Tot school - Practical life

(Goblin is 27 months)

This week the activities I have focussed on with Goblin have been practical ones. Normally if Goblin wants toast for breakfast I make it for him, but this week I have presented it as a Montessori tray exercise. 

 I had to give him a spoon to fish the butter and jam out of the pots, because he was struggling with a knife. But once he got them onto the bread he was pretty good at spreading them. Although quite a lot of the butter went straight into his mouth!

Another activity we did this week was putting a nappy on a doll. I have seen lots of blog posts with toddlers washing plastic dolls. I thought it was a really nice idea and a good way to teach Goblin about applying soap and washing and drying an object. So despite my strong dislike of ugly plastic dolls I gave in and bought one for Goblin. There are some really expensive dolls out there but the one I found wasn't actually that bad, and I managed to find a boy doll too. Goblin was much more excited about this plastic doll than he had been about the two waldorf dolls I made him (typical!). We inspected the doll together and Goblin named different parts of its body - Feet, knees, belly button and willy.

 I cut up one of his disposable nappies and reattached the velcro fastners with tape. Then I showed Goblin how to put a nappy on. Goblin watched avidly and then did it himself. He enjoyed it so much he took the nappy straight off again and did it a few more times.
I did try and get him to wash the doll but he wasn't interested. We'll try that another day.

 We also built on the animal matching game I did last week. Instead of his Oceans book, this week I got his 100 animals book. I took down the whole tub of animals and we went through the book and matched as many animals as we could. This was a great exercise for naming the animals as well as matching. Even if he couldn't remember the name of the animal (like Otter) he could still recognise that the toy matched the picture.

I really need to look up the names of some of the plastic fish and butterflys. At the moment we have about 9 fish and 10 butterflys and I give them all the generic titles of 'fish' or 'butterfly' (with the exception of the marlin fish which we found in his ocean book). If Goblin can learn new animals, I think I should probably make an effort too.

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