Small Fry Academy - Week 1

Welcome to my Small Fry Academy

I've put together weekly lessons to keep my little tator tots happy and engaged in learning.  Hopefully you will be able to use these ideas with your little ones as well.  While some skills may build throughout the lessons, each week can be done at any time to follow your child's interests.

Thank you for stopping by and enjoy! 

Tumbling Toddler (2 years):  Week 1 - The Moon 

Our weekly learning poster:
Here's the poster I made

and here's it is with our weekly goals, very simple

There is no right or wrong way to structure your day.  The way I do this is to introduce the poster in the early morning, right after breakfast.  We sing songs and talk about the new concepts for the day.  After this we do fine or gross motor skills depending on the day and then take a break for free play (or running errands).  After lunch time we do poems and work on a skill (naming colors, pointing out letters, writing letter) and then we read our story.  This is usually right before nap time.  After nap we do a craft or activity and then have free time.  Before bed time we quickly look over our poster and point out what we may have learned today.  We like to point out to daddy what we learned since daddy is away all day, then we go upstairs and read another story (either the same or different, whatever my child picks).

Monday:
     Introduce the theme- The moon.  Talk about when you see it, where it is, if you can see it now.  Ask questions, even if your toddler can't answer you yet.
     Introduce weeks vocabulary words.  My words were Full, Half, and Crescent - Though you could do crescent for your shape this week.
     Read story about the moon (repeat daily).  You can read a new one every day or the same one over and over.  I check out 5 books from the library on the topic and let my child decide which he would like me to read every day.  Here's what we had for the moon.  There are so many children's book on every topic you can use whatever you have or whatever your library has.

My son loves listening to and watching these stories too.  Here's links to You Tube videos for what we listened to this week.  It's Papa, please get the moon for me and Goodnight Moon. 

Recite a poem about the moon (repeat daily):  

I recite a poem as well as doing songs and books just to introduce my kid to a different pattern of speech and words that we normally don't use in every day conversation.  I think of it as the same as letting your kid listen to a variety of different sounds of music. 

~The Man in the Moon~

The man in the moon

Looked out of the moon

And this is what he said,

"Tis time that, now I'm getting up,

All children went to bed."

Sing song about the moon (repeat daily): 

I found this little simple song on You Tube.  I let my son watch the video and we sang along once we learned it.  I have you tube on my iPhone so it was easy to just load this up for a quick song any time throughout the day.  

Gross Motor Skill:  

Recite Hey Diddle Diddle and take turns jumping over the moon.  I used a round throw pillow to be my moon but you could even just tape a piece of yellow or white paper to the floor and call it the moon.  

Tuesday:
Review poster.
Introduce shape or color (I alternate weeks.  One week I'll introduce a shape, the next a color).  This week I did the color yellow.  I pointed to the poster and then showed a couple items I collected in the house that were yellow.  Next we went on a yellow scavenger hunt and found more yellow in the kitchen.  We found the cheerios box, a couple magnets, and a tonka truck that was sitting in the kitchen.  I also conveniently picked out a yellow shirt for both Drew and his sister to wear today.

Fine Motor skill: We played with yellow moon sand.  You could also play with yellow play dough or if you introduced a shape you could cut playdough out into that shape using a cookie cutter.  I love the huge boxes of 100 plastic cookie cutters that walmart sells for about $12.  Money well spent in my opinion.

Color Reinforcement - For lunch we ate yellow:  We had bananas, yellow wax beans, and a cheese quesadilla...which I called the moon, it was full when I started, then I folded it in half and made it a half moon and I ate mine to look like a crescent moon...Drew tried to eat his like that too, it was very cute.

Craft: Waiting for dinner Drew colored a picture of Hey Diddle Diddle (the cow jumping over the moon)

Wednesday:
Review poster
Introduce Letter:  I picked the letter M.  We traced the M in flour.  I put a little flour on a cookie sheet and had Drew try to make an M.
We went on an M hunt when we went to the grocery store, our reward was we found M&M's at the checkout line, so we bought them and ate them.  Did I plan that right or what :)

Gross Motor skill:  A nice way to burn off energy after grocery shopping.  We tossed the moon around...A yellow playground ball.

Art: Waiting for dinner Drew painted the moon with yellow puffy paint (equal parts shaving cream and glue)

Letter Reinforcement: We ate M's - meatballs, melon and milk

Thursday:
Review poster


Introduce number: I started with 1, seemed like a logical place to start, especially since there's only 1 moon (for Earth at least).
We ate the number 1 for breakfast - we had 1 moon (mini bagel with cream cheese), one strawberry, one yogurt, and one cup of apple juice.

