Saved by the Bell

Welcome back! School is fully in session here at our Little Learn & Play Academy :) It has been a great first week & I plan to give you a re-cap post soon, but first I need to tell you all about our very first day!!

I was able to get the rest of the room ready just in time for our first "official" day! Truth be told most of the book shelf was already organized, but I did go through & weed out some things that we wouldn't be needing right now. I also tried to go through our mini library & separate the books into 'for fun' & 'for learning' to be sure we are doing a little of both during Story Time. This is actually one of FOUR little libraries in the house :)
So I got it all ready...now what?

We woke up Tuesday morning & I grabbed his outfit & hurried us downstairs for our First Day Picture! Sadly the picture I had planned to take was hard to get seeing as how he refused to let me take it... so we headed in for some breakfast. (the picture above was taken later in the day after all the "crazy mum" energy excitement had passed)

Then we headed into the back room & got to "work"! We looked at our new Activity Board to see what was in store for us.

Our schedule for the day was:
Story Time (he chose Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you Hear? & ABC Look at Me!)
Letter of the Week (A)
Color of the Week (Red)
Number of the Week (one)
Science Exploration (Our Nature Walk was rained out)
Life Skills (Write a letter to a loved one. Continue Potty Learning)

We also changed the Weather for the Day to stormy...

Since we never got to do our Nature Walk, we decided to take our "classroom" outside & play in the rain!

We talked a lot about where the rain comes from, & experimented with filling different containers up from different sources to see how fast they filled. We had a blast :) Then we headed in for some lunch before nap-time.

Later we talked about how there is a BIG 'A' & little 'a'. We practiced tracing them with our fingers & I demonstrated how to write them. He is pretty solid on his uppercase Alphabet & has been for quite some time, but is completely lost with almost ALL of the lowercase set. So that is what we are working on this year. A new letter each week & reviewing past letters in the following weeks.

And don't forget about the littlest dude, it's never too young to start learning ;)

Over all it was a success! And for those of you wondering, we aren't sitting at the little table for hours doing school work & such. We carry the "work goals" with us through out the day. I try to follow his lead & if he wants to play or do a puzzle, we do it. But when I see an opportunity to discuss the Letter/Color/Number I jump on it. When we play cars I ask for the RED car a lot, or ask him to point to it. When I hand him a treat I say "ONE Animal Cracker. ONE.". And then there are times like doing a craft or such that we sit down & work together. And we are reading SO many books together now. It was easy to get lost in the day with a toddler & infant, but now it's a priority. As time passes & he gets older I'm sure the dynamic will change a bit, but for now this is working out splendidly :) 

I can't wait to update you on not only how the rest of the week has gone, but on how Potty Learning is going! BUT, it is insane how insanely busy we are right now with birthdays & weddings & appointments, so it may be a few days. Don't worry though, I'll get it all up on here eventually, just you wait & see :)