Size Sorting and Sequencing – printables

Well, I’ve been keeping busy with the Bob the Builder activity packs.  As long as M is responding well to them (and is he ever!) I’ll keep trying to think up some new things.  Thanks to those of you who have given me some excellent ideas!

These were super easy and fast to make, please don’t think I spend all day on the computer working hard at these things.  It’s a lot of fun for me too, as well as for M.

First I made a size sorting activity with all the trucks: There are twelve different trucks, with a small, medium, and large size of each.   The child sorts them onto the mats.  I’ve only put them around the mats in the photo so you could actually see the mats.   I think there are other things we may do with these too – like sort by color onto a color wheel.   If you think your little one would enjoy this, you can download it here.

I also made a size sequencing activity of just one of the trucks – Scrambler, who is actually an “off-road” 4-wheeler.  He’s crazy and hyper and M loves him to death.  There are 8 images, each one a bit smaller than the next:
These can be downloaded here.

Enjoy!  If you print these and use them, I’d love to know about it!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

P.S. I know it looks like a lot of cutting, but I watched the clock and I had it all cut out and ready to go in 12 minutes!  No, I wasn’t even hurrying. ;)

Tot School – Nov. 15, 2009

M is 38 months old

We have had an odd couple of weeks.  Two weeks ago I suddenly felt burned out and apparently M was too – we were both kind of blah all week and did almost no tot school.  It was a rough week, so I didn’t bother to post even the few things we did manage to do. 

This past week M has had a pretty bad cold and we were home every. single. day. all. day. long.  On top of cabin fever I also had 3 very short nights in a row because M would start coughing so badly, and I’d get up to try to help, but mostly just held him and comforted him.  It’s sweet, isn’t it, how big boys turn back into cuddly babies in the middle of the night? :)  But 4 hours of sleep a night had me beat.  Thankfully I’ve had some free time this weekend and I’m feeling human again. :)

Not that this is about me… but just to forewarn you that this post may be, I don’t know, a bit nutty. :)

We did our ABC train in the pocket chart: 

We matched fur to animals with this file folder game:

 

Played with this bear dress up puzzle from the Target dollar spot:

 

He did some Bob the Builder truck name puzzles with flat glass marbles (definitely the hit of the week):

 

M worked with his build-a-letter homemade set, and was much more into it this time than he was originally.  It may have helped that I only set out a few letters.

 

We pulled out our counting mats and he counted with some skittles that were left over from his Halloween stash:

 

I found some very inexpensive plastic canvas stars at Walmart and M “sewed” it with a length of yarn and a plastic needle.  He really liked this activity!  It seems fine motor skill activities are always favorites around here. :)

 

I gave him a cardboard tube with numbers written on it randomly and some number stickers and he matched them up.  We did this once before with letters; for some reason he loved doing it with letters, but wasn’t that interested in the number tube.

 

The Target dollar spot also had these enormous blocks.  M is totally into blocks lately and I knew he would love these!

(See the t-shirt on the floor there?  They make awesome soft hankies for sore little noses that won’t stop running!)

 

We have been talking about animals in autumn, mainly raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, owls, and bats.  We checked out several good books from the library, and I found a Your Big Backyard magazine on the sale cart there for 10 cents, from October of 2008.  It was full of great information about animals.  On top of talking about squirrels and owls, it had a section that talked about how some animals have fur and skin that helps them hide.  M was totally interested in that part: It also had a cute mini-book to make that had M decide what animal would be on the next page by looking at a small part of the animal on the page before: It also had mazes, games, great fact pages… I could go on and on.  I have heard of Your Big Backyard, but I had no idea it was such an awesome magazine.  We loved it! 

 

M also did a raccoon craft using shapes: He did a great job with it and had a lot of fun sorting the shapes out first.  Anything with googley eyes and/or glue is sure to be fun. :)

Last year, pre-blog, I made these stick puppets for M: I brought them out again and he had fun learning this cute rhyme:

One little owl when the moon was new,

Along came another owl and then there were two!

