Tot School – December 6, 2009

M is 39 months old

 

This was a pretty easy and fun week for us.  I filled M’s shelves up with some Christmas-themed file folder games I made last year, a new puzzle, his ABC collage pages, and a couple of fun clothespin math activities.  We also had no less than 3 play dates and a day at our local community center’s creative play area.  And a big dinner at the in-laws to finish the week out.  Whew.  The busy season has begun I guess. :)

 

ABC Activities:

M can not get enough of cut and paste pages lately.  He is going through 2 letters per week in his ABC book and we’ll soon be done with the whole alphabet at this rate.  He always asks for his “cutting pages” first; I think he loves that he can do it completely on his own and has the routine down.  However, I’m not sure he’s really learning much about letter sounds from this activity, except when we take his book down and “read” it.  I’m thinking of starting up the letter lapbooks again after we finish our ABC book with the collages, because he really seemed to soak in a lot with the lapbook activities.   He’s still not interested in doing any letter crafts, so I’ll wait a while before trying that with him again.  Anyway… here are the collage pages he’s done in the past two weeks:

He also spent some time looking at the ABC Book and doing the tracing pages: See that tripod grasp?  He’s really come a long way with this lately.  I showed him how “real artists” hold their paintbrushes and told him it’s important to make those muscles really, really strong, and he totally got into it.  He always wants me to help him hold the paintbrush the right way and it’s carried over to activities like this!

 

We matched the capital letters on a gingerbread file folder game from here.  Next week this will be out again and we’ll match “baby” letters to the “mama” letters. When I made this I put magnets on the back of the letters and we do one half of the alphabet at a time on a cookie sheet.  We also take turns (I made a lot of mistakes that he had to correct ;) ), which makes it more fun and game-like for him.  He tells me a letter to find and then I have to find it and put it on the right spot, then I do the same for him.  If he is having trouble, it’s easy to tell him the color of the circle he needs, as a little help.

 

Counting

We played this fun clothespin counting game with Christmas tags, ribbons, and foam stickers:

And we counted lots of things throughout the week in our everyday normal routine.  He is really doing well with counting and I love seeing him light up when he really “gets” something!

 

Patterns

We played another file folder game from here.  In this one M had to match patterns to create mittens: The right side piece of each mitten attaches with velcro.  He did great with this, which I knew he would (he was able to do it last year), but I added in a step where he had to describe the design to me - “a green rectangle above a blue circle” – as he found each mitten to match.

 

We also played a mitten matching game from the November issue of our High Five magazine.  Each mitten has a multi-colored design on it.  We played this Memory-style with the cards face down:

 

And we made ABAB patterns with some cardstock Christmas lights I made, using clothespins and yarn to string them up:

 

Colors

M did some color mixing with water in jars: He’s been asking to make colored ice cubes lately, which was something we did quite often over the summer.  He wants to use them in his bath.  Seriously, this kid comes up with some funny (but fun!) ideas sometimes.  So I decided to add a color mixing lesson in.  He loves using pipettes, so this is always fun.   Then he had fun dripping the water onto paper towels:

 

We did another file folder game.  This one was from here (also made last year).  I made the stockings into pockets and M loved fitting the candy canes into the matching stocking. 

 

Fine Motor Skills

Several of the above activities involved the use of fine motor skills (almost all of them, actually), but I also surprised M with a new (Dollar Tree) Mickey Mouse Puzzle.  He’s been putting his 24 piece floor puzzle together with no problem lately, so I wanted to see how he’d do with a 25 piece small puzzle.  He had it done in no time – all by himself!  He knew to look for pieces that had a little bit of whatever image he was looking for, and didn’t need any help at all.  I’ve asked for some puzzles for him for Christmas from relatives, and I’m interested to see how he does with a 50 piece one.  Needless to say I have bought out all the 25 piece ones at Dollar Tree. :) 

 

Music

We sang a lot this week and played instruments.  I have a binder of songs that I’ve put together for M and he has a small bin of instruments.  It’s more noise than anything, but it’s a lot of fun and he loves it.  There are no pics; I’ll have to do a separate post about it sometime!

M received a guitar for his 3rd birthday and this is how he likes to play it: Hee hee.   He asked me to get it for him a lot this week, and loves experimenting with the different sounds he can make with it.  We also listened to a lot of Christmas music – grown up and kid kinds. ;)  I have to be diligent about playing cds in our home because since he was born I haven’t listened to much music.  We never listen to the radio and I feel like I am always craving peace and quiet.  It’s been nice to have music back in our day, it can do so much to brighten our moods!

Creative Play

M has been dying to build a maze lately, but wanted help.  So this is what we did Friday morning:

He’s helping the Christmas Angel from his nativity set find her way out here. :)

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots!  Go here to see more tot school posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Christmas-Themed Math Activities

We’ve been doing some fun activities this first week of Advent and I thought I’d share a couple of them with you now in a bit more detail.  You’ll also see them in the weekly Tot School post.

