Tot School - Ocean and Beach Theme

Well, this is my first official "Tot School" post. Our boys are 28 months and 51 months old. My older son has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS and along with the issues that coincide with his diagnosis he also has some learning difficulties. Although he has been attending a special education pre-school I personally feel that they do not focus enough on his actual learning of skills. He is very smart in some areas and lacking in so many others. This is why I am committed to taking a bigger role in his education and in turn hopefully making him better prepared for kindergarten.

We have always focused on learning new skills a small part of everyday but we never actually had a game plan. Now I think we do, or at least I am working on it now. My oldest's school works off of the Creative Curriculum which is theme based so I will try to work along this schedule possibly staying a week behind so I can follow-up with anything they have missed.

Here is our week 1 -

Beach/Ocean Theme

We worked on the letter F - for Fish, this week using some writing template that I printed from my membership at Kid Soup (although it is a premium site with a fee it is a great resource for printables and little games; we use it constantly).

If you look closely you can see where he did his letter in pencil.

I printed out these fish patterns also from my membership at Kid Soup to make this file folder game for matching capital and lower case letters. I broke up the letters into three folders. Since I planned a lot of ocean themed activities we will definitely work on this one again several times since me son has trouble with letter recognition.

My son did an open-ended art picture to work on his imagination.

We also made some fun sea creature crafts together this week. Since my sons loves to make things with me I generally use craft time to work on fine motor, listening and attention to direction skills. You can find my original post on these crafts here (lobster and crabs, jellyfish collage and paper bag whales).

The boys and I read the following books. My 4 year old really loves the facts and details that are in the Cat In The Hat Learning Library series so we read two beach/ocean themed ones this week, it is a really great series for kids who are into technical fact based information (which my son thrives on).

For Some Quiet Time (also known as must get dinner on the table time) the boys watched this:

and we watched this one for family movie night!