Sunday, March 22, 2009

Tot School

Luke is 46 months old
Kimberly is 34 months old
I can't believe that we missed Tot-School last week, but we did! The weather was nicer, I buckled down and got real busy with the elementary homeschool kids, and I was tired, real, real tired.

But, I did manage to document a little of this weeks "work"
First and foremost, we were blessed with a few beautiful days. These days are very rare in March in upstate NY, and when they come we try to savor them.

On this day, we headed to the state park a very short distance for our house.

That is a frozen lake behind Luke, and although the temperatures were in the 50's on this day, the lake is still frozen and we got to see some ice fisherman . Look at that lovely, warm sunshine. This is Tot-school at its best.
Snow melt is a lot of fun also.
We have begun a farm unit. We are learning about farms, farmers, tractors, farm animals, and we are loving nursery rhymes with a "farm" theme.
Our first nursery rhyme is Little Boy Blue.
I found this very cute Little Boy Blue craft a First -School.
I cut out the pieces and Kim and Luke were both very successful at gluing the parts onto "Little Boy Blue".
I just had to share this wonderful picture that Kimberly drew one day. She spends a lot of time drawing pictures, something my other 34 month olds never cared to do. When she finished this picture, she brought it to me and told me that she had drawn a beaver. I looked at the picture and realized,--SHE DID!
We have a new game for our "farm" study. It is very simple: draw a card and move to the correct animal or color. If you land on an animal, you put that animal in your barn. This is also a great puzzle activity for the youngest tots, and is great for learning colors and shapes as well.
We have been learning about rainbows and we made these cute pipecleaner-pony bead rainbows. I made one as a pattern for the kids to follow, and then they took over.
I have seen this done on many places all over the internet. Most of these used styrofoam to secure the pipe cleaners, but I made blue playdough instead. This made a very easy "blue sky" spot to put our rainbow pipe cleaners. I also had the kids only put 5 beads onto the pipecleaners so that they wouldn't get overwhelmed.
Kimmy was very proud of a job well done.
Also, to go along with the rainbow theme, we made a rainbow snake.
A printer, crayons, and brass fasteners were all these cute snakes needed.
Make sure to check out all of this weeks great Tot-School ideas.

1 comment:

RockerMom said...

Wow, the melting snow looks like fun. I also love all the farm activities. Thanks for shaing!