Tot School - First Try

Oh. My. Goodness.

How long has this been around?! How long have you known about it!? Why didn't anyone ever tell me about it!? 

I recently stumbled across a little thing called Tot School. Be still my little-teacher's-heart. I can't believe I am just now discovering this concept. What fun! What joy! Squeals of delight!

As explained here, "Tot School" is not school at all, it's just fun, focused play with the toddler in your family. From what I gather, many families who homeschool older kids, use Tot School to give their littles something to do while the bigs are learning and/or to offer their littles some focused one-on-one time that they see the bigs getting time with mom (or each other!). Most importantly, "Tot School is not forced, is always fun, sometimes doesn't happen the way I plan, and is always focused on my tot."(from 1+1+1+1=1)

There are many, many websites full of wonderful ideas to do present your tot with fun play that encourages learning (which, in my opinion is all play). The unschooler in me knows we will not do Tot School on a scheduled basis, just whenever one of us feels like it. It's nice to have some new ideas of things to do with him and as he gets older, I'll be able to use the Tot School ideas as ways for me to take note of what he knows and what he's learning (ahem, assessments, yes, but golly I'd hate to use that word when referring to a preschooler). 

I also think that the reason I love this idea so much is not only because it struck a chord with the teacher in me, but moreso because I know Burkley will LOVE it. He absolutely LOVES sitting and doing activities that require patience and focus. He thrives on it. He enjoys it and chooses to do those types of thing all the time. He loves to sit and build, assemble, play trains, color, and read books. He loves to find matches of things and seek out similar attributes and match colors of things throughout the house and wherever we go. I just know he will love the activities I've found on the various blogs I've been looking at!

So, today I tried our first intentional game.
While he was napping, I pulled these supplies out of my school room.
I assume you can figure it out, but since he's been excited about learning colors lately, I thought we'd try a color sorting activity. I showed him how to choose a shape from the box, assess its color, and put it into the corresponding cup.

He sort of did it...for 30 seconds.

But, -remember, go with the flow!- soon he got excited about finding matching shapes instead. Here he's showing me he has two triangles. I should have known Mr. Matchy would love to do that instead.

And then, 2 circles!

And his piles (yes, I did help him a bit) of hearts, squares, and circles. He also liked finding the "big!" ones and the tiny "baby" ones, as he called them.

And next thing I knew, we were stacking cups!

And making them into hats! Brown is his favorite, so I'm not surprised he chose that one!

 I love the way everything went. I was curious to see what he'd do with it and I had fun watching him decide how he wanted to interact with the toys. I'm excited to try something Tot School-esque again soon. It's hard to differentiate between Tot School and regular play. But, I guess the main way Tot School differs from regular unstructured play is that I will plan an activity ahead of time rather than see what happens spontaneously. I don't care if the activity goes as planned or not, it will just be something new and fun for us to do!