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 11, 2009

M is 37 months old

We began this week by moving an old TV stand / media center to M’s reading spot. Tuesday morning I grabbed some kitchen plastic ware and filled the shelves with activities.This worked so well with M, even better than I expected. He was able to pick and choose which activities to do (or not do) and many of them were things he could do independently (which gave me a little time to check the laundry, tidy things up, etc).

We worked on putting one activity away before getting another one down, and I was ok with him quitting an activity whenever he wanted. I’m trying to concentrate on having fun more than anything else right now in regards to tot school. And M woke up with a horrible cold that morning, so I wanted to go easy on him. Just cleaning up one thing before getting another one down was enough in the way of rules for us this week!

First, he strung some pony beads onto a length of yarn, using a plastic needle.

Next, matching up some paint sample strips with clips.We are working on learning the gradation of color shades. I thought the clips would get him a bit more interested in this. They did, but only a very little bit. He did the blue and then that was enough. This post from Shannon at Growing and Learning by Leaps and Bounds gave me this idea. Maybe next time we will work on just one color like she did.

He also did this super-fun activity that I whipped up for him over the weekend – an ABC tube with stickers to match: I simply took a cardboard tube and wrote the alphabet on it in random order, and put it out with some foam letter stickers. M would pick a sticker, then roll the tube around to find the matching letter. The idea for this came from Sophie’s mama in this post. I just added stickers! It was a big hit for M! I plan to do one with numbers sometime soon too.

M did some scissor practice pages:

In one of the plastic tubs I placed a piece of green construction paper, scissors, a glue stick, and some pages from a toy catalog. For this activity M had to cut out any toys that had green in them, then glue them to the construction paper and make a collage.He liked the idea of this, but didn’t work on it for very long. We put it back on the shelf and he can pull it out some other time to finish it.

One of his favorite activities was this:I wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on bottle lids, then made cards to match them up with. The cards also have the corresponding number of X’s to put any small manipulative on. In this case, it was m&ms, which is why M loved it. :)

He did a little pom pom transferring with tweezers:He made this into a game and I had to use his pliers. :) We would each grab a pom pom, say “cheers!” while clinking them together, then drop them into the ice cube tray. He’s a funny boy sometimes. :)

Hands down, the all time favorite of the week was this *I spy sensory tub* activity. It was inspired by the many posts in the blog world about making I spy bottles, but I knew M would never be happy just looking for small objects – he would want them in his hands where he could examine them and get to know them. So I photocopied a bunch of small objects, then hid them in a mixture of rice, macaroni, and lentils. He had so much fun with this, I was amazed.He did this 7 times that day. Sometimes he would hide them, sometimes I would. He was totally enthralled. Which made for a very happy mama. :)

I worked the hardest on this activity, and it was the only one M was not even mildly interested in:I’ve been seeing this book everywhere - and just love the idea of it… so I made my own! I cut some foam shapes to use, and made letter templates for them, which I then laminated. I thought M would love this, but he was absolutely. not. interested. Ah well, we’ll try again another day! I’m still showing you because I’m just so proud of it. :)

We did one more sensory activity – packaging peanuts and water. If you get them just a little bit wet they stick together and you can create things. If you get them a lot wet they dissolve. M had fun making them dissolve. :)

One day we made this pretty autumn tree:

And we learned more new songs and poems. First, from Preschooleducation.com:

(tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”)

All join hands and circle around
While we watch the leaves fall down.
See them twirling to the ground.
See them skipping here and there
See them flipping in the air.
Autumn leaves so peacefully
Falling, falling from the tree.
(I would have loved to have sung this one outside while twirling M around, but his cold and our rainy weather just didn’t cooperate.)

And a poem, from childfun.com:

Leaves
Little leaves fall gently down
Red and yellow, orange and brown. (flutter hands like leaves falling)
Whirling, whirling around and around. (turn around)
Quietly, without a sound. (put finger to lips)
Falling softly to the ground (begin to fall slowly)
Down and down and down and down. (lie on floor)

I hope everyone had a wonderful week! Check here for more tot school posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Oct. 4, 2009

 M is 37 months old

We had a very laid back week.  I am working on getting some tot trays / workbox-type things set up that M can work on independently throughout the week, but they are a work in process and nothing is where I want it to be yet. 
M surprised me by finding things to do on his own this week anyway – most of which were never captured on camera.  He strung beads and pasta, played with his Lite Brite, laced up some lacing cards, and played with some of his favorite flannel board sets.  My husband had Monday off, and they played Bingo, tried playing checkers, and read a lot of books together.  They also got out their binoculars and did a little out-the-window bird watching.  Here they are mommy-watching :)
Tuesday was an absolutely glorious fall day and we ventured outside (with the binoculars of course).  M grabbed his “nature basket” and trotted off:
You can see our yard is still mostly green.  There is one tiny patch of leaves turning colors in an oak tree: I’ve been hoping to gather up some beautiful leaves for an autumn leaf identification project, but Mother Nature is not cooperating with me.  Actually I should be happy that the leaves aren’t turning yet, it means winter is still a little ways off.  M grabbed a branch blown down by the wind gusts we’ve been having and tried his best to knock some leaves down for me.
No luck, so he started building with some logs -
Another look around with the binoculars(by the way, I got these at Target for $1.00 – awesome deal!) :
We did do some fun school stuff inside too, continuing with the autumn theme…
We learned a new poem and a new song.  I found both at preschooleducation.com.  The song (to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell”):

The leaves are falling down,
The leaves are falling down,
Red, yellow, orange and brown,
The leaves are falling down.

And the poem, which M absolutely LOVED and did over and over again…

5 little leaves so bright and gay
Were dancing about on a tree one day.
The wind came blowing through the town,
And one little leaf came tumbling down.
(Continue with the remaining 4 leaves)

We did this with 5 silk craft leaves (Dollar Tree!).  I held them up, made them dance around, then M was the wind and blew and I would let one fall.  This was a huge hit!  He then held the leaves and I blew them, then he asked for all the craft leaves, and his silly mama gave them to him and eventually this happened:
Look closely and you can see a couple of them still in mid-air. :)
We also tried  doing these harvest pattern strips from filefolderfun.com:
He is just not *getting* patterns at all.  So I gave up and made it into a quick file folder matching game to put on a tot tray for him.  There are several more pattern strips, these two are just the ones we tried doing.
We did a fun autumn matching game – played concentration style.  He did great with this.  I can tell he is really starting to get better at the memory games.  The cards were printed from DLTK.
We also did a flannel board story about the Little Red Hen (I associate it with harvest time).  This set was found here:

And we made a cute autumn wreath:

That’s it for us for this week!  I so enjoyed taking it easy and not trying to fit too much in.  We both had more fun just being together. :) 

Check out what other moms are doing with their tots here!

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! :)