Tot School

M is 35 months old.

I felt really behind all week, nothing was planned (and I am nothing if not a Planner), and both M and I were a little cranky.  Sigh.  Motherhood isn’t always pretty I guess.  Anyway, we did only a few things…

We played with M’s foam bath numbers and he matched the number to the correct pile of erasers that I set up:

He did this pretty well, with only a little guidance from me.  We switched it and he put the number of erasers down next to the appropriate foam number (does that make sense??)

One day he wanted to “do school” when I wasn’t able to, so he got out the little erasers, a pair of tongs, and a bowl from the kitchen and did this all on his own :

 

I found a copy of the Moveable Alphabet here, printed it out and put it in our pocket chart (from Target dollar spot – you knew I’d mention it at least once, didn’t you?!).  Then M matched up his letters from his See and Spell.  I thought he would have fun putting things in the pocket chart, but he really was not all that interested.  I do think I’ll try it again though, it could’ve just been that we had a bad attitude all week. ;)

M matched paper clips to colored pieces of cardstock.  He did great with getting them on this time, something he’s really had a hard time with in the past:

 

He did some scissor practice using the pages I printed from here:

We did a dolphin puzzle, which was a real struggle… I know he can do this puzzle, he just lost interest halfway through.  I made him finish it, but I’m really not sure why.  Normally if he isn’t having fun we just skip something. 

We made a blue, yellow, blue, yellow pattern with his blocks.  I did this with him and kept asking “what comes next?” and he kind of got it eventually, I think.

We finished up with an activity that’s always fun and puts both of us in a good mood.  We got out his songbook and we played his instruments and sang several songs.  You can’t see his box of instruments in this picture; we have a harmonica, a triangle, a shaker bottle (pictured), jingle bells, tambourine, and the bowl and wooden spoon (pictured) that he uses like a drum. 

I’m hoping to make next week a little more fun and interesting!  I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Noah’s Ark

I have found that M seems to gain more from our Bible story times when we do activities and talk about the story a little bit before actually reading the story from one his children’s Bibles.

So, on Thursday I let him watch a short (3 minutes) video about Noah’s Ark on his Read And Share Toddler Bible DVD. He really enjoyed this.

There are so many inspiring ideas online for a Noah’s Ark theme. We almost weren’t able to fit everything in!

Friday morning when he woke up, this was waiting for him:

The printout is from Making Learning Fun (a fantastic site, by the way).

M got right to work:

Later we talked about all the colors of the rainbow as we did a little color mixing:

Next we had fun playing “Sink or Float?” in our kitchen sink:

M came up with some pretty interesting things to drop in. :) We made a little boat with a sponge, straw, and foam sail, and tried to see what we could carry on it and what would make it sink.

We talked about the ark and how God kept Noah, his family, and the animals safe on it.

I found these story cards on Sparklebox (another fantastic site!). M has never done sequencing with story cards before, and I wasn’t sure he was ready for that challenge, so I simply told him the story with the cards, and then we did it a second time while he told the story (with me giving some prompts).

I made up some game mats by printing this template out on colored construction paper, and we played an animal matching game. The game we used is one we’ve had for a while, but as we found matches, we got to put our animal couples on our arks. Whoever had the most animals on his/her ark won. :) Very simple, I know, and it was really unnecessary to print out ark game mats, but simple things can make a difference. M felt like it was a brand new game. And he won. ;)

We didn’t end up actually reading the story about Noah and the Ark from M’s Bible until bedtime that evening!

I had a craft planned, but we just didn’t get to it. However, I do still plan to do it with M, and I’ll create a separate post for it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Open Ended Art – Mixed Mediums

The theme for Open Ended Art this week is Mixed Mediums… check out the other artwork here!

This turned out to be a really easy art project for us… because I didn’t have to do anything!  One day recently when M was home alone with Daddy, he made this:

Look very closely and you can see one yellow line on the left.  It qualifies! :) 

Apparently M did this completely on his own.  I had some construction paper out and he picked a green piece and put it on his easel.  Then he got a cup of water from the bathroom sink (where was his dad? That’s what I want to know!), and dipped chalk in it then drew on the paper.  As a finishing touch, he added stickers.

So, colored paper, water, chalk, stickers… you can’t get much more mixed than that! :)  Here’s a close up:

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time - Mixing with Yellow

The Open Ended Art theme for this week was “mixing with yellow”.  You can check out other works of art here.

