Shapes Cutting, Pasting, and Sorting Pages – Printables

M was SO into his ABC cutting and pasting collage pages that I had to come up with something similar to keep him from going through the entire alphabet in a month. So, this is what I came up with for him… (This is his finished collage for the “square” page.)

I made a set of cutting and pasting shape collage pages. And then I realized this would be a fun sorting activity also!

I’ve made two sets of printables; one is for cutting and pasting, as M did in the above picture, the other is for sorting: (I’m thinking this will be perfect in our pocket chart).

It’s fun to use real, every day objects to show children how shapes are all around us. :)

Just Click on the links below to go to the download page.

Shapes Cut-and-paste Collage Pages
(You’ll see is a lot of space between the pictures on these pages. This is so the child will have plenty of room for cutting.)

Shapes Sorting Cards

Have a beautiful day! :)

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 – Nov. 1, 2009

{M is 38 months old}

I am going to start with some of our activity shelves from this week: 

M loves doing anything with a dry-erase marker and/or a clipboard.  Who knew it would be so easy to get him interested in something?

I found a rhyming match page here.  M drew a line from the items on the left to the rhyming match on the right:Then we used the same card to match beginning sounds.  We talked about the distinction between words that have the same sound at the beginning and words that rhyme.  These are not easy concepts for a 3 year old to understand, and I think I probably should’ve used this page for just one or the other concept, not both.

He did another visual discrimination card where he first circled the tallest item in each row, then circled the shortest item in each row.  These were also found here.

He also did some same / different cards with sports balls and fruit: These were pretty easy for M – he simply circled the “different” object in each group.  He loves doing things like this and I like to include something I know will be easy for him.  A little ego-boost never hurt anyone. ;)  These were also found here.  Also, just a note… I found these mini dry-erase markers at Target; they are a bit shorter than a normal-size crayon and I’ve noticed they really encourage him to use a proper tripod grasp when drawing with them.  We’ll be using these more from now on.

I grabbed the very last “Make Your Own Monster” kit at the Target Dollar Spot, and put it on a shelf for M.  He was not as interested in this as I expected him to be.  He was acting very silly about it, and once he discovered the glitter glue, well, that was it.  All he wanted to do was put glitter glue everywhere. :)He made two monsters (we call them “silly creatures” because monsters are a bit much for him lately): 

Our theme for the week was pumpkins, and our letter was P.   M created the P pages for his ABC book:You can read more about it in this post.

I put 4 cardstock pumpkins in an activity box for him along with a glue stick and some shapes cut from yellow construction paper.  I printed the shapes from Making Learning Fun.  M decided to work on this project without me, and without asking for any directions (it was supposed to be for creating jack-o-lanterns).  I found him like this: Just haphazardly gluing shapes to the pumpkins. :)  So, we talked about the shapes, and we talked about the different sizes of the pumpkins – tall, thin, short, wide, small and large.  I showed him how to use the shapes to make a jack-o-lantern, but he decided to do his own thing.  That’s ok, I’m really trying to make this more fun for him than anything else.  And he learned more this way than he probably would’ve if he’d done it the *planned* way.  Here’s how they turned out:

He did a pumpkin shadow match activity:The inspiration for this idea came from this post at Izzie, Mac & Me.  He really enjoyed this one – it was just challenging enough, but still easy enough for him to do with no help.

We read a fun poem with pictures: I found the poem online and just copied it into a Word document with some pumpkin pictures I created from an online coloring page.  (I know this poem was on someone’s blog; unfortunately I just copied it right then and forgot to save the blog url to my handy dandy idea spreadsheet.  If you had this on your blog, let me know so I can link to it!)

We also did the always fun “Five Little Pumpkins” poem with the flannel board.

We baked yum, yum, yummy pumpkin muffins: They were heavenly.  I wish you could all have one!

More P activities….

M practiced Pouring to a line:

And we played the Penny Drop Game: This was definitely the “hit” of the week.  I posted more about this game here!

We read The Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Steven Kroll. and looked through some pumpkin life cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone. (Sorry no pics of ours!)  We put them in order and went through them a couple of times.

We learned some new pumpkin and halloween poems, but most of them were flops, ha.  The one M did like was “Pumpkin, Pumpkin” from childfun.com:

Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Sitting on a wall. (child sits)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Tip and fall. (child tips over)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Rolling down the street. (child rolls around on floor)
Pumpkin, Pumpkin
Trick or Treat!!!

We also did a couple of pumpkin and Halloween crafts…
M made a pumpkin mosaic:

And we made a tea light holder together, using red and yellow tissue paper:

 

That’s it for us! 

For more Tot School posts go here.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Raccoon Shapes Craft – printable :)

So, tonight I had two hours of uninterrupted internet time. I was going to write 3 posts for later this week, comment on all your lovely posts out there, and maybe even play some sudoku.:)


What I ended up doing instead was creating this little guy: Isn’t he cute?

