I don't know if it's the warmer weather, the messiness of toddler life, having a Dad/husband having to prep for finals, or a combo of everything, but time seems to be going by so quickly as of late and I'm having a hard time keeping up! Amongst the craziness though tot-school has stayed a consistently fun part of each of our days, and as long as I can keep on top of documenting the activities we'll be in good shape. 😉 So, for the sake of saving as much time as possible for all of the above mentioned items, here's our week of PURPLE in review!

Theme: The Color PURPLE
Snacks (One per day):

• Bare  Baked Crunchy Beet Chips
  
• Purple Grapes
  
• Plum Organics Eat Your Colors - Purple 
  
• Happy Tot Love My Veggies (Purple Pouch Blend)
  
• Mixed Berry Dried Fruit Strips (these are a purplish enough color that we let them pass)
  

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the PURPLE mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan 1-2 activities each day):
Monday - PURPLE Color/Create a Book activity and PURPLE sensory bin. I feel like we'll continue to do these little coloring books whenever I can find one applicable to our weekly theme from here on our because of how much Em has enjoyed them. Not only are they helping her to learn her colors, but she's also now started to pay much closer attention to detail, and I love watching her motor skills develop with how she'll hold her crayons and pencils. For Emery's sensory bins, I received a few questions as to what exactly we put in her bin. I shared specifics on the toys that we included in her purple sensory bin in my Instagram stories (click on my "Tot School Highlights to find that if you're interested in specifics) but to answer the question in short we just use toys from around the house that fit our theme! Items will usually include things like wooden blocks, magnets, wooden stacking rings, puzzle pieces, and other small items that Emery can dig for and move around in the rice. Other items that could be used though could be Legos, cars, really anything that your kiddo enjoys playing with! The main point is that there's some sort of "theme" to the sensory bin to help teach whatever you're focusing on, and that it's giving your child a different way to play with their toys.

Tuesday- PURPLE play-dough with bead stamps and PURPLE YouTube Video. We found another use for our lacing beads that we bought last week with this week's play-dough activity, giving me yet another reason to be so happy that we got them for Emery! For the activity, I let Emery pick out all of the purple beads, and then use whichever ones she wanted to stamp shapes into her play-dough, saying "PURPLE - (whatever shape she was making)" whenever she'd stamp it into the dough. Her favorite one was the square bead, and before long Em was saying "poo-pull scare!" along with me every time she stamped it!

Wednesday- "PURPLE Yuck" Teeth Brushing Game. Wednesday of last week also happened to be Emery's first ever dentist appointment, so in an effort to help prep her for the experience I created a fun little teeth brushing game for her. Putting this together was as easy as putting a sheet of paper into a gallon sized ziplock bag, then giving Emery a purple dry-erase marker to color "yuckies" onto the teeth through the bag. Once she'd drawn on enough of the purple germs, she then got to use a special purple toothbrush to brush all of the yucky germs away. I just drew/colored my own little smiling girl to make it more personal for Em, but here's a cute free coloring page that would also work great for any kiddo. I'm not sure how well the activity helped prep Em for the actual dentist, but if it helped her with the color purple I guess we'll take at least one of the two objectives learned as a win. 😆

Thursday- Bead Sort Activity to recap on secondary colors (PURPLE, ORANGE, & GREEN), and PURPLE bath crayons. Emery had asked to play with her beads and buttons this morning, so I went into my craft closet and found a ton of the old classic beads that elementary school dreams are made of (yet another testament of how bad I am at throwing things out 😜)  and put together a sorting game for her that worked really similarly to our bead sorting games in past week's activities. The big change that we made to this game was that instead of using color coordinated bowls for Em to drop the beads into, we used plain glasses and I started out each glass with a couple of beads in each color to get her started on the sorting. I wanted to see how she would do having a little less obvious of direction with the color sorting, and although it took a couple of tries to get her into it, once she caught the concept of things she did really well with the game. For Em's bath that night we went back to focus on the color purple specifically and gave her some purple bath crayons to color with in the tub. Em LOVES being able to color during her bath times, and I love that it's an activity that she can have full freedom and creativity with, but is also super easy to clean up after (the colors literally just come off with water and a light sponge/bath loofa, even on a textured tub) so it's a win-win all around. 