Two little owls perched high in a tree,

Along came another owl and then there were three!

Three little owls flew to the barn door,

Along came another owl and then there were four!

Four little owls lined up side by side,

Along came another owl and then there were five!

Five little owls called “Hoo, hoo, hoo”, then they

flapped their wings and away they flew!

I can’t remember where I first found this poem, sorry!  M loves it and we did this several times.

He really liked it so much (he’s very into poems lately, and loves having visuals for them), I made some squirrel stick puppets and we learned another poem.  The clip art for the squirrels was taken from classroomclipart.com, a new site for me.  I love free clipart!

5 Little Squirrels

The first little squirrel said, “I want to play!”

The second little squirrel said, “Let’s find nuts today!”

The third little squirrel said, “Yes, nuts are good!”

The fourth little squirrel said, “They’re my favorite food!”

The fifth little squirrel said, “Let’s climb this tree,

and crack our nuts… one, two three!”  (CLAP 3 TIMES)

 

We played our autumn matching game several times:

 

We also played a fun game that was came in our High Five magazine October issue.  It’s called Gathering Nuts and I turned it into a file folder game (just laminated it onto a file folder).  It’s a basic counting game, and M had a lot of fun with this one.  He and Daddy played it every chance they got.

 

I also pulled out another game I made last year (also pre-blog) with squirrels and acorns.  M matched the acorn numbers to the  squirrels.  I’m sure there are other things we could do with these; I need to think about that some more.  Suggestions?

 

M played a pinecone race game.  I intended to set a timer for this, but forgot, so it wasn’t much of a race really, but M enjoyed it enough that he did it on his own several other times throughout the week.  First I had him carry pinecones in a ladle from one end of the living room to the other and dump them in a basket.  This was much too easy, so we switched to a large spoon:

Lots of fun was had! :) 

And, this is super-duper late, but I have to show you him in his Halloween costume: Complete with winter hat and winter coat on underneath everything.

Is it just me, or is he really cute? ;)  Maybe it’s just that mustache, hee hee. :)

Sorry I was all over the place in this post!  I’m going to try organizing our activities by skills for our tot school posts.  Obviously I’m not starting that today, but I do plan to start doing it soon! :)

For more tot school posts go here!

Have a beautiful week! :)

Tot School – Oct. 25, 2009

M is 37 months old

We continued with a few apple-themed activities this week that we weren’t able to get to last week…

First Two Little Apples in an Apple Tree poem and mini-flannel board: M has always loved this poem! :)

We read 10 Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss (such a great book!!), and did a cute flannel board activity putting apples on a picture of M! They are numbered 1 to 10 and size sequenced too. I have seen this in a few blogs lately, but I can’t honestly say where I saw it first. It was before I started keeping better track of that sort of thing!

We also read The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree, by Gail Gibbons. With this book we used these apple life-cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone. I made them into a little flip book so there would be no end or beginning to the cycle as we went through them a few times.

We also did a fun activity matching apple patterns on a boy’s head. The cards and patterns are from Making Learning Fun. We made them into magnets and did them on a small pan. I saw this at Izzie, Mac & Me.

Notice that green visor? It was in our “pay it forward” gift package from whisperingwhispers at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn. I put it in one of M’s activity containers this week and he had a lot of fun putting race car stickers on it. He wore it for a long time afterwards too! :)

He did his first dot-to-dot page: an apple! I think he did pretty well! It’s in a page protector and he used a dry-erase marker and a piece of felt for an eraser.

We did an A activity for his new ABC book too! Check it out in this post.

M also used his dry-erase marker on a zoo page from a workbook and tried drawing straight lines.

