Tot Spot... for Last Week

In one box "J" had our velcro sticks (craft sticks with velcro dots on the ends).  At first she wasn't sure what to do with them, but after a little guidance, she had fun!  Triangle was her favorite shape to make...

I picked up this shape puzzle at Target's dollar spot a while back.  I knew it would be on the easy side for her, but put it anyway so that we could work on some speech ("J" doesn't talk much.  She has a speech therapist that comes every other week to work/play with her).

A while back I saw these cute clips at IKEA.  I should have bought two sets!  "J"s task was to clip them onto the bowl.  She loved it when I first introduced it, but only pulled it out herself once.

"J" loves beads and stringing!  We've used these spools (thank you, DI!) many times and every time she loves them just as much.

"J"s last box had a paper doll.  This was definitely her favorite box of the week!  She would dress the doll up and then take her on outings all over the house!

Here's "J"s box all packed.  At the end of school, we pack it up and put it up on a high shelf.  She has four smaller boxes, her pencil box and a white board (and this week she had a puzzle, because it was incredibly flat and fit in!).

On Monday's I try to sit with her and show her what is in each of her boxes (one at a time), and how she can use them (but of course she's welcome to come up with her own ideas!).  During the week, at school time, she chooses a box, does the activity, then puts the pieces back in the box and chooses a different box.  (REALITY CHECK: that only happens about half the time.  The other half, she has boxes scattered all over our table and I have to remind her to clean them up before she can choose a different box.)

This is her pencil box.  She has a bingo marker (the orange lidded container), a dry erase marker, crayons, scissors and playdough.  The dry erase marker is for "drawing" on her white board, and also for different activities that I've laminated.

Tot Spot

I've renamed this weekly feature.  "Tot Tuesday" was so limiting... okay, okay!  It was very much misnamed!  "Tot Spot" is much more... flexible.  :)

So this week, "J" hasn't been much interested in school.  She starts with us, but doesn't last much longer than 10 minutes.  That's okay.  At least she knows the option is there for her.  Here are a couple of activities in her box this week:

This one was her favorite (as in, she spent 9 out of her 10 minutes doing this activity).  She first put the tees into the triangle, then balanced the marbles on top.  She was a bit distracting to "N" and "A" when the marbles went rolling all over...

This is the activity that took up the remaining minute of her interest in "doing school".  Stacking cubes on top of each other.  

Not pictured, but also in her box this week, she had an animal bingo game, but instead of playing it right, I had her match the cards to the pictures on the bingo mat.  Her other activity was gluing foam shapes and letters onto paper.  She did actually like that one, but I didn't get any pictures of it.