We did a great clothespin counting activity.  I found these cute Christmas tags and ribbon at the Target dollar spot.  I wrote a number from 1 to 10 on the tags, then attached a length of ribbon to each one with a stapler.  I put some foam Christmas stickers on clothespins (you’ll need 55 clothespins total) and M clipped them to the ribbons, counting up to the number on each tag as he did so.  This great idea came from here, where it was done with an autumn theme.    He really stuck with this and did all 10 tags!  Why I don’t have a picture of that, I’m just not sure. :)  Crazy mommy-brain.

 

Next, a fun patterning activity with clothespins (again!) and cardstock Christmas lights.  I made a pattern, then traced it onto red, green, blue, and yellow cardstock.  I cut out the lights then added detail with a black marker. 

M and I strung the lights up on some yarn which was tacked into his flannel board, which is just flannel on a foam core board and comes in handy for things like this.

There are no action shots because we took turns holding the Christmas light and yarn together while the other person clipped on the clothespins.  M is really into patterns now that he’s got it all figured out.  He told me, “they’re taking turns!”  Um, why didn’t I think of that?  Weeks of trying to figure out how to help him understand patterns… I could’ve used that idea! 

We did a simple ABAB pattern as you can see.  I’m going to do this with him again next week and see how he does with an ABCABC pattern – I’m running with the taking turns idea.  I’m not sure if an AABB pattern would make sense at this point. 

Both of these activities were really enjoyed by M and I love that he was honing those fine-motor skills as well as learning a little math!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Yet another Bob the Builder activity…

I can practically hear everyone jumping up and down with excitement about this (that's me being sarcastic). ;) Well, M is loving these and so I keep going; he thinks his mommy is pretty cool right now, ha! Little does he know the really cool mommies have better things to do with their time. However, I do think this is the last one for a while. He may never get tired of Bob and his millions of work trucks, but I am. Just a little!

Anyway, let me show you the new *Bob the Builder – Counting and Comparing Flip Book*…
We had a little apple unit early in fall and one of the items we used was an apple counting book that I printed from Childcareland. M loved it! So, I used that idea and took it one step further by making this one into a split flip book. You can flip either side of the book, and then compare the amount of trucks. We’ll use this to talk about “more” and “less”.

The cover:
The inside:
The trucks are laminated and attach to the pages with velcro dots. I’ve placed the correct number of velcro dots on each page as an added help with counting and developing one-to-one correspondence.

After the counting is done, start flipping the pages and ask “which side has more trucks?” and “which side has less trucks?”. Discuss how 10 is a larger amount than 3, etc. I think there’s a lot we’ll be able to do with this!

Recently M was playing a number match game and someone (we had company over) asked him which number was the *biggest* number, and M just stared at the numbers with a blank look on his face. Bigger? Well, they (the numerals) pretty much all looked the same size to him. I realized that amount and size can be difficult concepts for a child, when referring to numbers. And then this book popped into my head and now here it is! :)

The .pdf file is available for download here or just click on the image at the top of this post!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – November 29, 2009

 

This was a pretty light week for us… and we enjoyed it!  We didn’t try to do too much, and just had fun.

Fine Motor Skills

M cut strips of green and red paper with the “zig zag” scissors, then we made a chain of loops and used stickers to close them up: He was very interested in this activity, and caught on to the fact that we were making a pattern.  This was a real breakthrough because in the past he hasn’t gotten the whole *pattern* idea.  I expected lightbulbs to appear over his head and bells to ring, but he just calmly said, “it’s a pattern, we need green next.”  Ha ha, this kid always amazes me and makes me laugh. :)

He spent a LOT of time popping the tiny bubbles on this bubble wrap, such a great activity for strengthening those little fingers:

 

He put pipe cleaner “branches” into the holes of a salt shaker, then added fall colored leaves (pony beads).  He loved this, and thought it was hilarious to call them branches and leaves.  We got this idea from the Schafer Family blog.

 

And laced up some Autumn themed lacing cards:

 

Sorting

M used tongs to sort fruit and vegetables from his supply of pretend food:

And we sorted truck cutouts onto a color wheel:

Math Skills

We played “store” with M’s pretend food and a cup of pennies.  We both had so much fun with this and M had a smile on his face the whole time.  I don’t know why we haven’t done this sooner.  He told me later in the day, “I had fun playing store with you, Mommy!” :)  We set up his fruit and veggies on the loveseat and he picked the items he wanted and I told him the price.  It was perfect for counting practice, and when he ran out of money we had a short conversation about why we can’t always have everything we want.  This great idea came from Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns!

 

Sensory

We played a sensory game with a few matching pairs of items and a small pillowcase.  One of each pair went into a small container and the other went into the pillowcase.  M had to pick an item from the plastic container, then try to find the matching item in the pillowcase using his sense of touch only. I held the bag for him, but he was on his own here just so I could take a picture. :)  He did great with this and had so much fun we did it again right away.  Here are the items we used: pennies, pinecones, wooden blocks, megablocks, clothespins, glass pebbles, pipecleaners wound into a circle, craft leaves, and spoons.