Fine Motor: We played with stickers.  We placed one moon sticker on each letter M (yellow dot stickers like they sell at Staples for color coding).  This is also a pre-math skill, one to one correspondence.

Art: markers - coloring a #1 print out sheet that I made.  It had a 1, the written One and a picture of the Moon.  I tired to get him to trace the 1 then I just let him color while I got dinner.

Friday:
Review and make a craft day!
We made the cow jumping over the moon.  We took a paper plate with a brad in the middle and then a piece of cardboard with a cow on it.  Of course we recited Hey Diddle Diddle with this craft.

Friday fun:  We opened Oreo cookies and ate the cream off in moon shapes.  Some opened nicely and were full moons, others the cream stuck to each side and we had half moons or crescents.  It didn't matter though, they all tasted good :)

This was an awesome week and a great way for me to start my small fry academy, I hope you liked it.  Next week we'll explore COWS!  :)

*On a side note the weather is still hot here so every single day we've been going outside from 10-Noon and then again from 6-7pm.  So while it looks like we are going a lot of inside learning we are still spending several hours out in fresh air.  Or hot muggy sticky air, whatever the case may be.   Also my son is now consistently napping for at least 90 minutes every afternoon.  I've really worked hard to teach him nap time rules and stick to them.  It's taken a month but he is now going down for a nap and going to bed without a fight.  I also attribute some of the success of nap time to the structure during the day now.  He knows exactly what to expect and knows he's not missing fun by napping since we have a lot of fun leaning every single day now.

Bouncing Baby (3 months):  Lesson 1
While a 3 month old isn't learning like a toddler I still like to jot done my "lesson plan" so I can make the most of our one on one time.  I try to do each of these things every day or every other day.  I don't have a schedule with my tiny tator tot.  Whenever I feed her or play with her I toss one of these songs or games in the mix.  Since she isn't playing with toys yet I am the only entertainment she has.

Story: I love you through and through...You can pick any book with a few on each page and colorful pictures to look at.

Nursery Rhyme: Hey Diddle Diddle.  I learned a little jazzy tune that goes along with this rhyme so I sing this to both kids during transition times, when we're cleaning up and moving on to the next thing.

Poem:   Poetry exposes kids to words you may not normally use as well as a different rhythm to the spoken word.  I recite the poem when Kara's eating.                                   

 Bed in Summer

by Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at night  And dress by yellow candle-light.  In summer quite the other way,  I have to go to bed by day.  I have to go to bed and see  The birds still hopping on the tree,  Or hear the grown-up people's feet  Still going past me in the street.  And does it not seem hard to you,  When all the sky is clear and blue,  And I should like so much to play,  To have to go to bed by day?

Vocabulary: Name the body parts while getting dressed and at diaper changes...which for a 3 month old is quite a bit :) 

Classical Music: Mozart (I use Pandora so I just listen to a variety of whatever it plays) I put on classical music at nap time for an hour.  When the music stops playing kids can get up, when the music is playing they must stay in their room for quiet time (well that applys to the toddler, Kara can get up whenever she feels like still)

Lullaby: Golden Slumbers...I sing this every single night before she goes to sleep.  I checked out a lullaby CD from the library to learn about a dozen different ones.  I highly recommend this! 
But here it is in case you want to learn it and can't check out a CD with it, this isn't me I just found someone singing it on YouTube to share.  

Exercise: Bicycle - I did this exercise at diaper change time too.  Kara's always a happy baby when I'm changing her diaper so I steal a few extra seconds to play with her.  


Baby massage: After bath time I massage with lotion.  I took a class on baby massage so I could learn the proper way to do it and what moves to do to help problems, but basically I just rub her legs and arms with my hand in a C shape starting at the top and going down using a pretty firm grab, I rub her palms and the bottom of her feet and I massage her belly in circles from my left to my right (she's laying on the floor facing me so her right to her left)...apparently that's the way it should be done to aid digestion.  Then I rub her jaw line, temples and up to the top of her head with my finger tips.  I do this every other day, since she gets a bath every other day


Game: This little piggy...I play this when massaging her and big brother likes to play this with her too :)  It's great bonding for all 3 of us together.  




Please let me know if you like the new format for 'tot school'   It took me quite a bit of time to figure out what and how I wanted to teach my kids.  I am so happy with the results this week and noticed a huge difference in my 2 year old with my really structured days.  I'm really excited about it and have several weeks planned already!

Other great learning things over here!