Friday- Free Play with Lacing Beads to recap all of our colors. Friday was a busy day for us spent prepping to spend 9+ hours at Thunder Over Louisville the next day, but since this was our last day of tot school for the week and our last time focusing specifically on colors, I wanted to still give Emery a fun activity to finish up the week on. She asked to play with her lacing beads that morning while we were home, so I pulled them out for her and let her have free reign on what she decided to do with them, just making sure to either say or have her say the color of whatever bead she was holding in her hand at the time. She laced them, stacked them up and knocked them down, clanked them together with her hands to make noise, and just had fun with them however she felt inclined to. I always appreciate some sort of focus with our activities, but also have to admit that the times that I'm able to see Em fully indulge in her own creativity without any sort of major boundaries is really fun to watch and be a part of. 

That wraps up our purple week and our color unit!! After a lot of thought I made the decision to not do any weeks dedicated specifically to colors not on the basic color wheel (pink, brown, white, black, grey) just because right now I feel like Emery is ready to move onto something new, and I feel like because we've been focusing on the concept of colors for so long now, she's grasped the idea of it well enough that the other side colors are just starting to fall into place. She's now able to recognize and say the color pink and white and that's just from our day to day activities without any specific focus on them! It's incredible how much she's able to soak up and I'm loving watching her learn new things every day! This week in tot school we've been celebrating Earth Day and focusing all about the Earth and what we can do to be kind to it, and I'm hoping to have that post up for you all before a whole other week has passed by! Thanks for being so patient with me, and always remember that if you have any questions about any of our tot school activities and don't want to wait for the next post, you're welcome to follow along with us on Instagram or shoot me an email or DM on Instagram with any questions! 

We will see you all soon with our Earth focused week of Tot School! Happy Learning! 

WOW this last week of life just flew by for us! We had appointments, parties with friends, and got to celebrate Kyle's (Dada's) birthday throughout the week, so finding time to fit in our tot school activities proved to be a little harder than expected. We still worked hard to get at least one activity in a day, but didn't pressure ourselves too much if we only got one in, or if the activities were on the short side, some only lasting about 5 minutes! We never stress over the length of the activities, and it's so important to remember going into these that your toddler will let you know when they're done with their tot school playtime. Sometimes it'll last an hour, sometimes a couple of minutes, the important thing is that the toddlers are learning and having fun! All we need to do is provide the structure to help them know what to learn and explore. 🙂

Theme: The Color ORANGE
Snacks (One per day):

• clementine oranges/tangerines
• cheddar cheese sticks/cheese cubes
• baked sweet potato fries
• Macaroni & Cheese
• ​Happy Tot Organics Love My Veggies pouch (carrots, bananas, mangos, sweet potatoes)

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the ORANGE mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan 1-2 activities each day):
Monday - ORANGE create-a-book activity and M&M color sort activity. We started out our week with our classic coloring book activity that we've done every Monday throughout our colors unit! Each week we pair this activity with the Pantone Colors book AND the corresponding mini board book for the color we're focusing on, and it seems to have been a really successful way to introduce the color of the week to Emery in a focused and fun way. That afternoon I had an appointment at the chiropractor that happened to fall at the exact same time as Emery's nap, so in an effort to keep my tired toddler happy I pulled out some of her Easter candy during the appointment to keep her entertained. While in the waiting room at the office, I poured out all the candies onto her stroller tray, then had her help me sort them into different rows based on color (her tray has horizontal grooves in it so it helped to keep them organized). Once they were all organized by color, I'd ask her to find me a specific color of M&M, and if she picked out the right color from her lines, then she got to eat the candy. This was definitely one of those made up on the spot type of activities, but it helped make our experience waiting for the doctor more enjoyable, and helped me feel slightly less guilty about feeding my child M&M's because if it's educational then it's a little more ok. 😆

Tuesday- ORANGE sensory bin and coloring an ORANGE with ORANGE chalk on the chalkboard. A question that I get asked a LOT is how I get Emery to not make a huge mess every time we get out her sensory bin and it's time for me to get real with you all and publicly answer that... I don't. I try to do my best to manage the mess as much as possible, but at the end of the day Em is a toddler and I feel like that usually wins in the mess or no mess battle. Every week when we pull it out I put the bin on a large tablecloth to try and catch as much of the mess as possible, and then start each session by reminding Emery that she can play with the bin as much as she wants as long as she keeps the rice inside of the bin. Sometimes I'll try to give Em specific tasks while playing to keep her entertained with the sensory bin as well (ex: can you find me the ORANGE circle?) but most of the time I let her play freely. If she starts getting crazy, I'll calmly once that her one rule is to keep the rice in the bin, the second time of the rule again and let her know that if she throws/dumps the rice again that playtime with the bin will be over, and then the third time will take the bin away saying that since the rice couldn't stay in the bin that playtime with it is over and it's time to do something else. I've found that at least with Emery this method helps give her the reminder that she needs to try and keep things neat, but also helps me know too when she's done with the activity. By the time we've reached her third warning, I've found that the main reason that Em is throwing the rice is because she's gotten bored playing with the toys in it and is moving on to in her mind what makes sense as the next activity - throwing the rice and making a mess. Switching to a new activity at that point helps save us a little more of a mess, and a little more of my sanity at the end of it. 

