Tot School with #TeacherMom

Ok guys. This is happening. I've been toying with the idea of Tot School for a while now. Beckett and I have done well on and off with intentional learning activities, mostly regarding the alphabet. You can see what we've been doing here.

Now I've decided to take the dive into a more organized (but still flexible) structured learning plan for him. I'm going to be honest: I have NO CLUE how this is going to go. But I'm excited! I've done some reading and found some great articles and insights. I like this article best. So! Following her structure, here's my thought process:

My Goal:

My main goal is just to be intentional about spending time with little man, working on basic skills he needs. More specifically, I would like to:

- expand his vocabulary

- finish learning the alphabet

- learn to count to 10
- provide new experiences

-prepare him for writing through fine motor activities

I plan to have an "assessment" sheet that will be super informal and completely unecessary, but helpful for ME! It'll just be something that I can track his progress and see what we've accomplished over the year!

My other goal is to share my adventures here! I make no promises about how all of this will pan out, but I invite you to join with me on my adventure! I'll plan to upload my printable plans to my TPT store (for free, of course).

My Plan:

My plan is subject to change! Seeing as I have NEVER done this before, I plan to go a month at a time and see how it pans out.

For now I'm aiming at laying out a basic structure and tweaking it as I go. I plan to have monthly themes as opposed to weekly themes I've seen elsewhere. I know my toddler and I think spending a full month focused on a theme will give us more opportunity for both flexibility and mastery.

Each Month, I will have a list of vocabulary words I would like to focus on, songs we can sing, adventures & activities that support our theme, themed activities to build fine motor skills, & manipulatives for counting.

Here's what my September Brainstorm looks like:

Regarding a schedule, I think for now we will just aim at choosing a couple of activities that we feel up for each morning. With our alphabet activities, we worked while I drank coffee and that worked out really well for us!

My Set Up:

Well, my house is currently under renovation. Eventually, my front room will be a library (eee!) where we will do things like Tot School & Homework. For now, we'll work on our rug.

I plan to have a book box where I'll have books specifically geared toward our theme for the month. We used this when I started focusing on the alphabet and I loved that when I pulled out the box, we were working on letters no matter what book he chose. You can see our box here:

We have LOTS of books in our house, but also have a really awesome library system, so hopefully I'll always have a variety that fits our needs. I'll plan to share our books here.

I also plan to have a manipulatives box that supports our theme. Next month it will be filled with cars & trucks, etc. We can use these for talking about our vocabulary words, colors, and numbers. I just printed up these counting mats to use.

And that's all! Do you Tot School?! I would love to know what you've done! What has worked for you? What resources do you love? What advice do you have? Do you have any FABULOUS ideas to go along with our September theme? Comment here or connect with me on Facebook or Instagram. And stay tuned! I'll have September's plan and materials laid out for next Tuesday!! You can follow me on Blog Lovin' to make sure you don't miss out! :)

I also plan to have a linkup for any Tot School Moms out there who'd love to share what they're doing! Link Up will start next week!