Reading a few posts recently about another homeschool mom’s tot school, inspired me to start being more intentional about some of the time I spend with my 14 month old. I know she’s young and I don’t plan on being too organized with school as of yet with her, but I do want to get her sitting still longer and focusing a little better. I feel like my 4 yr old did a lot better with these things at her sister’s age, but maybe my memory is a bit honeymoon-ized.
We’ve been playing in the sandbox a lot. She enjoys it like nothing else. I was amazed the first time I introduced it to her. I expected mixed reactions as a lot of babies seem to not like the feeling of sand. But she dove right in, literally.
We’ve also gone to the beach a few times and she seems to enjoy that for a while.
Don’t you love Florida. I mean, where else can you go to the beach in January and February?
I’ve tried coloring with her a few times. She does get the idea of putting the crayon to the paper and taps it on there a lot. But after a while the crayons do end up in her mouth. So, yeah, gotta watch that closely.
We’ve also focused on playing with her pop up toys (the ones where you push or turn the buttons and an animals pops up) and a weeble type set where you put the weebles into holes and watch them slide down.
She loves pulling books out of the book basket and looking at them on her own. She can sit for quiet a while just flipping through books. But she still doesn’t sit still enough to actually read more than one page together. That or she tries to grab the book out of my hand or close it. She’s done surprisingly well with H’s paper page books. I put them all up for a while fearing she’d rip them up, she only a couple pages have suffered in the past couple months. Pretty good track record I’d say!
Tonight I cut a whole in an old (clean) coffee can and gave K some puffy balls to stick into the hole. I was amazed at how well she did. She focused really hard on it and she only attempted to put them in her mouth twice. But apparently she didn’t like the fuzzy feeling.
We also used an empty tissue box and some of the single duplo blocks too. She seemed to enjoy using both and the resulting rattling noises that came from shaking them afterwards.
I plan to keep researching and coming up with some new fun (and cheap) activities for her. And I’ll be sure to share what we try!
So happy you were inspired! *Ü*