Wednesday- ORANGE Name Game activity. We had a park playdate Wednesday morning during what would be our regular tot school time so we only did one activity this day but it ended up being more successful than I expected it to! Emery has started recognizing different random letters of the alphabet (E, H, S, & V before this activity, like I said random haha) but I wanted an activity that would help her recognize the letters specifically in her name aside from "E". Making this activity is SUPER easy and free to put together - I just used some old paper scraps in different shades of orange and then wrote down a letter of Emery's name on each one. I laid the letters out on Em's table in order, then went over each letter with her while saying them out loud. Once that was done I gave her an oversized button, then would ask her to put the button on the different letters to see how she did remembering them. We'd cheer like crazy every time she got the correct letter, and I was amazed at how quickly she caught on, and how the information has actually stuck since the activity. She now recognizes the letters "M" and "R" in addition to the others, and we're only working on the "Y" to get her full name in letters covered. Since this was an afternoon activity, Kyle had just walked in the door from school as we were starting, and Emery insisted on him playing it with her, which is why our cute scrub-laden Dada is in the pictures, jumping straight from one type of school to the other like a pro. 😉

Thursday- ORANGE flower walk outside and flower cookie-cutter activity with our homemade ORANGE play-dough. Thursday gave us the first warm day that we'd seen in what felt like a million years, and with how miserably late and sparse the warm weather has been this Spring, we've learned to take advantage of the warm weather whenever we get it! We took a walk outside through our neighborhood and to our local grocer's nursery and pointed out all of the orange flowers that we saw along the way. Once we got home from our walk, we took out our orange play-dough and a flower shaped cookie cutter (I got it in a set of Easter cookie cutters on clearance from our local grocery store) and let Emery cut out her own orange blooms!

Friday- ORANGE lacing beads. This Friday was Kyle's actual birthday and he was lucky enough to have the day off from school, so the majority of this day was spent spending time together as a family and celebrating him! We did get a new educational toy in the mail this same day though, and when Emery saw it she was really excited to try it out, so we took it as an opportunity to have a tot school themed activity to add to our fun Friday! I found these cute Melissa & Doug Primary Lacing Beads on an Amazon lightening deal, and after actually seeing the beads in person and watching Em play with them am SO happy with my purchase and the versatility of the beads (we've already used them in three different activities in less than a week's time!) They include all of the primary and secondary colors, and are just the right size for little toddler hands to hold and maneuver, but are big enough that I don't have to worry about Em putting them into her mouth/any sort of choking hazard. For our activity this week, I put the box with all of the colored beads in front of Em and had her pull out the orange ones one by one, stringing them onto the lace as she went. It was so much fun watching her focus really hard on getting the string through the beads, and the excitement on her face when she'd get one through was priceless! She always seems to grow and retain a lot from activities that also involve some sort of motor skill development, so these were a definite win in our book!

That wraps up our ORANGE themed week at tot school! This next week we'll be finishing up our color wheel and unit with the color PURPLE! Feel free to follow along on Instagram for our daily activities in real time, or check back here next week for the full blog post!

Have a great week!

If I'm being honest, this past week of tot school was a challenge for us. The teething that started causing us problems at the end of last week's tot school continued strong through the whole of this week, and on Tuesday while playing outside Emery also had her first official face collision with the cement, making her willingness to do much of anything almost nilch. We didn't get two full activities in every day, but worked hard to do at least one every day, and thankfully we're far enough into our colors that Emery still seemed to pick up on the color green fairly quickly despite not spending quite as much attention on it. Because I like to keep things as real as possible here I'm only including the actual activities that we did this week in my post, but if you're looking to do more activities with your toddler throughout the week, feel free to check out my other tot school color themed weeks for more ideas!