 

Thanksgiving

Here’s a picture of our finished Thanksgiving tree:

We had so much fun with this and we will definitely be doing it again.  What a great way to list our blessings and what we are thankful for.

We went to our Nature Center again for our weekly class and while there the kids drew pictures of what they are thankful for.  Here’s M’s: Apples were first on his list, you can see it in the middle.  Other things were his family, building a snowman, and going sledding when it snows.  He had a great time scribbling… I was surprised because he has not shown that much interest in crayons at home.  At the nature center he was still coloring when all the other kids were done!

I printed a turkey out from here, and M painted it with his watercolors, then cut the tail feathers apart:

 

Imagination

M has a tiny teddy bear that he’s been calling “baby” lately.  (He wants us to have a baby so badly!)  He made a little bed and “baby” slept in it: Then “baby” woke up and wanted to be rocked (someone else wakes up and likes to be rocked sometimes too). What a great daddy!! :)  (No, that isn’t quite the same way I rock M!)

For more Tot School posts, go here.

Have a beautiful week! :)

Tot School

November 22, 2009

 M is 38 Months old

My camera battery died in the middle of tot school one day so some photos of just the activities were taken later in the week... like 5 minutes before I wrote this post. :)

ABCs and Pre-writing:

M is going through some anti-craft phase right now, and this includes the craft pages for our ABC book.  He loves cutting and pasting for the collage pages though: So, apparently we will now have an ABC collage book.  I’m hoping the craft pages will make an appearance again sometime soon, but I’m leaving this kind of thing totally up to M.  Here are his Ll and Oo pages: (This was when the no-crafts discovery was made.  M cut the letters out, but refused to do the rest, so yours truly did it in a futile attempt to get him interested.)

On a more positive note, he was totally into the tracing pages.  We “read” his book together and then he practiced holding the dry-erase marker correctly and traced the letters:

We also did our cardstock letters and glass pebbles activity (both from Dollar Tree!): He loves this.  It’s simply setting a letter out and then tracing it with the pebbles in the same way you would draw the letter (start at the top, go down, etc.).

For the very first time we had a sand tray to trace letters.  I was hesitant to do this because I thought at some point M would just want to play in the sand, most likely getting his little cars involved.  We had a little talk about how this is only for drawing letters, shapes, or numbers in, and he actually did pretty well.  He did experiment with just doodling in it too, which was fine with me.  We used this with our sand letter cards: He really did a great job.

We also matched up our Mama and Baby letters with these fun cards (Dollar Tree!):

 

He’s been playing quite often with a fishing game I made 2 years ago (he loved it then and still plays with it frequently) : The fish have letters on them and metal grommets for eyes.  The fishing pole has a magnet on the end of the string to catch them.  The chair, in case you were wondering, is M’s “fishing bridge” and the floor there?  “Floaty Pond”.  :)  As opposed to other side of the room, which is “Sinky Pond”.   Yep!

Pre-literacy Skills:

I have a subscription to an email full of free samples from Dover Publications.  The email comes weekly and I always save a ton of things.  One was these Opposites cards: M was very interested in this – of course he knew about opposites, but didn’t know the term for it.  He enjoyed matching these up and I plan to print more for him soon.  He would say “If it isn’t hot” (and grab the hot card), “then it’s cold!” (and match it to the cold one). 

Fine Motor Skills:

He played with another I Spy Sensory Bin – I found some great new things to put in it for him – a little hammer, screwdriver, pliers, and saw – such cute and tiny things!  We also used a variety of other things found around the house.  I didn’t have a theme at all… but he loved it!

And a Curious George puzzle:

 

Large Motor Skills:

After reading about how important a workout of large muscles can be in a boy’s learning, we did our movement cards before a lot of the other work.  M always enjoys this!

Leaping :)…

 

Math Skills:

I thought this would be a super-fun activity – connecting dots to make shapes: M was interested at first, but quickly moved on to something else.  The idea for this was here.

I found some wooden tan grams at Michael’s  ($1.00 – you should go now!)  and printed a couple of puzzles for him:

 

Size sorting with Bob the Builder trucks (loved this activity and the next one, of course):

 

And size sequencing with Scrambler, also from Bob the Builder:

 

History:

We have been reading some great Thanksgiving books and I told him the basics of the first Thanksgiving with this flannelboard set: He listened very well and then told Daddy the story later!

 

Life Skills:

This week we took the drawer locks off of M’s dresser drawers and he was given two new jobs – put his own clothes away after they are folded, and pick out his own clothes to wear each morning.  He is loving this new-found freedom, such a big boy!  And while the clothing choices are not ones I would’ve made, I’m very, very proud of him!  And now I know that the red shirt is way too small and needs to be packed away. :)

Nature and Science:

We also had a class at our local nature center all about apples this week.  M had so much fun taste testing and graphing his favorite apple, cutting an apple to see the star inside, and even squishing an apple to make cider!  The children were all given their own apple seed and we went to a beautiful sunny field where they planted them. So much fun!  I need to start including our nature center experiences in my tot school posts – we always learn so much there!

For more Tot School, go here!

Have a beautiful week! :)