Tot School – Sept. 20, 2009

This week we worked on how letters are formed (M constantly wants to draw letters) and the order of the ABCs.  He knows the song, but actually putting letters in order is another matter all together.

We used our pretty glass pebbles and cardstock letters (both from Dollar Tree!) to practice forming letters correctly.  We worked on as many letters as he wanted.  I told him to start at the top, bottom, or wherever, and how to form them as if he were going to actually write them. He really got into this and we did about 6 or 7 letters before he wanted to move on to something else.

I found some upper and lowercase letter stamps at Target and Michael’s (I think Michael’s had the lowercase) and I’ve been wracking my brain for a way to use them.  Finally, I made this little name card for M:You can see the stamps are pretty tiny, but he did a great job and seemed to know exactly what he was supposed to do:

We did an ABC train activity with our pocket chart.  I found the ABC cards here, and the idea for how to use them was from Little Hands, Big Work.  We sang the ABC song a couple of times, then we tried singing it very slowly and stopping at each letter; the idea was for him to find each letter and place it in the pocket chart.  Right away he became a little frustrated.  I think the way we had the cards lying on the floor was a little overwhelming for him.  It’s a shame that this turned out to not be fun for him because he was really, really looking forward to doing something with the train when he saw me cutting it out and laminating it.  I should have put more thought into this and separated them by color so I could give him hints to help find each one. 

We did a couple of letters:

But, in the end, I put them all in the pocket chart and we just had fun singing the song and pointing at each one. We did that several times. Then later in the day I found him with a pencil pointing to each letter and singing, and that made me feel much better!

We did a color shade activity.  I let him pick the color sets he wanted to do then I put out the darkest and lightest of each one.  We talked about dark, and darker than,  then about light, and lighter than. He was doing great with that, but then I set a medium tone out for each set and asked him which was lightest and which was darkest and he had a little trouble.We switched to talking about light, medium, and dark and he did better, but then he said “I don’t want to do this anymore”, so we put it away. :)

We did his transportation same/different cards, and he did fantastic.  He’s done these before, but this time I asked him why the different one was different and he was able to give me a clear answer each time.

(Oh, I love those baby hands!)

I also gave him some new cutting pages… he loves his scissors. (Sorry no pics!)

Later in the day I found him doing these little puzzles in his room:

And he’s been calling this little teddy bear his “baby” all week.  We’ve had a lot of friends with new babies lately and I think he’s got the baby bug. :)  Here I found him rocking his baby:      Gosh, I sure do love this little boy! 

Go here for more Tot School ideas!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Color Mixing Bags

So, M has really been into the color mixing idea lately. But, he’s not quite “getting” it, if you know what I mean. He loves that you can mix two colors together and get a totally new color. I mean, that is pretty neat if you think about it – I’m sure to a toddler/preschooler it seems like magic.

But he will pick random colors and say things like “Mommy, guess what you get when you mix together pink, brown, and orange!” Then he’ll say “Green!!” :) Sometimes he says something along the lines of “dark green” or “light green” which really cracks me up.

So, apparently we need to work on shades of color (which will be in a separate post – probably a tot school one), and exactly which colors mix together to make new colors.

He loved the color mixing activity we did a while ago and I’m going to try to do a new color mixing activity on a regular basis. Lots of exposure to the idea in various ways means it will eventually come together in his mind and he will understand it (I hope).

This week we made simple color mixing bags with paint. We’ve all seen these on other blogs, this is nothing new! But anyway, here’s what we did…

First, get 3 good heavy duty ziploc bags (you may want to double up your bags – one of ours tore.) Place two dollops of paint in each one, one in each corner. Bag 1 – red and blue, bag 2 – red and yellow, bag 3 – blue and yellow:Tape the bags shut with duct tape or packaging tape.

Then talk about how colors can mix together to make new colors. Give your child a bag and ask him/her to guess what these two colors will make mixed together. If he says “kinda purplish-green, I think” just smile and say “let’s see!” and let him squish the paint around and mix it up. It’s important that the discovery be solely the child’s… they remember things so much more easily if this is the case. Act surprised when he says “it’s orange!” :)

You can do more with these after the colors are mixed – I showed M how to draw shapes with his finger, and we practiced a few letters too!. You can smooth out the paint into a very thin layer and see if you can look through it. Hold it up to the window if it’s sunny and see how pretty it is!

