Milestone Monday: Blocks, Walking and Big Girl

So first up is that Princess has figured out how to stack her blocks. The most she has ever stacked is 5, but those tend to fall right away. She usually manages about 3-4 blocks before they fall over.

Next up is that Princess is WALKING!!!!! She's been cruising since she was about 15 months old and started taking like 2-3 steps on her own at about 16 months. Then about two weeks later, she started getting brave and taking more steps on her own! It was decided that if we put her in shoes, it should help her toe dragging. Well, the problem was putting her in shoes! She HATED them! Then we went to the zoo for Labor Day. We put her shoes on her and she found out that she can WALK by holding someone's hand and she can go where SHE wants to. So now, she has been very good about putting shoes on when we go out. She LOVES her shoes now. And we even got her a pair of Mary Janes and she LOVES her "pretty shoes." She now will get up and walk all over the house. She's walked from one side to the other by herself!

Then, on Saturday, Princess didn't want to eat lunch. So MeMe suggested that she sit at the playschool table. So we tried it.

Later that day, MeMe and Pops went out and found Princess a toddler bed. It was a Minnie Mouse one but we decided not to put the Minnie Mouse stickers on it. Pops had to put it together and of course Princess had to help.

Once we got her "big girl" bed together, she had to sit on it. She got a pillow, a Doc McStuffins pillow case, a Doc McStuffins doll (that is about as big as she is!), a butterfly blankie, and a new butterfly sheet for her bed.

Later that night, we started a new routine: bath (if needed), jammies, story, bottle, and then bed. So far she has spent the past 2 nights in her bed. Of course, she doesn't want to sleep on the pillow and instead sleeps at the foot of the bed, so she has fallen out a lot. We're going to put pillows down tonight. Last night, we put a baby gate up at the door because the night before, the dogs kept coming in to sniff at her. Hopefully by her IFSP, she'll be sleeping in her "big girl" bed by herself and not falling out of it.

Week in Review: First Week.

So this past week was our first week of school. I had wanted to start back when the local schools started, but things just weren't to be. Instead, I cut myself some slack, did some more research and decided to start the week before Labor Day.

Being Little Man is "technically" in preschool now, I still fall under the "not legally homeschooling" category. There are no regulations about preschool (yet). So we're doing some random things here and there to just keep him learning, but not really focusing on any grade or curriculum. (Here are our Curriculum Choices.) Since he's not really going to preschool this year, I felt left out of the all the "first day of..." photos that all my friends were posting on Facebook. So I snapped this one of him on the first day of his Tot Time class at the rec center.

This week, I had planned a four day week, being Little Man had an appointment on Monday. It didn't wind up working out to be a four day week. Instead, we took a field trip on Friday!

So on Tuesday, I helped Little Man set up his Interactive Notebooks.

The ones that didn't have Expectations in them got them glued in. We also glued in the spelling list for the week. The spelling isn't so much about learning to spell the words as it is practicing his writing.

We also read "Pete the Cat: I Love my White Shoes." And then I had him do some writing to go with it!

It says "I love my blue shoes."

That was pretty much it for Tuesday. I wanted to ease into school.

The next day we went through just about everything. One of the things Little Man liked doing was the dot sticker page for spelling.

For math, we did a "math about me" page and glued into his notebook. He also worked on writing letter L and number 1. (I'm going out of order for the letters and focusing on formation of them. This way he has some success at first doing "easy letters.") We also talked about "The Three Little Pigs." We'd already read it, so he got to pick what he would make his house out of and write a sentence and draw a picture. It was a shared pen writing. We did science, which we are finishing the five senses. This week was the sense of smell. We also read from the Bible.

On Thursday, things were pretty much the same. We did counting by 5s in his math journal. I got this page idea from: Miss Van Maren's Fantastic First Grade

He wrote letter T and number 1. (We'll focus on one number a week.) He wrote his spelling words in capital letters. We read "The Three Bears" and he wrote that he didn't like oatmeal. Science was good vs. bad smells and Bible reading. Next week, we are introducing the review pages!

We had planned to finish the week on Friday, but being MeMe was off of work, she wanted to take the kids to the zoo. So we had a field trip to the zoo! (Blog entry forthcoming!) And one other thing we did, was during the week, we received a package from Great Grammy. So I had Little Man write her a thank you note!

So what was Princess doing while I was teaching Little Man? Well, with a little help from MeMe, we put together some Discover Bins for her. These are like the prelude to tot trays. In them, we have different things: post its, silk leaves, craft sticks, pom poms, books, just things for her to explore.

So far, they are keeping her busy. But I don't know for how long.