Tot School - 18 months

Baby H is 18 months old.  I haven't been keeping up with taking photos of all our learning activities and explorations lately, but I really want to write about all the neat thing my little boy has been doing...

I introduced H to some new puzzles recently.  He's doing shape puzzles and peg puzzles pretty well.  His two favorite shapes are the oval and octagon.  He says "oval" nicely, and octagon is "oct".  Rotation of puzzle pieces still has a lot of room for improvement, but he definitely gets the concept of turning the piece to make it fit (he just gets frustrated easily when it doesn't work).  I tried some two piece traditional puzzles with him and he wasn't quite ready for those yet.

As always, I'm always pulling out various combinations of toys to practice fine motor skills and matching.  Putting the 'stems' into these blocks is actually pretty tricky because they have to be lined up exactly right.  H will do these types of activities over and over, but I need to keep a close eye on him because he throws things on the floor when he's done (or frustrated).  H throws things a lot more than his sisters did at his age - I wonder if it is a boy thing, or just his personality..  Another favorite activity lately (no pictures of this one) is pouring objects from one container to another.

Playing with playdough, drawing with markers, and all types of sensory exploration are a daily occurrence.  It's so much fun sitting next to H and watching him try different things.

Now that H knows almost all of his letter sounds, we've moved on to sight words.  I know this sounds kind of silly for an 18 month old, but his entire face lights up when I take out his flashcards.  I actually don't see this at all as teaching him to read, but rather as an exercise in pattern recognition.  H's vocabulary and pronunciation of words that have different sounds has really improved lately, and I think some of this can be attributed to the sight words because he looks at my mouth as we say the words (usually when we read books together, he's in my lap).  He recognizes about a dozen sight words like 'in', 'all', 'go', 'he', 'you', 'see', 'my', 'at', etc...  and likes to play along when his older sisters (3.5 years old) are playing sight word games.

H is starting to look less like a baby and more like a toddler.. my baby boy is growing up!  He had a wonderful time at a local Easter egg hunt, walking around and people-watching.  I'm so glad the weather is finally warming up because I can't wait to take the kids out more - it seems we've been locked up inside the house all winter. 

Linking to Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1

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