We haven't done much lately as far as our Tot School. With being on vacation and busy with other things we haven't had time to sit down and concentrate on learning.  Of course, we still had learning times but nothing special.
I decided that we are officially starting 'school' on October 4th. This Monday.  We are going to start out by focusing on a letter every week for 26 weeks. We're just going to go through the alphabet and talk about words that start with that letter, do games associated with that letter, read books about the letter and other activities that have to do with the letter for that week.  I'm not sure yet if  I'm going to try to do something every day or maybe just do 3-4 days a week.  We'll see how it goes.  Lydia loves to be engaged and do activities so I think she'd be more than willing to do something every day but I'm not sure if I'm ready to be quite that prepared yet. :)  We'll start slow. :)
In an effort to be organized I bought 26 colorful folders to keep my plans for each letter in.  As we do worksheets and other projects associated with each letter I will put those in the folder also. After we are finished with a letter Lydia will be able to look through the folder at the work she did and we will be able to use them to review also.  Anna will even be able to use them in a few years! :) 
Today I wrote the letters on the folders and put some lined paper in each of them so I can take notes on activities I want to do when we get to each letter.
Lydia had fun 'helping'.  She knows all of her uppercase letters but we have not worked on any lower case so she had fun finding the "yittle yetters!".  (I wonder how long until she will be able to say her 'L' sound??)

She enjoyed holding up the folders and telling me what letter was on the front:

She did a great job of counting two sheets for each folder:

Then she helped me put the paper in each folder.  She wanted to "do it myself" for most of them but lost interest a little around letter T. 

Anna sat beside us and chewed on a little person.  :) 

 

As we looked through one of her kindergarten workbooks I found an idea for a counting game. We had some time before lunch so we did that too.  

First she cut five pieces of paper in half.  She LOVES scissors and does a really good job cutting with them with a little help.  She loves scissors so much that the other day I found her on top of my desk getting my scissors from their high home.  ....we had a little talk about that.  :)  

Anyway, then we outlined her foot, my foot and Anna's foot on some of the papers and she drew some feet on some too.  Then we numbered the feet 1-10.  

There is her foot, #6:

 She was very excited to "play a game now!"

 First we walked over the numbers, stepping on each one and (supposed to be) saying it's name:

 

Then we hopped over the numbers, which turned into running over the numbers....

which turned into this...and school was over. ;-) 

 Here are some links to some of the sites that I found fun letter-oriented activities and worksheets:

http://www.starfall.com/ni/download/level-k-bl/bl-abc.pdf 

 
 
http://www.first-school.ws/theme/alphabetp2.htm#a

 And here are links to two games that we have been using to learn counting and letters. I'm not sure the second link will work correctly, but it the Pig's Alpha Bricks game that we use. 

http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/games/count_your_chickens/count_your_chickens.html



http://pbskids.org/superwhy/