The Art Box – Jan. 18, 2010

In the Art Box last week: tempera paints (in the pill box), scrapbook scissors (of course!), a jar of foam stickers, glue, regular stickers, a baggie of scrap paper, construction paper, newsprint, paint roller and brushes, also a little wooden crocodile and paints.

M has really enjoyed painting on new surfaces lately – foil, plaster, wood. I bought the wooden crocodile and paints at Michael’s for $1.00. This, of course, was the first thing he wanted to do when he saw his art box. He really concentrated on all the little parts. Then he painted its tummy red. :)

He has a few random pieces of wood (sanded smooth) from Daddy’s stash, and keeps them in with his building blocks. So he went and grabbed one and painted it. :)

Next, he complained because there “isn’t much stuff in here”… I put less in his box on purpose thinking it would spur his creativity a bit more. He did decide to make a collage, something he used to love doing but hasn’t been interested in lately.

Then he painted with the little paint roller – he loves to paint with red and then paint white over it and watch it turn pink: Doesn’t that look like a heart in the center?

We spent some time working on a sticker collage to go with a Bible story (more on that in another post), and had so much fun we brought our enormous jar of foam stickers and our living room looked like this for a while: He really enjoyed these stickers for some reason. Here’s one of many finished sticker collages (I know, it’s really flower-y, ha ha): Note the cow jumping over the moon. ;)

And of course he did some cutting. This kid LOVES to cut with scissors! He told me this was an alligator :)… I can kind of see it. ;)

Link your kids’ art up below! Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – January 17, 2010

M is 40 months old. 

Yay!  We’re back!  As nice as it was to not write up the TS posts for the past few weeks, it’s also very nice to be back in our groove. 

So, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Math Skills:

I put together a little *math box* (well, in our case a math coffee can) like the one here that my friend Natalie at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns put together for her daughter.  It was full of craft sticks and various bottle lids.  I even threw in some little cards with shapes on them.  He was totally interested in this as it sat on his shelves, yet… he wasn’t sure what to do with it.  So, I showed him how to make shapes with them and suggested a few other things (patterns, letters).   And, I kid you not, the kid said to me, “But can’t I just paint them, Mommy??”   I’m thinking this says a lot about who he is. :) 

We also did some fun number stamping with a grid and a number cube:   I wrote the numbers 1 to 6 randomly on the grid (20 spaces – you can print one here), then using a variety of stamps (the pencil top kind) we rolled the die and then stamped out all of the 2’s or whatever number we got.  We took turns with this to make it more like a game, because M is all about games lately.  He had to help me find the right numbers quite a bit. ;)

We also did some snowflake counting with clothespins and a piece of yarn: I don’t know if you can see clearly in the photo, but we had 5 snowflakes with numerals on them which we clipped in sequence onto the yarn.  Then we had snowflakes with dots on them which we had to match to the correct number and also clip on.  M really, really enjoyed this.  Anything to do with clothespins or paper clips is sure to be a hit around here lately!  The snowflakes were found here.  I colored them with colored pencils to make them pretty. :)

We also practiced counting with some linking monkeys: This was a great introduction to addition!

 

Shapes and Colors:

M did great with this little activity.  I found this pattern block mat here; it has 4 hexagons in different colors.  In order to do this M had to figure out how to make the red hexagon with his trapezoid blocks, the orange one with triangles, and the blue one with diamonds...  a very interesting activity!

 

M also enjoyed his triangle collage page:

 

I bought these fun color paddles with a little leftover Christmas money.  They were from Oriental Trading. M had a lot of fun walking around and looking through them at various things.We also used them in a window to mix colors by placing one in front of another.  There has to be a ton of things we can do with these.  However, I’m really coming up with blanks.  If you have any ideas, share them!!

 

Literacy Skills:

M worked on his letter matching file folder game from here.  This matches upper and lower case letters.

 

We did a letter stamping game similar to the number stamping one mentioned above.  With this one we used a printout from here, and some upper and lower case cards (more on these cards in an upcoming post!) to turn over… we focused on just Tt, Ff, and Aa and stamped them out.

 

M did his Bob the Builder name puzzles with glass beads: He continues to love these!

 

Sorting:

Our theme for this month has been winter and snow (hence the snowflake activities), and we sorted our seasonal clip art onto colored paper.  M did great with this, he’s really got his seasons down. 

Fine Motor Skills:

I have to say, gross and fine motor skill work is what M enjoys most… I have to keep that in mind and incorporate it into other areas, like using fine motor skills to clip numbered snowflakes, etc. 

Another little thing I ordered from Oriental Trading was this awesome Shapes Hammering set.  M loves hammering the little nails into the corkboard and he’s made several pretty neat designs with the shapes.  Most often he pretends he is building a house. :)  He’s played with this every day since I put it out for him.

He laced together two foam mitten shapes:

 

He received this great fire truck puzzle for Christmas and did it 5 times the first day.  It has 46 pieces and has an emergency scene on the other side.  He LOVES this puzzle!

 

I put together a little push pin activity for him, which he also really loved!  We had some little letter cards left from our toothpick poke activity which has become a little boring for him, so he did those first, then I added in some little shapes and drawings for him to outline with the push pins. He really enjoyed this and it was a great workout for those little fingers!  I think I first saw this at The Shafer Family blog.

 

Geography:

We’ve only recently been talking about maps and the world, our country, state, etc.   M is very interested, and enjoyed doing this puzzle (Target Dollar Spot!) of the U.S. Ha – you can see this picture is from some time ago – our Christmas light patterns are in the background! ;)

 

Gross Motor Activities:

M and Daddy and I all ice skated on wax paper in our living room: This is so much fun!  We first did it at our Nature Center weekly class, and it never gets old!

We did our movement cards too; they are always fun.  I’ve found that if M is in a bad mood or whiny or whatever (sigh), if I can think of an activity that has a lot of gross motor movement it helps tremendously.  He turns back into himself.  I’m just not good with all this “boy stuff”, hee hee.  I was a sit quietly and play with my dolls kind of girl.  But, I’m learning!!

 

Music:

M inherited a small keyboard from an older cousin and has been playing it non-stop: It plays a couple of demo tunes by itself and has 5 different rhythms to choose from.  M loves to play these rhythms and make them faster or slower.  It comes close to driving me up a wall sometimes, but I’m glad he’s learning about rhythm somewhere, because he sure isn’t going to get it from me or his dad! ;)

 

Sensory:

We’ve been using some oatmeal (in the cupboard for over a year) in our sensory tub lately.  After seeing oatmeal in a sensory tub at April Flowers, I decided to do it too! M enjoyed playing with his farm animals in it:

And because he loves to play with my seashells I hid them in there one day – 20 of them.  I have him a grid with 20 spaces and he spent a long time looking for all of them.

 

Creative Play:

M also inherited this remote control Scrambler (a Bob the Builder truck) from the same cousin that gave him the “piano”.  Well, he has pretty much played non-stop with Scrambler since we brought it home.  Here he is with all of his puppets and some stuffed animals strung out on the floor… trying to get Scrambler to run over them all. :)  Yep, that’s my sweet boy running over animals with a 4 wheeler. ;)

For more Tot School posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)