Tot School – Feb. 7, 2010

M is 41 months old. 

We have been taking turns sharing the flu the past couple of weeks and so what you see below is a hodgepodge of activities we did in the last half of this week (when we were finally starting to feel better), and things we’ve done over the past several weeks that have just not made their way into a post yet.

First, the fun stuff – Valentine Activities. :)

M used tongs to transfer red and clear plastic crystals into an ice cube tray.  He, on his own, made a “red, white, red, white” pattern as he did this.  I actually squealed when I saw it. :) The boring ice cube tray was exchanged for a cute heart tray soon after this, but no pics.

I set up a heart cutting activity for M and before I could walk to the kitchen, find my camera and get back, he had them all done. These were pretty scrapbooking papers I picked up at Target.  I folded a piece in half and drew half a heart on it and M was so surprised and excited when he cut it and opened it up to see a heart!  He loved this and did more of them the next day, and even showed Daddy his “trick” later. :)  I saw this on Chasing Cheerios.

I put together a quick sensory bin for M, using our red crystals, pom-poms, red and silver foam snowflakes (Valentine’s Day is associated with winter in my mind, although I know it isn’t for everyone).  There are foam heart beads and foam heart stickers in there, and little pipecleaner hearts too:This was a phenomenal dud with M.  He lasted 5 minutes looking at the items.  However, I’m sharing it because he loved the “snow” I filled it up with.  This is fiberfill stuffing, and it is called Cluster Stuff.  I get it at Walmart and since discovering it, I do not use anything for stuffing (when I’m sewing or whatever) except this.  It never gets matted down.  It’s washable and, in fact, gets softer and fluffier when it is washed.  Oh, I could sing it’s praises for a long time.  However, what you really want to know is that M thought it was wonderful and played with it by itself for quite a while.It’s soft, warm, and cozy as you just dig your hands in.  Mm.  Don’t you want to go buy some now? :)

Back to activities… a little Sucrets can (M loves this little can, what can I say?) with pony beads in Valentine colors and red pipecleaners.  After he strings on the beads we’ll shape them into hearts for the Grandmothers.  Blue was added to make it a bit more masculine. :)  It worked, right?He hasn’t actually done this yet, but I wanted to include it in a post before Valentine’s Day is actually here.

Also, for a fun activity on his shelves, I put a container full of our Valentine window clings.  He does these seasonally, but for some reason theses Valentine ones were a huge hit.  He loved running back and forth and putting them up on windows.  Most of them found their way onto our kitchen door:

 

More Sensory Activities:

We made Gak using liquid starch, white glue, and blue food coloring.

After this picture, the battery in my camera died and I didn’t get any pictures of the actual process of making it or M playing with it.  It was a lot of fun.  It’s a slippery, stretchy putty.  It’s pretty cool stuff.  Here’s a picture of it after my battery was charged, ha.

 

M asked for his Floam one day; it’s been forever since he’s played with that.  He sat in the living room for a good 45 minutes “snowplowing” the floam.  We are still finding it everywhere despite the huge towel he was sitting on.

 

Math Skills:

I wrote numbers 0 through 10 on some paper doilies and M put them in order on the floor (he pretended he was a train as he moved down the line).  Then, using tongs, he counted “snowballs” (cotton balls) onto them.  He enjoyed this much more than I expected and did a great job. This is him telling me he doesn’t want me to take a picture just as the camera is flashing.  Sigh.  I thought this was a super idea, and then I saw that Katie at Katie’s Nesting Spot had done the exact same thing, except hers are much nicer looking (of course, everything she does looks amazing), and obviously weren’t just thrown together like ours were. ;)

M has been loving his pattern blocks and mats lately.  He has been doing them every. single. day.

 

Literacy:

M got this new ABC puzzle from the Target dollar spot and did it with only a tiny bit of help:

He did a J cut and paste page:(he just loves that purple glue stick).