Next week our theme is autumn animals – think owls, squirrels, bats… and raccoons. I found some great raccoon books at the library today, and wanted to make a fun workbox activity for M that went along with them. We haven’t done much with shapes lately, so I came up with this. He’s entirely made of shapes. Well, except for the googley eyes we’ll be putting on him and the whiskers (probably black yarn since that’s what I have on hand).

I looked all over internet-land and couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, so I *had* to make one from scratch (oh, darn!). DLTK has a cute one that is entirely made of hearts, but M, being very manly, is not into hearts so much. ;)

If you are interested in making one, or if you ever do a raccoon theme, you can print out the template and instructions from here. I’ll probably cut the shapes out and then use them for a template on black paper. I’ll let M color the shapes on the second page gray. If you have a kid who is good with scissors, they could do a lot of the cutting too.

Enjoy!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Button Board

I just made this: Isn’t it fun?!  This will be a shelf activity for M this week, but I like how it turned out so much that I’m sharing it early.  I think it will also make a great car trip activity!

I first saw the idea for a button board at Chasing Cheerios (I can’t find the exact link), and have been meaning to make one ever since.  I had a lot of ideas to make it more boyish (hers was flowers) and thought of wheels for cars and trucks.  However, I finally decided to make it easy on myself and just made shapes. 

It will be great for learning this practical life skill and will give those fine motor skills a good workout!

It took me about an hour total to put it together.  Should’ve taken pictures, but I didn’t…. anyway, here’s what I did:

• Cut a piece of corrugated cardboard to desired size and shape.
• Choose fabric from stash to cover board.
• Decide where you want to put buttons, and mark spots with an “X”.
• Sew buttons on.  This is the not-so-fun part, especially if you choose to have 15 buttons.
• Put thin layer of glue over the cardboard and smooth fabric with buttons out on top, centered with extra to overlap onto the back.  I used decoupage glue, you could use regular white glue thinned with water, or spray adhesive.
• flip the board over and wrap edges around to the back.  Secure with duct tape or more glue, or both.
• Cut several shapes of all colors and sizes from felt.
• Cut button hole slits in each shape in the center. Felt is so great for projects like this because there is no sewing involved!
• Button your shapes onto your board! 

You could make this with more room between the buttons, and then outline the shapes on the fabric around the buttons.  Your child could then match the felt shapes to the shape outlines. 

I like it this way, even though it is a little busy looking.  M can rearrange the shapes however he wants, and come up with a new design each time.  It’s great for a shape and color review tool too!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 27, 2009

M is 37 Months old

This week we began our autumn theme! I’m very excited about all the great activities and learning tools available with this theme.

We did a little normal school stuff too – that first…

We did our ABC train in the pocket chart again. Right away, when M saw me setting it up, he said, “I don’t want to do that, I didn’t do so good with it”. :( I told him that we were going to do it a different way this time and that he would do great. I sorted the train cars out on the floor by color, and then told M which letter we needed and which color group it was with. Each color had only 4 to 5 cards, so it was really simple for him to find the one we needed. He did great! His favorite part was after the train was put together. He grabbed two pencils and we pointed to each letter while we sang the ABC song. I’ve got to remember to always set him up for success while still challenging him. It went so much better this week and he felt much better about his abilities than he did last week.

I made some dots on colored paper for him and he drew lines to connect them and make simple shapes. The inspiration for this activity was this post. He did well with this and was excited to draw shapes, but we sure need to work on that tripod grasp a lot! Later in the day he cut his shapes out. :)

We did our weather chart, which has been sorely neglected the past few months:

M practiced his sawing. :) He lined up his blocks and sawed them apart, one by one (making all the appropriate chainsaw noises – you did know that’s a chainsaw, right?) : You can see we aren’t getting very far on the road to cleaning one thing up before starting another. Sigh.

For our autumn theme, we did a sort of circle time activity a few days this week. First, we talked about all four seasons, and what changes take place during each one. I found these great seasonal clothing cards at Montessori for Everyone, and we set them up on the pocket chart and talked about them. I plan to use these at some point for sorting too. I put different colored star stickers on the backs of these so when we sort them M will be able to tell if he sorted them all correctly on his own (blue star for summer, purple for winter, green for spring, orange for fall).

I found some fun seasonal clipart at Kizclub and we sorted them out onto colored paper. Green for spring, blue for summer, orange for fall, and red for winter. M did pretty well with this. He had a little trouble with summer and spring items, but in my opinion some of them were a little confusing.

M hung up fall window clings in his room:

We played our autumn tic tac toe game:

And we read some library books about autumn (see reviews here and here):

We learned this fun seasons song (click on image to go to web page):

And I taught M this little poem…

Two little eyes to look at God,

Two little ears to hear His word,

Two little lips to sing His praise,

Two little feet to walk His ways.

Two little hands to do His will,

and one little heart to love Him still.

I’m not sure who wrote this, it is in one of M’s baby books. I’m trying to bring something more about faith/religion into our time together on a more daily basis. We pray at mealtimes and bedtime, read Bible stories, and do our (somewhat sporadic) Sunday School lessons, but I feel he’s ready for more than that.

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots! Check here for more tot school ideas.

Have a beautiful day! :)