Theme: The Color GREEN
Snacks (One per day):

• guacamole/avacados
• green smoothies (we put spinach, frozen fruit, and a vegan power powder blend in ours)
• Go-Go Squeez Fruit & Veggiez Pouches
• ​Plum Organics Mighty Colors (Green) pouch & Mighty 4 (Green) Blend

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the GREEN mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan 1-2 activities each day):
Monday - ​GREEN coloring create a book activity and GREEN themed sensory bin. These little coloring books have continued to be a success with Emery every week, and these past couple of weeks I've allowed her to start coloring in her books with miniature colored pencils in addition to her crayons to give the activity more variety. One of my fellow mama blogger friends did this same activity with her little and also let her use stickers in the color of the week on her book and it looked like a super fun idea to try! After Emery was done with her book, she actually asked to get the sensory bin out to play, so in the name of self-directed learning, I got it all set up for her with her green toys and let her have some fun with it for the rest of our morning!

Wednesday- ​Sing the GREEN song and Laugh & Learn™ Shapes & Colors Music Show App on the iPad. This was definitely our hardest day of the week with Em not feeling well and she basically spent the day playing Queen of the Castle, but we still tried to fit in a little bit of green education with her snack and some singing combined with cuddles to help her feel better. I've also found on days like these that Em tends to ask for waaaaay more screen time than she usually would, so in an effort to keep that screen time as educational as possible, we downloaded an app that teaches shapes and colors through a colorful piano on the iPad. I obviously prefer Em learning through more hands on methods, but for days when a screen seems to be the only thing that will make her happy, this app has been one that we've found to be purely educational and still fun enough to keep Emery's attention. 

Thursday- GREEN tree painting activity and GREEN play-dough /counting with buttons activity. This green tree painting activity I'd originally planned for Wednesday to follow up on our outside activity with, but putting it off until Thursday didn't seem to make much of a difference in Em's ability to enjoy it so we counted it as a win! To do this activity all I did was draw/color in a plain brown tree trunk on a piece of paper, then I gave Emery a circular sponge brush and some green washable paint and had her fill in all of the "leaves" on the trees. After the painting Emery asked to play with play-dough, so I got out our homemade green dough and some green buttons and we played a game where we'd count buttons as Em would squish them into the play-dough, seeing how many buttons we could count up to before there was no more room.

Friday- GREEN flower painting activity and bead sorting activity to recap colors RED, BLUE, YELLOW, & GREEN. Emery really enjoys playing with paint, so choosing to still do our weekly wooden flower painting to go along with our Planting a Rainbow book in addition to the painting of the tree was a no-brainer. To help keep things varied enough for her, we used the circle sponge brushes on Thursday for the tree activity, and used her regular kid paint brushes for the flower activity on Friday. After her tree activity we pulled out her bead sorting activity that we'd done at the end of her yellow week, but added in a green bowl and green beads to the sorting mix to see how she did with the additional color. She caught onto the added challenge and handled it really well, saying "oops" if she ever dropped a bead into the wrong bowl by accident and correcting herself immediately before I even had a chance to say anything. Seeing little things like that just help me believe in the effectiveness of tot school. Having that little bit of added focus and structure with what we're learning and playing with each week seems to be making a world of difference. I'm having so much fun watching Em learn and grow and can't wait to continue forward with her tot school journey!

This next week we will be focusing on the color ORANGE! Feel free to follow along on Instagram for our daily activities in real time, or check back here next week for the full blog post!

Have a great week!

Literally right after we finished up this week of tot school we decided that we all needed a little family getaway and hopped in the car to start a spring break vacation. Because of that this post is a little delayed in getting out, but I'm so happy to report to all of you that at the end of our yellow week Emery had what I guess you could call a "breakthrough" in her learning, and all of these activities that we worked to do to teach her the primary colors seemed to come together and she finally got it! I also tried to keep this week of tot school really flexible by letting Emery choose which activities we did on each day. We have a small bookshelf in our apartment that holds the majority of her school "supplies", and now that we've been doing this for long enough it was a lot of fun to see what she specifically chose to do on different days. I also feel like allowing her that freedom to choose the activities (maybe?) helped make them more effective in their teaching, and even though no week with a toddler is completely mess/tantrum free, this one for the most part felt more easy going and productive, giving me that bit of motivation that I needed to know that this whole tot school thing actually works. 😉

Theme: The Color YELLOW
Snacks (One per day):

• Bananas (Em LOVES bananas so we did fresh and freeze dried)
• Yellow Bell-Peppers (plain or with hummus)
  
• Fresh Corn (we included this in with a few of her dinners)
• Fresh Pineapple (if fresh fruit is a little too pricey for your area/season, then a freeze-dried tropical blend with mango's, pineapples, and bananas is a great alternative)
• Plum Organics Eat Your Colors YELLOW food pouch

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the YELLOW mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan about two activities each day):
Monday - YELLOW coloring activity book & coloring with YELLOW chalk on the chalkboard. Emery's really come to look forward to making these little color books every week, and this week it was a lot of fun to see her start to recognize some of the pictures that she was coloring (like the banana) and associate that item with the color yellow. After the book was made, Em asked to color with her chalk, so we pulled out our big chalkboard and I drew a large sun for her to color in to try and keep the item/color recognition going. 

