Tot School

We had a busy tot-school week with alot of learning mixed into many, many outside "big kid" activities.

I pulled out the Lauri Fit-A-Space puzzles and both tots enjoyed them.

Luke has become very good at sorting them by colors and then putting them together. I gave them each three at a time, but I think Luke is ready for more.

For the past two weeks have been concentrating on nursery rhymes.
Kimberly is just loving this version of Mother Goose that we got from the library.

Because of the Halloween season and in light of our latest visitor, we have been zeroing in on spider nursery rhymes. I saw a post about this book, Kathy Ross's Storytime Craft Book, which gave it rave reviews, and I have to agree completely.

The first craft we made was to accompany the nursery rhyme, The Itsy Bitsy Spider.

We made the Itsy Bitsy Spider with a bead, pipe cleaners, a sharpie, and black yarn.

I made a waterspout and reenacted the rhyme, many, many times.

Christmas tinsel gave a wonderful water effect, "washing the spider out!"

I had bought a package of wooden beads to use in future projects. Kimberly got a hold of them, so I gave her an egg carton and she was happily occupied putting them in and out of the carton for quite a while.
After she tired of that, I handed her a pipe cleaner and she spent another half an hour stringing the beads. I have aways preferred pipe cleaners to other things for stringing because the tots are so much more successful using this method.

We have also been learning about the numbers 1, 2, and 3 this week. I bought this Diego game last week, and it is very cute.
I removed all the cards except the cards with the numbers 1, 2 and 3. Doing this, we used twelve cards to play with.

Kim and Luke then took turns picking out a card, they looked at it and we discussed the number on the back and the type of animal on the front of the card. The number of animals corresponds to the digit on the back.

After picking a card and counting the animals on the card, we match the animal to the correct playing board. The boards are divided into four categories, walkers, swimmers, flyers, and climbers. This is a game we will come back to time and again, because there are so many different ways it can be used.

I hope you enjoyed out Tot-School post this week. Make sure to go to the 1+1+1=1 website and check out other Tot School posts.