He got in some more fine-motor-skill practice putting this button board together:

And the big hit of the week was this: I made some 3”x3” cards from construction paper, used a black marker to write a letter on each one, and put it in a box with some toothpicks. M picked a letter and a toothpick and, working on the carpet, poked holes along the letter. This was a lot of fun for him and was good for letter identification, letter formation, and fine motor skills (again!). We held them up to the window and saw the light shine through the little holes. I got this great idea from prekinders – that site is full of good ideas! And so many of them are super simple like this!

We learned a fun new song (tune of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”) from preschooleducation.com:

Once a little appleseed

was planted in the ground.

Down came the raindrops

falling all around.

Out came the bright sun

as bright as bright could be

and the little appleseed

grew up to be an apple tree!

We added motions to it and M wanted to sing it several times. Preschooleducation.com is a great place to find poems and songs!

That’s it for us this week! Next week we will be having some pumpkin fun!! :)

Check here for more tot school posts.

Have a beautiful week! :)

Tot School – October 18, 2009

M is 37 months old

Well, this week M was recovering from having a horrible cold (I guess that’s all it was, but it was a bad one) and I was trying to not get sick, and hard at work keeping a migraine at bay for the first half of the week.  We are both feeling better now!  Whew!  But, unfortunately not many pictures were taken.  M did a lot of school on his own, with me lying on the couch, opening one eye now and then to make sure he was ok. :)  I’ve taken pictures of the shelf activities he did, but not many of them were taken when M was actually doing them.  Anyway…. here we go…

First, some apple activities… (excuse M’s half-dressed state, dressing was not a priority this week, sigh).  He sorted small and large apples into baskets with tongs:He loves any activity that includes tongs! 

An apple counting book that I downloaded from Childcareland : He did this on his own one day when I was napping (Daddy was home) – I couldn’t believe it.  He sat and put apples on all the pages from 1 to 10.  I will leave it out for next week so we can do it together and actually count. :)

Same / Different cards from prekinders with apples:I laminated these and put them in a container with a dry erase marker.  M must’ve done these 5 times this week and I didn’t get a single picture.  Some of these were difficult, but he did great!

Some fall-themed lacing cards:

 

An apple file folder game where he had to match up the combination of apples on the front of the pockets, from homeschoolshare:This is a great file folder game – M loved putting the apples in the pockets.

Pockets are apparently a big hit, because he loves this color-sorting file folder game too:I printed this from Homeschool Creations, and made pockets in a file folder with the color name cards.  There are several pictures of objects in various colors that are sorted into the pockets.  I made this a long time ago and M has definitely gotten his use out of it!

We did a fun counting activity with this printout.  I have discovered that adding a clipboard to any activity makes it a ton of fun. ;)  Here’s M taking off with the clipboard in hand to go count the windows in the kitchen:(Still in his jammies at noon, yes he is.)  We had a lot of fun walking around counting items in our home.  M colored over the pictures, then I helped him write the numbers in.  Here he is very seriously making a notation with his little pink crayon, hee hee:

 

I gathered up M’s foam uppercase letters, and some wooden lowercase letters, as well as some clipart from our ABC lapbooks.  M matched the lower and upper case letters, then we sorted the images by beginning sound.  M did great with this; I have to say I was pretty proud of him!  It helped that we only had 3 letters and sounds to work with.  I think he really enjoyed this and I plan to do it in the future as we add more letters to our lapbook collection.

 

M has been making up a lot of rhymes lately, he is really into it.  So we did this rhyming card activity: These can be printed from here.  There are several to choose from and I will be making more of these.  This was  a fun activity for M and he did very well.  I wrote the words on the back (mainly for my reference so I could give M the right words – bug, not beetle for example) and put red stars on one set and blue on the other so he can sort them out first.  The red group rhymes with cards from the blue group.

 

M also helped gather in the last of our carrot crop (goodness, there were a lot): And yes, he needed to be bundled up like that – it’s been snowing on and off all week, and in the 20’s. 

We also saw more of these guys: Gobble Gobble!

Hope you all had a fabulous week and are warmer than we are here!  Go here to see more Tot School posts!

Have a beautiful week! :)