Enjoy! Have a beautiful, very colorful, day! :)

Art Time! Salty Watercolors

This is one of those art projects I’ve had in the back of my mind for ages – meaning to do it, forgetting about it, remembering it, getting too busy to do it, forgetting it again… you get the picture. :)
Finally, we did it.  And, boy, am I glad we did!
It is from one of our favorite art books - Scribble Art by MaryAnn Kohl. 
We used white cardstock, glue, table salt, pipettes, paintbrushes, and our fabulous homemade liquid watercolors left over from a previous project.  (I covered our art tray / muffin tin with foil and the paints kept pretty well.  I did have to add a few drops of water to each cup and mix them up, but they worked just great and were still nice and vivid.)

M scooted up to the table and got busy with the glue bottle:
Then we tried sprinkling salt on with a spoon -
but it was not covering the glue as well as we needed it to.  If you do this, you need to put  a lot of salt on your glue pattern.  I finally just dumped it on right out of the box.  Then we tapped the extra salt off into the tray and we were left with this:
The idea at this point is to gently touch the salt pattern with watercolor paints and it will spread out – you can actually watch it soak through the salt along the lines you’ve made.  We started off with pipettes:It worked, but the paint was also forming puddles because M was squeezing too much paint out.  We (*I*) couldn’t clearly see the salt doing it’s thing because of the puddles.  So, I tried to get M to use a paintbrush and just barely touch it to the salt lines.  This is actually what the book directs you to do, and I should’ve listened to the book because M loves those pipettes dearly (they are fun) and we had a bit of a disagreement at this point.  ;)
Anyway, it did work better with the brush, as long as you just touch the salt.  Don’t brush the salt.  That point is very important!
It was a very neat and fascinating project, watching the soft colors of the paint spread along the salt, sometimes mixing together and creating new colors.  There was something just very slow and relaxing about it. 
Here are the finished art pieces:

This is definitely on our “do again!” list!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Daniel in the Lion’s Den

We were in a hurry this past Friday – trying to get out of town for the big Labor Day weekend (hope you all had a wonderful weekend!), so we only had a short amount of time to spend on our Bible story.
We read Daniel in the Lion’s Den in both of our Children’s Bibles (see them here and here), one in the morning and the other at nap time.
We learned this song with motions (from Hubbard’s Cupboard, click the picture to go to the site):
And we made a paper plate lion. I drew inspiration for this idea from both DLTK and Making Learning Fun.
You will need a paper plate, paint, paintbrush,glue, a triangle cut from construction paper or foam, googley eyes, and 6 strips of black yarn.
First, paint a paper plate orange. We are running low on paint, so we mixed red and yellow together. You could do different color combinations too – maybe yellow for the face and orange or brown for the outer edge of the plate (lion’s mane), but we made it simple and did orange all over.
Glue on googley eyes, and a triangle nose (we used brown construction paper).
Next, glue on whiskers. For the whiskers I put the glue lines on the plate so M could see where to stick the yarn pieces.
For a little scissor practice, I drew black lines for M to cut on the back of the plate, around the mane at about 2 inch intervals.


Ta da – our finished lion:
We also read a library book that sort of tied in to this story. It is titled How Loud is a Lion? by Clare Beaton.

