A New Twist on the Tot Book

As most of you know, we have a lot of Tot Books available for download and I still love making them. Unfortunately, my tot does not LOVE them as much as I do! Since I need to practice what I preach-not forcing him and following his lead-I needed to adjust a bit!

The next Tot Book with the highest number of votes was by far Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, and thankfully Krash loves that story too! As I lay in bed hurting (from my pregnancy) I rolled ideas around in my mind of how to change things a bit to meet his needs at this stage.

I then thought of my Activity Pack I had made for the boys a couple of weeks ago and realized I could do the same thing with the Tot Book items. Instead of just making the few things that fit in the Tot Book, I could make an assortment and keep them all in the clasp envelope while we work with them.

I also thought of YOU and how this might be better for anyone else using them as we all desire to expose different skills to our particular tots. With more of a variety to choose from, I hope you will be able to adjust your Tot Book (or Activity Pack) accordingly to suit your tot.

So, here is our first Tot Book/Activity Pack…

Of course we have a few mini-books, the first one is about colors…And the other about counting/numbers 1-10…My tot loves the pockets with cards so I created a few of these for this set. The first is a simple story retelling pocket. You can see I added a photo of myself to be the “Momma” for him!The next is a Monkey Parts pocket, focusing on identifying body parts. I included a photo of Krash in this on also, so he can point to his parts and the monkey’s parts using the cards (except the tail, hopefully).I made a Monkey ABC set, including both lower and upper case letters. Krash knows all of his upper case and we re working on lowercase right now. I left his letters cut in strips like you see, as the 26 individual cards are just too much for him right now. I plan to help him sing the ABCs and lay them in correct order, and also match up the upper/lower case strips to each other. As he advances, I will cut them apart.Finally, I made a size sequencing set…

I plan to collect all of our stuffed monkeys, plastic monkeys, etc. and place a monkey on one of his trays with one of the new components. It will be tray work for him-which he likes, with a new little surprise each day! When he tires of the pieces, I still plan to put them into a Tot Book (might need to be bigger) for safe keeping, but until then, I plan to just keep them in an Activity Pack envelope, letting him go back to the pieces when he wants to.

You can find all of the PDFs for these here, on the Tot Book site. I hope you enjoy it and as always, let me know if you use any of these so I can link up your blog to the page!