Tuesday- YELLOW play dough (with button-face emotions) and YELLOW YouTube song/video.  This morning Emery pulled out the play dough, and to make it a little more interesting I decided to incorporate in a different play item and pulled out some old yellow buttons that I'd found in my craft closet. We read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Suess, which focuses on different emotions being felt with different colors, and then used the buttons to make different emotions in faces on the yellow play dough. For where Em is currently at with her age, I would put the buttons in place to make a specific emotion, and then we'd say which emotion it was while she'd push the buttons into the play dough. For older kiddos, this could easily be adapted to have the children create the faces in the dough themselves, or create numbers, letters, or shapes depending on what you're wanting to focus on with them. 

Wednesday- YELLOW sensory bin and singing our YELLOW song/poem.  There will forever be a part of me that will despise how messy of an activity the sensory bin is, but for how much Em loves it I know that it's one that we'll have to keep around when it can be made applicable. This week while she played with the sensory bin we also tried to incorporate finding a few different shapes into the mix of things, and in an effort to keep all things relevant we also sang the YELLOW song during/after the sensory bin activity. I don't know if it's just my bad singing voice or if they're just really catchy tunes, but Emery has been loving these weekly color songs and makes them into a little dance party every week!

Thursday- ​YELLOW flower painting activity and colorful window markers. This flower painting activity at least for me keeps getting more and more fun every time we do it. This week Emery got super focused on her work, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the artist in me celebrated at her attention to detail. 😉 The second activity of the day was not originally planned on, but ended up being successful regardless and reminded me of the ever-importance of being flexible with the curriculum. I had initially planned a bead sorting color activity for us, but that afternoon we were watching a couple of Emery's friends (an almost 3 yr old and a baby) and when I pulled out the activity, I realized that although it proved to be a great idea for the almost 3 year old, it was too much stimulation for Emery combined with the company of friends, and it ended with a giant mess of beads all over the floor and Emery crying because I was letting her friend do the activity and not her. We did try the bead activity again the next day, but I needed something quick to make up for the mess/disappointment in that moment. I pulled out some window markers that I've had since college (you can find some here), and let Em and her friend go wild on the biggest window in our house. It ended up being a huge hit, and to insure that colors were tied in I had the kids name each color that they used before taking it to the window.

​Friday- YELLOW glitter star wand, picking out YELLOW clothes to wear, and bead sorting activity recapping on RED, BLUE, & YELLOW. I didn't get any pictures of the yellow star wand, but we basically just painted this wooden star wand that Em found at Hobby Lobby, and then once the star was painted yellow, I gave Emery some gold glitter (turns out gold & yellow are the same thing in the glitter world?) and let her go to town on it making her wand as glittery as possible. As with all glitter crafts, make sure that your work surface is completely covered unless you want it to sparkle for weeks on end following the activity. On Friday we also did a retry on the bead sorting activity and I can't even tell you all how happy and proud I felt watching Emery as the activity just "clicked" in her mind and she went straight to work sorting through the beads! To recreate this activity, all you need is bowls (I made mine the same colors as the beads we were working on, but another alternative would be to use white paper bowls and color either the base or rim of each bowl the colors that you're wanting to focus on), and then some sort of small object in the different colors that you want your toddler to sort (we used wooden beads - another craft closet clean out find). Put all of the beads in a separate bowl, and then guide your toddler to separate the beads into the different bowls by color. If you're child is older they could do this with more colors than three, or use a spoon to transfer the beads/objects to help develop their hand-eye coordination. Once Emery got what the activity was supposed to be, she had SO much fun separating out the beads, and I already know that this is going to be an activity that we coordinate into our day to day activities to keep her up to date on her colors that she's been learning. It always feels good to end the week on a positive note, and this for us was definitely the best type of ending we could've had!