And we did the activities in our new J lapbook:

 

Visual Discrimination:

I bought a cheap small calendar and M matched up the small pictures on the back to the large pictures:

As you can see, he’s been opting out of some of the photos lately.  It’s his choice and one I’m really trying to respect although I would prefer to see more of that cute face. :)

 

Fine Motor Skills:

M played with his Lite Brite:

Sorted erasers into an ice cube tray with tweezers:

And played with a wooden dress-the-bear puzzle:

For more Tot School posts, go here! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Letter J j Lapbook Printables

Well.  I’ve finally gotten another letter lapbook finished up.  As much as M enjoys his cut and paste ABC pages and his ABC book, I really felt he was getting a better grasp of phonics and letter formation (etc.) from the lapbooks we had done.  He really enjoys these and they are fun for me to put together too.  They take some time, but we are in no hurry. :)

I have to admit the J lapbook was a difficult one for me… I had the toughest time coming up with good ideas.  Ah well, D is next (for dinosaurs, yay!) and I’ve already got a good hundred ideas floating around in my head.

So, here we go… our J j Lapbook: That’s the inside.  No craft on the front as of yet.

First, Things that Begin with J:This is a standard for all our letter lapbooks.  We go through the pictures and reinforce the beginning sound.  M enjoys this very much for some reason.  It kind of ends up as a chant… j-j-j-jellybeans, j-j-j-jackhammer, j-j-j-jumprope.

Next, Color Sequencing with Jellybeans:
Now, admittedly these jellybeans are a bit larger than regular jellybeans, and M did call them eggs as they were printing out, but he believed me when I told him they were jellybeans. :)  There are 5 colors and 3 jellybeans for each color.  M will sequence them from darkest to lightest or vice versa.

Number Sequencing with Jars:Pretty simple here – just sequencing the jars from 1 to 5. 

Then we’ll count our jellybeans from above onto the jars:

Jack and Jill Poem Sequencing Cards:The sequencing cards are from here.  And there are 4 of them; I was missing one when I took the picture.  I added a little card that has the poem on it too.  I printed the sequencing cards much smaller than the originals, making them each 3”x2” so they will fit into the lapbook pocket.

Big J and Little j Sorting:This is simple and pretty self-explanatory.  M loves jackhammers (and all things destructive), so I’m sure he’ll enjoy this.  In the future I may print the letters in various fonts too, but for now a simple sort seems best.

The back of the lapbook has one last pocket, Dot-to-dot J and j Letter Tracing:These are laminated so M can practice on them with a dry-erase or window marker over and over again.

All of these activities are available for downloading and  printing here.  Like I always say, you don’t have to make  lapbook!  Just use them for activity packs or whatever! ;)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Jan. 24, 2010

M is 40 months old.

This was a pretty light week for Tot School. I had quite a bit planned and ready to go, but M spent a large amount of time each day in pretend play and was so happily amusing himself, I just let him do his own thing. I expected him to ask to “do school”, but this really only happened on Monday while I was busy (of course!) with housework.

So… perhaps we are entering into a more involved creative play phase? I eavesdropped as much as I could and heard some pretty interesting and exciting things going on. :) It’s always a little stunning to me to realize that my little baby is a real boy and can think on his own and make up stories and well, who knows what else! Am I the only one feeling a bit of bewilderment at this sort of thing??

Anyway, enough rambling. M did his (independent) shelf activities while I cleaned Monday afternoon, and there are almost no action shots of these. Sorry, I know those are always more fun!

Math Skills:

M practiced his size sequencing skills with Scrambler (from Bob the Builder):

And with baseballs too:

Visual Discrimination:

I never know if this sort of thing is a math activity or what… anyway, I’ll just put it in it’s own little category for now. M did these Curious George Shadow Match cards:There’s more than just these, but for simplicity’s sake I only photographed a few. I thought these would be fun, but M was not interested. I will bring them back out some time soon because *I* think they are fun! Maybe he’ll change his mind next time around. :)

Literacy Skills:

M did two “cutting pages”, as he calls them, of the letters M and K. I can’t stress how much he LOVES to do these; they are always the very first thing he heads for. (See the gross brown stuff? That’s what happens when you leave your kid alone with a purple glue stick and he uses the entire thing on one page.)

Music:

We have been singing and playing our instruments a lot and listening to some cds. If anyone has any children’s music recommendations, I’d love to hear them! We learned a fabulous and cute new robot song. Listen to it here!

