Tot School--P Week

Isaiah will be 48 months on Saturday!

This week we started back into our alphabet inspired school. However, rather than going straight through the alphabet, we are working through a "letter/sound chart" given to us by Isaiah's speech therapist that shows which sounds usually develop first for little people. It just so happens that the first letter on the chart was P, so that's where we started.

I wasn't as on top of things as I still hope to be, but we're getting there. I didn't have a specific Bible story picked out to work on, but we did read the Bible every day as a family.

We started out the week just right with a playdate with our friend Lydia! No pictures, I'm afraid, just too busy having fun!

I drew and cut out an upper and lower case P for Isaiah to glue onto a piece of construction paper. He hadn't used glue in about 6 months, but he remembered exactly what to do with that bottle!

We then worked with his little markers on his pre-writing skills and hand strengthening by having him open the markers and then draw lines up, down and across as well as circles, trying to make the Ps pink and purple.

And then he tried to tell me he wanted no more of this activity (before he had completed the tasks) by throwing his arms out to the sides whenever I asked him to draw a line. Yeah, he's got his own ideas these days. :)

We played with pink play-doh. I made him a little pot from some of the play-doh so that he could tear pieces from the rest of the play-doh and put the pieces in the pot, but he was only interested in tearing apart the pot, so we just went with that before rolling out long pieces and shaping them into the letter P.

I finally got some pictures printed out for him. This was a big hit! He didn't do as well as I thought he would in naming the pictures at first. (I had tried to choose things that he already knows really well, looking for opportunities for him to succeed right away.) We then adapted to laying out all the pictures. I asked him to give me the picture of "walker" for instance, and he got them 100% correct this way, from a field of 8! We worked with these every day, and he has definitely improved. I hope to add to our stash every week.

Isaiah's pronunciation continues to improve, but his habits change. Originally he was not closing his words well, but now he's not opening them well. For instance, "popcorn" comes out "opcorn", when it used to be "popco". It's strange to me, since I don't understand how all that works. He's improved greatly on closing his words, which has definitely helped with understanding him. Any suggestions in this area are greatly appreciated!

Thomas also downloaded and printed lots of pictures of cars for Isaiah to look through--another big hit with Little Man! We use them for colors right now, but I have plans for grouping and other things as his color identification gets better.

We also enjoyed exploring the letter P in the kitchen with pancakes, peanuts and pizza!

Check out all the other Tot Schools for great ideas of fun things to do with your little ones at 1+1+1=1!