Tot School: Circle Shape

This week has started out pretty rough. I've been struggling with handling Emma's terrible twos stage, and I got rear-ended by someone who immediately drove off after doing it (thankfully, no damage was done to the car), so I'm a bit behind on tot school this week. But, we finally got the first one done! For the next two weeks, we're going to be talking about shapes. This week is on the primary shapes: circle, square, and triangle. Today, specifically, we went over the circle.

We don't really have any books about shapes in our collection, though Usborne Books & More has a couple of cute ones I need to pick up!

 Thankfully, the library had PLENTY available, unlike the Fall books for last week. I may have gone a bit overboard with the books, to be honest, but you can never have too many! (This is a picture of just the books I read with Emma today - I have a few more on shapes that I plan to use later!)

This week, instead of choosing outfits that go along with the theme, I'm focusing on feeding Emma foods that are in the shape we're going to cover. For this lesson, Emma has had sliced bananas and a hamburger, to throw out some examples. Easy peasy.

After lunch, we started our tot school lesson with a shape song, then read the above shapes books. Once we were finished with those, we collected a few of Emma's balls and her round laundry basically to "shoot hoops". Emma didn't quite grasp the concept, but she enjoyed throwing ALL sorts of toys into the basket. Aw well, at least she's had fun with it!

When Emma was ready to move on, I drew a big circle on a piece of paper and tried to get her to do the same - still in the scribbling stage, so that didn't work. Then I brought out some Play-Doh for her to "trace" the circle. Again, didn't grasp the concept, so I improvised by making bracelets for her while talking about how they're in the shape of circles.

Then we just spent the rest of the time having fun with the Play-Doh. There's no need to push a concept while they're this young, so instead of stressing about her not picking up on anything, I just focused on us having a nice, quality time together!