I am cheating a little with this post because it’s more of an activity than actual artwork.  And we did this as part of our Noah’s Ark theme for Sunday School on Friday this past weekend (the post about Noah’s Ark will be coming this Friday).  However, it includes yellow and there was plenty of mixing involved, so I am hoping it qualifies! :)

M had a great time with this.  It seriously kept him enthralled for an entire hour.  There was a higher than usual danger of messiness, so I had to stay right there with him, but I really enjoyed it too.  It could’ve (should’ve) been done outside; I was just too lazy to take everything out.  There’s a towel on the table for obvious reasons.

I set up several glasses and jars on our kitchen table and filled them about halfway with clear water.  We started with six and ended up adding one or two more as we went along.  I put red, yellow, and blue food coloring into an ice cube tray, gave M some pipettes, and he started mixing. 

Here he is with yellow in his pipette (it’s looking a little green; I think this is due to my camera for some reason):

And… Yellow + Red = Orange:

 

Then he filled 2 ice cube trays with the colored water so he can have more outside ice fun one of these days.

This was such a fun activity for M, and it was fun for me to watch him be a little scientist.  I highly recommend doing this with your kids – just pick a day when you are feeling brave and very, very patient!  I had to remind M several times that this wasn’t an activity we could be silly with.  I didn’t want broken glass and food coloring all over my kitchen! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School!

M is 35 months old.

Whew, what a busy week! I’m having a hard time weeding out tot school photos, because I have about 30 of them! Here are the ones showing the most fun…

We played a game of “what’s different? / What’s the same?” with his toy cars one day. I’d put 3 of them together (2 vans and 1 racecar, or 2 blue cars and 1 red car), and he’d have to figure out which one was different and why the other 2 were the same. The tongs were his idea, not mine. :)

He did his name puzzles with milk jug lids. I finally got around to making ones that say “Mommy” and “Daddy” for him. He just loves these:

Pattern blocks and pattern cards:

He asked to do something with “baby” letters (lowercase), which had me very excited, because he hasn’t shown much interest in them, and has been a little confused. Calling them mama letters and baby letters has helped, silly as it seems. So, we grabbed his ABC poster (Dollar Tree), and his See and Spell letters, and matched them up. He did great with this:

Then we lined them up and sang the ABC song a couple of times. He thought it was neat that we could do that, I guess we’ve never done it before.

Then we got out the See and Spell boards and worked on them for a while.

Here’s an ABC uppercase and lowercase matching file folder game we did. We only did the first half of the alphabet and then he was ready to quit. You can find this here.

We did his favorite truck puzzle cards (Dollar Tree again!):

We bought some $1.00 animal flashcards from Target (2 sets) and used them for a matching game. I loved the pictures on these, and went back to buy the insect and American animals ones.

More matching – this time with his toy cars and a color wheel:

It quickly turned into a parking lot. :)

We played with our Target dollar spot marble run:

Sticker book:

We matched up ladybug designs on the flannel board:

Outside time – getting treasures out of a giant ice cube:

Blowing lots of bubbles right in Mommy’s face:

And playing with his new sand/water toy:

Whew! Hope you had a busy and FUN Tot School week too!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Imagination at Work

Every month we get an issue of High Five, a preschool version of Highlights magazine.  The subscription was a gift from Matthew’s grandma, and he LOVES it.  Every issue has a page with a picture of something to build using blocks or every day items at home. 

Here’s the picture from our current issue:

It’s an apartment building, built with blocks and empty cereal boxes.

And here’s what has been standing in our living room floor since Friday night:

I really should’ve taken a picture of M playing with it and setting it up, because he was really into it.  Seriously into it.

We got these little crate-style containers at Dollar Tree a year ago and we keep M’s little cars, musical instruments, and a train set in them.  Well, apparently we did keep those things in them, but now they are just lying in heaps on the floor.  Because he needed an apartment building.  :) 

Really he treats it more as a house; I’m not sure he really knows what an apartment building is.  There’s a garage to the side made from blocks, and the book in the front is the sidewalk (couldn’t you tell?).

And, yes, some of the people living in the apartments are figures from M’s nativity set that he has refused to let us put away since last Christmas.  He plays with them like they are action figures, lol.  If you look closely you’ll see Mary on the rooftop and baby Jesus in the middle square, hee hee. :)

I thought it was such a great idea, and works so well.  You can’t beat a play house/apartment building for $3.00!  And believe me, I’m not upset at all that I need to go back to the Dollar Tree to buy more containers for the toys that were evicted!! 

Have a beautiful day! :)