blank square - she kept wanting to put them on top of the matching image - but that's okay.

There were several bugs in this set that were new to her, so we talked about them and learned their names and even looked at the words.

I didn't get any photos, but we also did this with the small mammal cards from the M is for Mouse printables that were also released this week.

And, for our final letter N activity, we made nests out of noodles.