This is a fun book that goes through characteristics of several animals, always asking at the end of each page, “But how loud is a lion?”. Finally, at the end you see the lion and he ROARS (very loudly at our home, but only as loudly as you wish at yours :) ). We discussed how lions are loud and have sharp teeth and claws that could hurt people, and how wonderful it was that God sent an angel to keep Daniel safe – the lions didn’t even touch him!
Have a beautiful day! :)

ABC Book – Letter H

It has taken me more time than I planned to get back to our ABC Book, but I have finally finished the pages for H. I haven’t shown it to M yet, I’m planning on doing it with him during our normal Tot School time this week. So you are getting a sneak peek!
The inside:
M has really been asking for help drawing letters lately, so I’m going to start including some sort of tracing activity for each letter from now on. For H – our letter template, with dashed lines, and laminated so he can use his window markers to trace the letters, then wipe them off and trace them again!
Next, a Tic Tac Toe game using Hammers and Hard Hats:
Two songs about the letter H (sorry only one song is pictured, but both are included in the printable file):

An envelope full of things that begin with H:
Heart pattern strips to match:
And, on the back, a shapes House to color, glue, and build:
I decided to use velcro dots instead of glue for the shapes house, so M can put it together as many times as he wants. I also use velcro dots to keep all the envelopes in the file closed.
Click here for the printable file of all the activities – Letter H.

You can print as many pages as you want and of course use them however you want. You do not have to make an ABC book. :) If you just want the tic tac toe game and the shapes house (or whatever), print only those pages. You could make them into activity bags.
If you use any of them, let me know – I’d love to see what you’ve done!


The instructions for putting the activities together are written on pages of the file, as well as information about where the graphics were found, which sites I used for the letter templates or songs, etc.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time! – Painting with Stuff :)

Monday morning M said, “I have an idea!” (This is his new favorite thing to say), “Let’s paint!”  So, paint we did – I was happy to hear him request this because we used to do some sort of open art thing several times a week (we shot for once a day, but that didn’t always happen), but somehow we’ve gotten out of our art-groove lately.  I bet we haven’t had the paint out in 2 weeks.

He requested blue paint, but since there was not much left in the bottle I gave him some red too and we turned it into a color mixing lesson. 

Then I grabbed a few items that he doesn’t normally paint with – a bath pouf, an old vegetable scrubber, and a foam paintbrush.

He tried them all out:

I had him look at his paper and asked him, “What do blue and red mixed together make?”  He got it right – purple.  I was a little anxious about his answer because I’ve started to wonder if he is a little color blind when it comes to blue and purple.  Often he’s not able to distinguish between the two.  At this age it’s hard to know if he is really having trouble seeing the difference between the two colors or if it’s just that he can’t remember the color names once in a while. 

There are worse things than being color blind, I know!  So, either way I think we’ll survive, ha! :)

Here is the finished artwork:

It’s a house.  Couldn’t you tell?  It’s a “big house”.  Yep. ;)

And, he wanted more “stuff” to paint with, but my mind drew a blank!  We’ll have to do it again when I’ve given it a little more thought.  And when it’s not morning and my brain hasn’t woken up yet.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Craft Time – Rainbows Galore – #1

I wanted to do these crafts as part of our Noah’s Ark theme last week, but we simply ran out of time.  They are pretty fun to do though, and I like the results, so I’m sharing them here.
The first idea I got from Making Learning Fun.  I printed this template, then circled the color names in the appropriate marker color so M could do this on his own a little bit.  Then I put a muffin tin out with different flavors of Jello powder – cherry, orange, lemon, lime, blueberry, and grape. Sounds yummy, doesn’t it?

(Please pretend you can’t see my rusty old pan.)

M put glue on each stripe of the rainbow (he needed a little mama guidance with this, so no pics), then used a small spoon to *sprinkle* (dump) the powders on.

Here’s the finished rainbow, and it smelled delicious!

There are a couple of things you should know before you do this with your little one though…
1. The paper becomes very heavy with this on it, because it gels when it mixes with the glue.  We used cardstock thankfully, or it would’ve been a disaster.
2. It gels when it mixes with the glue.  So, you know, you have gluey Jello  which, while it smells pretty and looks pretty, is really kind of gross.
3. Ants may come calling when they realize there is gluey Jello nearby.  For this reason M’s artwork ended up in the garbage early the next morning, the evidence covered up with lots of paper towels.  Thankfully he has not asked about his pretty, smelly rainbow yet. :)
So, if we do this again… and it was truly a LOT of fun for M (kept him occupied for a good 45 minutes) we’ll use sugar free koolaid. 
Have a beautiful day! :)