Sunday, March 8, 2009

Tot School

Luke is currently 46 months old
Kimberly is currently 34 months old
We had a great Tot School this past week, with a lot of activities, crafts and fun.
One of the events we like to celebrate each year is Saint Patrick's Day, and this year is no exception. I found this cute printable hat-shape matching activity at First-School.

Kim and Luke enjoyed gluing the pre-cut shapes onto the hat. (I cut the shapes out ahead of time)
They then decorated their hats with shamrock stickers. I have cut these hats out and they are now hanging on the wall, but on Saint Patrick's Day we will turn them into real hats by putting them on a construction paper crown.
This St. Patrick's themed pattern activity was also printed from First-School this week and enjoyed.
By far, the most enjoyed activity this week has been color mixing. I put bowls of water, colored with red, blue and yellow food coloring on the table and then gave each child a medicine measuring dropper. They could not manage the tiny droppers that come with science kits, but the droppers from the endless supply of antibiotics kids are on around here were the perfect size for little fingers.
I had a white tray with six places for color exploration. They mixed and mixed trying every combination.
It was funny that after a while, and after a lot of mixing, someone would tell me that they had made tea-in other words-it was brown.
This kept them busy for hours on several different days. It is a little messy but is a great thing to keep their little minds working.
Luke really enjoys doing mazes.
This week I made the kids a re-usable springtime maze book.
You can see the whole post about this project, including the links, here.
Another very simple activity enjoyed this week was making scultures with marshmallows and toothpicks.
If you need your 2 and 3 year olds (and 7 and 9 year olds) kept busy for an hour or so, open a bag of marshmallows and a box of toothpicks.
Our refrigerator is now adorned with these cute shamrock mice. They were very simple to make.
I cut out the parts and Luke and Kim each put one together. They are made out a foam so they will lasts for a long time!
Very cute!
We also made shape clowns that I found at First School.
Again, I cut out the shapes. They are too small for Kim and Luke to manage.
Kimberly is very good with her glue stick now and easily put the face onto the clown. She calls these activities "puzzles" because she needs to match up the shapes the correct way.
I glued the head onto construction paper so that we could embelish our clowns a little more.
We added a pom poms to the hat and
noses of our clowns.
I then cut ribbon to add to the clown's hair.
These cute clowns now hanging on our learning walls, which are any walls in the house, since the house is soooo small.
I hope everyone had a great week, and I hope all the sickness that is going around is gone quickly!
Check out the other great Tot School posts this week and find out what others are doing with their littlest learners.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

It looks like you had a great week ! Thanks for all the ideas ;-)

Unknown said...

Thanks for all the printables--I'm going to have to visit that site and do some of these activities.

CristyLynn said...

Those shamrock mice are adorable!

Jennifer said...

The re-usable mazes are great. A definite in the future for us.