Teaching the Tot, Revisited

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You may remember that back in October I wrote a whole post about "teaching the tot" and things that we wanted to work on.  I just wanted a rough guide to follow when it came to working on things with Olivia.  In my mind, the list was suppose to get us until she started preschool and then we would re-evaluate.  Well, here we are!

I looked back at that post, wrote a list on paper, sat back and thought to myself "What the heck was I thinking?" Ha ha!  I did say in the post that I didn't think that we would necessarily succeed at all of them by the time she was 3, but there were 28 things on the list.   Oh, and two months after making the list we moved, AGAIN.  Then I was miserable the last two months of my pregnancy (hello, 10 pound baby).  Then I had a newborn. I got a little nervous as I wrote out the list.  Surprisingly, we actually accomplished 20 things on the list!!  I'm pretty pleased with that.

Out of the 8 that were left--3 of them we didn't address at all, 3 of them are things that she almost has but aren't 100% yet (lower case letters, rhyming, tracing a line), and 2 of them are things that we work on and work on and she isn't even close (counting to 20, recognizing numbers).  We also worked on items that weren't on the list (like making simple patterns).  Overall, it was a good tool for us to use.

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I've said it before, and I will say it again--parents should be their child's first teacher.  So even though she is going to preschool, I am not writing off all learning at home.  We definitely don't do a scheduled learning time, nor is it rigid and demanding.  Honestly, what you see on this blog is a lot of what we do.  It's very simple, laid back, and spontaneous.  We are going to keep it that way for now.

Our new list is going to contain some of the same things, a well as some new things.

We always want to be working on fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and incorporating music and art into our weekly routine.

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Specific items that we are going to work on for the next semester are:

*counting to 20

*recognizing numbers 1 to 10

*continue working on one to one correspondence

*finish up learning the lowercase letters and matching them with the uppercase (we are close!)

*continue practicing rhymes

*writing--hold pencil properly (she's stubborn on this), trace lines, draw circle, begin to write name

*scissor practice

*recognize more complicated patterns

*same vs different

*beginning sequencing

*continue calendar talk (this interests her)

*introduce 5 senses

*dress and undress self

*continue basic phonics skills-she loves doing beginning sounds, so we are going to expand on this