Getting Started

As you can tell, I'm just getting started here on blogger. I'm trying my best to figure everything out and make my blog as "eye pleasing" and easy to use as possible.

My inspiration for starting this blog is mostly my love of teaching young children. I gave up my careeer (at least temporarily) as a Pre-Kindergarten teacher in order to stay at home full time with my son. As a mom, I want the best possible start for my little guy! Of course, as someone who has early childhood experience that means providing him with a meaningful day with hands on activities! Basically, my style of implimenting these plans will be to do little activities throughout the day. I do not plan to have my son sitting down for an hour of "preschool time" each day. He's simply not ready for that. Some of your kids might be at that level, and if so by all means schedule a "preschool hour" in your daily schedule. But if your little one's attention span is still growing, don't force your child into activities. Use your activities as breaks throughout your day. Maybe your child will get up and have breakfast and during breakfast you will do your fingerplay or rhyme with them. Maybe after morning playtime you will do an art activity. Do what works best for you and your child! These moments are meant to be fun for you and your child. If your child simply isn't interested that day, put the activity away until next time.

This week I will be planning out for next week's lessons. My plan is to post daily (hopefully including pictures) the activities I do with my son. I will also post how well the activity went over with him (sometimes things look good in theory, but don't really work out that well!). Most of my activities and themes will be geared towards the toddler age group, since that is where my little guy is at! But I will try to include, for the benefit of all, links or ideas on ways to take it up a notch for 3 and 4 year olds. Most of my experience is with Pre-kindergarten, so I do have a lot of ideas for the preschool age group. I also want to emphasize that not all ideas I am using are my ideas! I get a lot off the internet and teacher books. I'll try to include websites I've pulled info from in my posts, so you can explore them for yourselves.

What you can expect on Tiny Tots:
*Weekly themes
*Fun, age appropriate hands on activities
*Tips and tricks for enhancing learning

Enjoy and please pass my blog along to others!