Tot School - 28 Months

Baby H is almost 2.5!  My little boy is really going through a big developmental growth spurt right now as he's communicating more effectively, following directions, and craving more challenging learning activities.  He always asks to "do school" (so he can be like his big sisters, of course).  Here are some of the activities I've been giving him..

H loves getting to play with "big kid" games, and they provide a wonderful opportunity to practice fine motor skills.

Playing with his sisters LEGOs is a really big deal (he usually gets yelled at by the twins if he tried to grab their LEGOs), so he knows it's special when I bring him some bricks to stack.

 I've been trying out various activities on H to see if they are age-appropriate and he always rises up to meet any new challenge I throw his way.

Art is probably his favorite as he's becoming better at drawing (mostly circles and lines as well as some easy letters like T), cutting with safety scissors, painting, stamping, and more..

The iPad and Kindle have become part of H's daily routine.  He's getting pretty good at memory games and is going through some 'learn to read' apps pretty quickly.  Yesterday he was going through an app that tells you to touch each letter of the word to hear its sound before putting it together, but he would just look at the word an say it.  I think some of it was memorization but he does know how to read CVC words by sounding them out phonetically.  I might try Hooked on Phonics and the All About Reading Workbook on him pretty soon and see how that goes.

H is quickly catching up to his sisters (4.5 years old) in math.  We do a lot of counting and one-to-one correspondence work.  He also knows how to (with a bit of prompting) count to 100, skip count by 2s to 24, and skip count by 5s to 60.  It's funny because I don't actually teach him these things - he just listens to his sisters count and then figures it out.  H is very musical so I think the Classical Conversations skip-counting songs which I'm trying on the girls are right up his alley.

I try to use math manipulatives to make sure that H understands quantities and doesn't just memorize numbers.

While the twins seem to be more interested in playing with each other than with Mom lately, H loved to help me around the house with cooking, cleaning, and laundry.  He is really fun to hang out with.  With the twins my attention was always divided and it's really neat to be able to focus just on my little guy every once in a while and enjoy watching him grow up.

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