Fine Motor Skills:

M pulled out all of these puzzles on his own one day and did every single one of them. There were 12 little wooden puzzles in all:

On one of his shelves I put out a foam tray (this was originally a mushroom container at the grocery store), and a plastic needle with yarn. He poked the needle through the foam wherever he wanted and then pulled the long length of yarn through. He had so much fun with this and came to show me his “design” several times: I have to say this was definitely one of the hits of the week!

I also set out a new Dollar Tree 25 piece puzzle for him. He did this completely on his own the first time with no help. :) He’s definitely a puzzle boy. He was so proud of himself and said, “I just kept looking at the picture to see what piece I needed!”

His marble track came out and he put it together with only a little mama-direction. He loves this and it’s always fun.

A wonderful friend sent M this fantastic little peg board: Can you believe how cute it is?!? I was so excited when I saw it and so was M when he saw it waiting for him the next day. He made designs and rows of patterns, and ran to show me each one. :) This is a sign that he really, really likes something. And, I just realized that marbles sit perfectly on top of these little pegs, so I will be heading to the dollar store very, very soon. ;)

Creative Play / Large Motor Activities:

M was finally able to go outside and PLAY! Yay!

Early in the week we had some beautiful weather – it felt like a little bit of spring. :) In Minnesota that means it hit 32 degrees. ;) It lifted everyone’s spirits a little bit! M bundled up and went out… I wish I could’ve captured more of this on my camera, but I wasn’t able to get many good pictures. Ah well. Here you can see he is trying desperately to ride his bike on the small portion of our patio that has been shoveled: It didn’t quite work, but then he found a little ride on toy and “snowplowed” for a while. He then proceeded to lie on his tummy on the deep snow farther back in our yard, and play with his little cars and trucks for close to an hour. I even had our windows open to let in a little fresh air. :)

We made Monkey Bread on Wednesday. Yum, yum!

He really loves to bake with me and I need to do more of this kind of thing with him.

Life School:

We have had a challenging couple of weeks lately with M’s behavior. However, things are looking up and he has acquired some new freedoms and been given some new responsibilities. After I-don’t-know-how-many-months of trying to teach him to put one thing away before getting something new out it seems to have really sunk in! He has been so great about this and usually puts toys and activities away on his own without being asked. It’s absolutely heavenly! :) Of course there are always a few exceptions because he will need more than one thing in his play quite often… but I’m telling you, the bedtime clean up has gotten so much easier and quicker. Normally we only have 3 or 4 things to put away! Whoo-hoo! Because it used to be 20!

He’s also started making his own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and he’s allowed to use the microwave to cook his own chicken nuggets. :) This is all under very close supervision you understand. But still, he’s doing great and the more we work at making it fun for him to be a big boy, the better his behavior has gotten.

For more Tot School posts, check it out here!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – January 17, 2010

M is 40 months old. 

Yay!  We’re back!  As nice as it was to not write up the TS posts for the past few weeks, it’s also very nice to be back in our groove. 

So, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Math Skills:

I put together a little *math box* (well, in our case a math coffee can) like the one here that my friend Natalie at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns put together for her daughter.  It was full of craft sticks and various bottle lids.  I even threw in some little cards with shapes on them.  He was totally interested in this as it sat on his shelves, yet… he wasn’t sure what to do with it.  So, I showed him how to make shapes with them and suggested a few other things (patterns, letters).   And, I kid you not, the kid said to me, “But can’t I just paint them, Mommy??”   I’m thinking this says a lot about who he is. :) 

We also did some fun number stamping with a grid and a number cube:   I wrote the numbers 1 to 6 randomly on the grid (20 spaces – you can print one here), then using a variety of stamps (the pencil top kind) we rolled the die and then stamped out all of the 2’s or whatever number we got.  We took turns with this to make it more like a game, because M is all about games lately.  He had to help me find the right numbers quite a bit. ;)

We also did some snowflake counting with clothespins and a piece of yarn: I don’t know if you can see clearly in the photo, but we had 5 snowflakes with numerals on them which we clipped in sequence onto the yarn.  Then we had snowflakes with dots on them which we had to match to the correct number and also clip on.  M really, really enjoyed this.  Anything to do with clothespins or paper clips is sure to be a hit around here lately!  The snowflakes were found here.  I colored them with colored pencils to make them pretty. :)

We also practiced counting with some linking monkeys: This was a great introduction to addition!