I've got to be real, this week of tot school was a rough go for Emery and I. Something in the universe was disturbing Emery's world, and even though we worked really hard to stick to all of our planned activities it was a major struggle because of the gargantuan temper tantrums that ensued every single time the tiniest of things did not go exactly the way that Emery wanted them to. It was REALLY hard to not get discouraged and just throw our tot school activities out the window since Em didn't seem to be getting into them that much anyway and I was basically just in mom-survival mode, but on Friday morning the heavens opened, my child was happy and actually responded with the word "BLUE!!!!" when I asked her what color her bath water was, and all was right with the world again. It was such a good reminder that even when things seem a little hopeless because of that crazy toddler life to not give up!! Even when we don't realize it our kiddos are still soaking in so much information and as long as we're working hard to make sure that the info they're consuming is good, then they will get what we're trying to teach them in their own timeline, most likely right when we feel at our wit's end. 😉 

Theme: The Color BLUE
Snacks (One per day):
Honestly it was a LOT harder to find foods that were naturally blue to use for this week's activities, so we basically ate blueberries everyday in one form or another. If your tot doesn't like blueberries, then you might have to get creative by either choosing items with blue packaging, or just skipping the snack portion for this week. 

• Blueberries (fresh or freeze dried)
• Clif Organic Kid Z Bars (The snack bars themselves aren't blue but the packaging and wrappers are so we let this one count)
• Blue Corn Tortilla Chips with Hummus
• Blueberry Yogurt (we did Chobani's Greek)
• Plum Organics Mighty 4 Blends Tot Pouch (We did the blue pouch that included sweet potatoes, carrot, blueberry, apple, greek yogurt, millet & oat)

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the BLUE mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan about two activities each day):
Monday - BLUE coloring book activity and sing the BLUE song/poem. These cute little books are seriously my favorite way to kick off our week when focusing on a color because Em really enjoys making them and then she can use them and continue to look through them for the rest of the week, helping to keep our focus color in her mind! The BLUE song is such a cute and simple activity, and when we do it as our activity for the day we'll usually sing it through 2-3 times, and then again throughout the week if it fits into the flow of our day!
Tuesday- BLUE chalk on the chalkboard (with letter "E" focus) and outdoor BLUE activities. Tuesday was the only day slightly warm enough last week and we felt like we had to take advantage of it, so we spent our afternoon outside playing with Emery's blue bubble wand (our Target's dollar sections has these available from now until usually end of summer and for only being a dollar they last for a long time!) and she got to try out riding her new blue bike. The chalk activity could be done either inside or outdoors, but due to timing/Emery's temperament we did ours inside. A while back I found this giant sheet of chalkboard at Home Depot for only $10 and knew it'd make for a lot of fun indoor activity times while waiting for the weather to turn warm! Emery recently learned the letter "E" and has been pretty excited about that, so as an additional learning activity with the chalk I drew a large upper and lowercase "E" on the chalkboard, and then let Emery fill them in with the blue chalk specifically for our color focus. 

Wednesday- BLUE sensory bin and picking out BLUE clothes to wear for the day. In Emery's Little Friends Sound Book: Colors, the whole premise of the book is picking out matching colored clothes to go with each of the character's outfits (ex: bear has a blue hat and blue shoes, what color backpack should he choose?) so to try and keep a theme we picked out Emery's blue matching clothes on the same day that we read this book. We also did the sensory bin with her but with blue toys this week instead of red, and just like last time she had an absolute blast with it! Learning from last week's mess, instead of putting her sensory bin on her little play table like last week I put it on a giant tablecloth on the floor, and it made cleanup so much easier! Em tries to get this activity out almost every single day so whenever we can fit it in with our weekly theme I think we definitely will! (To see how we put together her sensory bin check out my last tot school post)

Thursday- Painting/Planting a Rainbow Activity and watch this 5-minute BLUE YouTube video. This ABC Kid TV channel on YouTube has proven to be great two weeks in a row now with their cute short videos on the different colors making this activity an easy one for a grumpy, just woken up from nap Emery, and our weekly painting flower activity to go along with our Planting a Rainbow book made for a fun activity for the second week in a row! Instead of doing "bag painting" like we've done in the past I decided to give Em a little more freedom and let her paint with actual brushes on a protected surface and it actually worked out really well. I found some adorable kid-sized paintbrushes at Target that worked really well. It allowed Emery to feel like a big kid painting with a brush, but also keep her hands and our work surface (mostly) clean. This day's activity was also a really good lesson day for me to learn that sometimes it's ok to give kiddos a little more freedom in their creativity, and that it won't always necessarily end up in a huge mess. Using craft paper to cover our surface made for an easy cleanup, and an overall happy mama and Emery. 

