Clothespin Color Letter Matching

Inspired by a blog I found through Pinterest, I created this clothespin letter matching game with colors. I thought it would be a good opportunity to for Ella to not only practice her letters, but also learn to recognize the words for several colors. I mounted the cards on index cards (simply because it was something sturdy I had hanging around), and laminated them for extra durability. Poor Ella, though, because I didn’t do the best job clearly writing the letters on the clothespins (it was harder to write the letters than I thought it would be!). I’m going to have to go back through a few of the clothespins and fix my poor handwriting!

 

 

Tot School

-Ella is 24 months old-

Last week we worked on the letter “D” using several printables from the COAH blog. Ella can now identify A, B, C, D, E, and sometimes L. She’s picking up letters quickly now. We’re still only working on one letter each week, but she’s learning to recognize the letters a lot more quickly than in the past.

In conjunction with the letter D, she had her first exposure to a lacing activity using the dinosaur from COAH. She didn’t get it at first – in fact she just ripped the dino’s head off even though I had laminated it – but by the second day I let her play with it, she was actually practicing lacing!

Ella has also been doing really well with counting to ten, although at times she forgets eight. We practiced counting using the Ten Tiny Puppies book.

Ella has been thoroughly enjoying playing with her shape sorter. It has a bunch of shapes and is a good challenge for her. Sometimes she enjoys just dumping them all out and putting them back in (with the lid open), but that works great too!

Tot School

~Ella is 24 months old~

We’ve been really out of our regular Tot School routine. We’ve had a sick household off and on for about two weeks, but with that said, we have done a few things.

For Christmas Ella got a ton of Melissa and Doug toys. I love these toys, and so does Ella. They are great for learning, and Ella really enjoys playing with them.

Ella has loved building towers with these blocks. I’m absolutely amazed at how good she has gotten at building the towers. She also puts the boxes all back together. I thoroughly enjoy watching her mind work through the process of figuring out which order the boxes must be put back together.

Ella is beyond obsessed with coloring lately. Although it is still a bit advanced for her, I printed out tracing sheets from COAH. Ella has started drawing lines and circles on her own, so I thought I’d go ahead and introduce the tracing sheets.

Ella played with alphabet fridge magnets I got from Target for $1.00. She loves playing with them on the cookie sheet. Although she can’t recognized many letters yet, she loves finding the ones she knows. She’ll ask “What’s that?” when she comes to a letter she doesn’t recognize.

Ella has also been playing with puzzles a lot, like this Melissa and Doug animal sound puzzle. She’s so quick with the puzzles now, but she still loves to do them!

---
On a completely unrelated note, my photo of Ella that won first place in the Paper Mama’s Photo Challenge is in a vote-off for the best photo of the month. I’d love a vote if you like my photo! :)

Tot School: Week 8

-Ella is currently 22 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

We took the week of Thanksgiving off from Tot School (we didn't do anything official), but we got back into our activities this past week.

• Letter B: We started working on learning the letter B this week (Ella can now easily recognize the letter A everywhere!). We focused on "B is for Butterfly" and Ella really enjoyed coloring butterfly pictures. There are a ton of great ideas for the letter B on the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. Many of her activities are still to advanced for Ella, but we were able to use a few of them, and I look forward to using more as Ella continues to learn.

• Christmas/Winter Activities: This is Ella's second Christmas, but it is the first one that she is really old enough to learn about some Christmas/Winter things. We've been learning about snowmen and Christmas trees. Ella has been coloring Christmas trees and snowmen all  week long. I found a bunch of coloring sheets from the Crayola website. 

• Shapes: Ella has been doing great with her shapes! She thoroughly enjoys doing her shapes puzzle I made from the COAH blog.

• Life skills: We decided to give Ella a Christmas present early so that she could have some practice with opening Christmas presents and learning how to act during present-opening. The Christmas present we gave Ella was a Melissa and Doug latches board. This "puzzle" has different types of locks/latches on doors that open up to reveal different animals.

Waiting for dad to open it up!

Cheesy posing with her present picture:

Tot School: Week 4

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

This past week was pretty busy, and I didn't get as much in as I would have liked; however, Ella still had plenty of opportunities to learn and explore!

Ella loves playing with her blocks. We practice counting (she can consistently count to "6" now, and sometimes even makes it to "10"!), colors, sorting, building, and letter recognition with these blocks.

Ella also loves to play and learn with her puzzles. She has gotten so good with them that she'll purposefully put a piece in the wrong place to see if we notice - she loves to test us! Ella has several puzzles, but we've been using a shape puzzle (similar to this one) and a couple of different animal puzzles recently.

We continue to work on learning our colors, and this week I introduced this dinosaur file folder color matching game. Ella loves playing with it! I think it helps that it uses dinosaurs - she really likes dinosaurs!

Ella also had an opportunity this week to take a really long road trip with her daddy. She had lots of time to learn about different kinds of vehicles on the road, and she loves to point out the big trucks!

If you've been keeping up with my posts about learning activities I've been doing with Ella, you know that I'm constantly on the lookout for new blogs and websites that have activities I can do with her. Here are a few sites I've recently come across that I've found to be very helpful. I can't wait to implement some of the great ideas I've read on these sites.

• Confessions of a Homeschooler (I've mentioned this one a few times)
• 1+1+1=1 (The host blog of Tot School)
• Counting Coconuts
• Totally Tots
• No Time For Flash Cards

Tot School: Week 3

-Ella is 20 months old-

Check out what we did in Tot School last week!

A is for Apple, Avocado, Ant, and Ali (our dog). This week we officially started looking at the alphabet, specifically the letter A. Right now, we are working on recognizing the letter A, and learning a few words that start with A. Ella loves to say "A for apple!" There are tons of resources with printables for doing work with the alphabet. I chose to use several of the printables from the blog Confessions of a Homeschooler. There are so many on her website, I only used a few last week, and we'll be using more this week.

This is the first week that we used crayons at home (she's used them at other places, I just haven't had any for our house until now). She's enjoyed coloring in her own "workspace." Coloring has given a good opportunity to work on colors, although right now the only color she consistently identifies is purple.

Ella also continues to enjoy playing with her puzzles that I created from the printables on Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. The pieces have held up really well to Ella's rough play! When we first started using the puzzle pieces, she really wasn't sure what to do with them. Now she can match them up and identify what the "whole" is a picture of even if she only sees a "half." The apple and pumpkin were two of her favorites to find this past week.

We also played with playdoh for the first time this week. Ella was pretty unsure what she was supposed to do with it, but she thought it was pretty great when I made a "mouse" out of the playdoh. I'm glad she has a good imagination because my mouse was pretty goofy looking!

If you've got a toddler, be sure to check out the link below for more great ideas for your toddler!