 

Shapes and Colors:

M did great with this little activity.  I found this pattern block mat here; it has 4 hexagons in different colors.  In order to do this M had to figure out how to make the red hexagon with his trapezoid blocks, the orange one with triangles, and the blue one with diamonds...  a very interesting activity!

 

M also enjoyed his triangle collage page:

 

I bought these fun color paddles with a little leftover Christmas money.  They were from Oriental Trading. M had a lot of fun walking around and looking through them at various things.We also used them in a window to mix colors by placing one in front of another.  There has to be a ton of things we can do with these.  However, I’m really coming up with blanks.  If you have any ideas, share them!!

 

Literacy Skills:

M worked on his letter matching file folder game from here.  This matches upper and lower case letters.

 

We did a letter stamping game similar to the number stamping one mentioned above.  With this one we used a printout from here, and some upper and lower case cards (more on these cards in an upcoming post!) to turn over… we focused on just Tt, Ff, and Aa and stamped them out.

 

M did his Bob the Builder name puzzles with glass beads: He continues to love these!

 

Sorting:

Our theme for this month has been winter and snow (hence the snowflake activities), and we sorted our seasonal clip art onto colored paper.  M did great with this, he’s really got his seasons down. 

Fine Motor Skills:

I have to say, gross and fine motor skill work is what M enjoys most… I have to keep that in mind and incorporate it into other areas, like using fine motor skills to clip numbered snowflakes, etc. 

Another little thing I ordered from Oriental Trading was this awesome Shapes Hammering set.  M loves hammering the little nails into the corkboard and he’s made several pretty neat designs with the shapes.  Most often he pretends he is building a house. :)  He’s played with this every day since I put it out for him.

He laced together two foam mitten shapes:

 

He received this great fire truck puzzle for Christmas and did it 5 times the first day.  It has 46 pieces and has an emergency scene on the other side.  He LOVES this puzzle!

 

I put together a little push pin activity for him, which he also really loved!  We had some little letter cards left from our toothpick poke activity which has become a little boring for him, so he did those first, then I added in some little shapes and drawings for him to outline with the push pins. He really enjoyed this and it was a great workout for those little fingers!  I think I first saw this at The Shafer Family blog.

 

Geography:

We’ve only recently been talking about maps and the world, our country, state, etc.   M is very interested, and enjoyed doing this puzzle (Target Dollar Spot!) of the U.S. Ha – you can see this picture is from some time ago – our Christmas light patterns are in the background! ;)

 

Gross Motor Activities:

M and Daddy and I all ice skated on wax paper in our living room: This is so much fun!  We first did it at our Nature Center weekly class, and it never gets old!

We did our movement cards too; they are always fun.  I’ve found that if M is in a bad mood or whiny or whatever (sigh), if I can think of an activity that has a lot of gross motor movement it helps tremendously.  He turns back into himself.  I’m just not good with all this “boy stuff”, hee hee.  I was a sit quietly and play with my dolls kind of girl.  But, I’m learning!!

 

Music:

M inherited a small keyboard from an older cousin and has been playing it non-stop: It plays a couple of demo tunes by itself and has 5 different rhythms to choose from.  M loves to play these rhythms and make them faster or slower.  It comes close to driving me up a wall sometimes, but I’m glad he’s learning about rhythm somewhere, because he sure isn’t going to get it from me or his dad! ;)

 

Sensory:

We’ve been using some oatmeal (in the cupboard for over a year) in our sensory tub lately.  After seeing oatmeal in a sensory tub at April Flowers, I decided to do it too! M enjoyed playing with his farm animals in it:

And because he loves to play with my seashells I hid them in there one day – 20 of them.  I have him a grid with 20 spaces and he spent a long time looking for all of them.

 

Creative Play:

M also inherited this remote control Scrambler (a Bob the Builder truck) from the same cousin that gave him the “piano”.  Well, he has pretty much played non-stop with Scrambler since we brought it home.  Here he is with all of his puppets and some stuffed animals strung out on the floor… trying to get Scrambler to run over them all. :)  Yep, that’s my sweet boy running over animals with a 4 wheeler. ;)

For more Tot School posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)