Friday- BLUE watered bubble bath and play with BLUE play dough. I said at the beginning of this post that this week was a bit rough for us, and that was no lie. All of the activities leading up to this point were kept fairly short because of Emery's even more short of a temper, and I had reached a point where I wondered if any of my efforts to teach her were making any sort of difference. I was ready to just give us a "free day" from any sort of tot school activities, but then late Thursday night found these Crayola bath tablets at Target that would turn Em's bath water whatever color of tablet I chose to put in the water. I've always been a little weary of colored bath things because of how close of contact it makes with Emery's baby skin, but these specific drops are free of any sort of phthalates, parabens, fragrances, and are non-toxic, so we decided to give these a shot. I also liked the idea of being able to make the concept of "blue water" real for Emery; we always color water blue on paper, and even in her songs and books talk about the ocean and other water being blue, but the main water that Em experiences on a daily basis in the bathtub is just clear so.... we put a blue tablet in the tub along with some Burt's Bee's bubble bath and oh my gosh - I seriously cannot remember the last time I saw Emery so excited! She LOVES bath time already, but adding in the bubbles and the color seriously just made her little year and a half old life! The best part about it was that while she was playing in the bath, I asked her what color her water was (honestly just out of habit of trying to teach her the colors) and when she responded with an enthusiastic "BLUUUUUUUUE!!!" all of my mama doubts and frustrations just flew right out the window. We were able to end the week on a positive note, and I didn't have to feel so "blue" about whether or not my daughter is actually learning any of these colors. I'm learning more and more that Emery will pick up on the concepts I'm trying to teach her in her own time, and that as her mother it's my job to simply teach and give her the environment to learn in as fun a way as possible. Every day and week we're still learning and perfecting, but the experience is a fun one and I'm enjoying the chance to be part of Emery's learning and growth. 

To get a day by day scheduled chart for your own BLUE themed week of Tot School simply click here for the free download, or if you're looking for a blank template to fill in with your own activities then feel free to checkout this free blank template. Week 3 of Tot School is going to be focused around the color YELLOW, and towards the end of the week we'll start trying to incorporate all three of the primary colors together to see how Emery does with sorting them out! Keep an eye out for that blog post next week, or feel free to follow along with us doing the activities in real time on our Instagram stories! Thanks for following along! Until next week-

Before jumping into our first week's recap of tot school, I figured that a really brief intro into what we're doing would be appropriate for anyone wondering exactly what "tot" school is.😉 I had first heard the term used by a few different mama friends on Instagram; curiosity lead me to doing some research, and I found that "tot" school is essentially a prequel to pre-school, and a focused and organized way to teach toddlers basic knowledge and life topics. There are SO many different ways to go about doing tot-school, so what you're seeing here is how Em & I have decided to do it that works well for us! Our basic set up includes a weekly theme, and each week has a snack, a book, and two activities for each day. We keep the schedule flexible to keep my stress levels low, and to ensure that the experience is as personalized and enjoyable for Emery as possible. If you like our setup but want to change the themes to something more applicable to your toddler, great! If you like my themes but want to add in more activities or different books, great! The whole point of the tot school is to make it your own in a way that best works for you and your tot! I hope to use this space to share our resources, activities, books, etc. with anyone that feels like using them for you and your toddler, and hope that whatever direction it takes you is one that can bring a few smiles to you and your little one!

Theme: The Color RED
Snacks (One per day):

• Strawberries (fresh or freeze dried)
• Raspberries
• Raisins or Cranberries (the Sun-Maid raisins come in a RED box, as well as Target's Market Pantry brand to tie into the color theme!)
• Red Gala Apple
• Plum Organics Eat Your Colors RED fruit & veggie pouch. I feel like Plum Organics products are sold at most grocery stores, and I love their "eat your colors" pouches, mainly because they help with teaching Em colors AND get her to eat some veggies without an argument. 😜 Not sponsored at all, but if this type of snack is your thing here's a coupon!

