Tot School Color Themes Goals

(Archer will be  around 15-18 Months)

My oldest is eight and a half, so it has been a long time since I have gotten to do tot school. I am very excited to start again with Archer!  Starting at the end of August, we will be doing a color a week (with a few potential breaks for holidays or vacations or if life throws us some curve ball) Organization makes me happy, so I made a list of goals for myself of what I was hoping to get out of our color themes.  I figured I'd share for anyone else planning their own tot school.

Let me start by saying that every family has their own educational philosophy.  I believe that little kids can and love to learn. However, I also believe that learning should be fun and low pressure.  Little kids need to play, move and have fun, so our "formal" school time is only when we're both in good moods and only for short periods at a time. I see our activities as enjoyable ways to spend time together that also allow him to learn.

Goals

• Vocabulary Building - Having an organized theme each week, will allow me to add in some vocabulary building. Archer loves food and he loves watching new lessons on Little Reader, so I have made him some lessons around food of each color.
• Fine Motor - I feel like the next few years will be focused on fine motor development, so we will try to include some activities that work on them. Nothing crazy, because he is still so young.
• Gross Motor - Research seems to indicate that all of brain development is interconnected, so I definitely don't want to forget gross motor activity! Luckily, with an active little guy, getting in some gross motor play should be pretty easy!
• Sensory Play - First off, sensory play is fun! It also exposes kids to a variety of textures and materials. There's some physics learning involved with pouring, dumping, piling etc. Plus you can bring in math concepts like sorting.
• Math - Like with Xander, I'm avoiding exposing Archer to numerals. Instead, we'll do other math concepts like sorting, ordering and matching. He is still little, so I'll focus on modeling rather than expecting him to do it.
• Reading - After teaching Xander to read as a baby, and his huge love of reading now, reading is definitely something I want to focus on with Archer. Once again, it is low pressure but exposing him to words will be a part of our Tot School activities.

Now you'll notice, that teaching Archer the colors is not an actual goal of Tot School for us.  For me, color themes give me a great way to organize our activities. He knows most of his colors already, and I know he will learn the others eventually, whether or not we do any Tot School.

Click here to check out our "curriculum."