Alphagator

Meet Mr. Alphagator! This is a great idea for kids who are learning the alphabet. At the beginning of each school year we'd make a large alligator cut out. Each week when we learned a new letter we would add a "spike" to his back. If you are doing a letter a week this is a great idea for you. You can make a smaller scale alligator (or several much smaller gators) and hang them somewhere your child can have easy access to seeing them (ex: low on your fridge, your child's bedroom wall). Allow your child to add spikes each week to thier alphagator.

Theme Overviews

This is what my weekly overviews will look like for each theme. I will try to post these the Friday before I start a new theme.

Theme

Vocabulary words: (These are words we will focus on through repetition. For older children it can be helpful to make word cards in which you would attach a photo and the word to an index card or something similar so they can see the word in print.)

Books: I will post books that I would recommend for kids for each theme. However, I think any book you can find at your library that goes along with the theme is great. Make it a point to utilize you library!

Songs/Rhymes/Fingerplays: I will post at least 1 thing in this area for the week. This would be something you would repeat with your child several times over the course of the theme.

Daily Activities: Each day I will list out a couple of activities to go along with your theme. They will be hands on activities- art, science, sensory, games, cooking etc.

Additional Ideas: Things like "field trip" ideas, DVDs, CDs, computer games, websites, etc etc. Anything else I think you might find fun or helpful as you explore the theme!

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!