Books (We read one book a day specific to the weekly theme):

• ​My Many Colored Days (Dr. Suess)
• Pantone: Colors (Pantone)
• Pantone: Box of Color (Pantone) (This is actually 6 mini board books for six different colors, so this week we used the RED mini book to go along with our theme)
• My Very First Book of Colors (Eric Carle)
• Planting a Rainbow (Lois Ehlert)
• Little Friends Sound Book: Colors (Roger Priddy)

Activities (We tried to plan about two activities each day):
Monday - Pick out RED clothes to wear (for Em & me) and Red Coloring Book Activity. I love activities like this because it shows that the activities don't have to be super complex or take a ton of planning or effort to pull off. Em LOVES picking out her own clothes to wear so for this day we just made it applicable to the color of the week, and then this book was as easy as printing out the free template, letting her color until she felt like she was done, then I cut out the pages for her and she helped me staple them all together. She was SO proud of the little "book" she'd made and carried it around the house with her for the rest of the morning!

Tuesday - Color Song RED on YouTube and a RED sight/nature walk. Tuesday was our warmest weathered day last week and to take advantage of the sunshine we went to the zoo that morning with friends and afterwards Em was pretty worn out and took a good nap. Usually when she wakes up from naps she needs a few minutes of cuddle time to fully wake up so watching this short 5 minute song video on YouTube about the color RED was a perfect after nap activity for her to wake up to, and then once she was ready to play again we went for a little walk outside and pointed out everything red that we could find from stop signs to cars to berries and everything in between!
Wednesday - Sing the "RED" song/poem and red flower painting. Emery loves music so when I found these free songs for each of the colors I knew I wanted to incorporate them into our schooling. I didn't get any pictures of the actual flower painting because it was a little messy, but it's basically an activity designed to go along with our Planting a Rainbow book. The book talks about planting flowers of all different colors, and I was able to find these cute wooden flower shapes at Target that I thought would go along with it well. Each week while focusing on colors we'll read the book, then I'll let Emery paint a few of the flowers in whatever color we're focusing on for that week. To make this activity as mess free as possible, I put the flowers in a gallon sized ziplock bag with some red paint and water, then let Emery move the paint with her hands and shake the bag until the flowers were covered. I'll have a full DIY post with this activity on the blog later, but here's a picture of her doing a regular rainbow painting to help give you an idea of how it looks. 

Thursday - Homemade Play dough. We'd originally had two activities planned for today, but ended up scratching the second one so that I could involve Emery in the making of the play-dough as well as the playing of it! We made the dough together in the morning in six different colors, then in the afternoon played with the red play-dough specifically to go along with our theme! The recipe I used for the play-dough can be found here; the only thing I did differently was to make two colors per batch instead of just one (basically just follow her recipe but before adding in the food coloring, separate half of your batch into a different saucepan to finish up!)

Friday - RED Sensory Bin and bake RED m&m cookies. This was probably our favorite day of the entire week which is totally ok because we celebrate Fri-YAY whenever we can! 😉 Making Em's sensory bin took less than 5 minutes to put together and kept her entertained for over 30.... which is basically an eternity in toddler time! To put it together I bought this lidded storage bin from Target for less than $5 (it's the 3.25 x 11 x 14" sized one in case you already have something similar), and then cleaned out my cupboard of all of our rice and quinoa that I'd let expire but due to previous laziness hadn't thrown out and put it to good use in Em's bin! Once the bin was filled with the old rice and quinoa, I simply gathered several of Emery's RED colored toys (think wooden blocks, balls, alphabet & shape magnets, etc) and "hid" them in the rice for her to dig out! Emery LOVED digging through the rice for her toys, and after a while of digging them out proceeded to then rebury them so that she could find them again! Once she was done playing, I took out the toys and lidded the bin so that we can use the rice again with different colors and themes! The only mistake I made in this activity was underestimating how much of a mess Emery could make with the rice and quinoa. Next week we're definitely doing this activity again, but with a tablecloth underneath her to make for easier cleanup afterwards!

That sums up our very first week of tot school! All in all I feel like actually planning out our activities, snacks, and books for the week takes about 20 minutes on a Sunday afternoon, and then I try to keep the actual prep time for each activity to 10 minutes or less to make it so that we can spend more time together having fun! Each activity ranged anywhere from 2 minutes to about 30, and I genuinely feel like it's given Emery a positive, educational outlet for her energy, and gives me a chance to bond with her in a different way as I plan out and join in on the activities with her! I'm already excited to start week 2 with her, and look forward to sharing in our little journey with all of you! I've included a free printable sheet showing our schedule, as well as a blank template for filling in your own theme, activities, etc if you so choose! Also, I try to share our daily activities as we do them in my Instagram stories, so if you want to follow along in real time be sure to join us there! Happy tot schooling!