Operation Playtime-Day 2-Nursery Rhymes

Today, Operation Playtime's theme is nursery rhymes. The kids put on a wonderful performance this morning of Little Miss Muffet. I posted this one, I am sparing you the next 20 performances they put on.

Nursery rhymes are something that we enjoy regularly during Tot School. They kids love to act out the rhymes and put on performances for the rest of the family. I also incorporate activies into our tot school using nursery rhyme themes.

You can look back at some of our nursery rhyme activities here. They may be within another post, but take a look and see the fun that we have had with our favorite nursery rhymes.

Make sure you go and check out everyone's fun over at Operation Playtime today.

Hey Diddle Diddle in the Sunlight

The nursery rhyme of the week is Hey Diddle Diddle the Cat and the Fiddle and I will post our activities in the Tot-School post, but I couldn't resist putting up Kimberly's performance early.

For your information, Kimberly turned 2 in May, and I have never had a little one as verbal as she is--we may be in for some trouble!LOL

Tot School

It was another busy week of Tot School , even with real life happening around us, I tried to find some activities to keep the "tots" learning.
Auntie Kim got the kids this alphabet puzzle which Kimberly and Luke both enjoy.

Luke can tell us how to spell his name now and can always recognize the letter L and sometimes the other letters. I do need to mention to Auntie Kim that we may need another set of these letters so that both Kim and Luke can spell their names at the same time--(we now need to share the K)

Keeping with our Nursery Rhyme theme, we learned about Jack Be Nimble this week.

Of course, we needed a candlestick to jump over, so I set about designing one.

Above Luke is painting the base of our candlestick, which was simply a round piece of corrugated cardboard. (be warned: if you let a "tot" paint with thick tempra paint, expect to wait at least 24 hours until the very thick paint to dries)

Gracie helped by painting our candle-a toilet paper tube. After painting the tube, I cut slits in the bottom of the tube, this is how I was able to glue the base to the tube securely. It needs to be pretty tough for when someone doesn't quite make it over the candlestick during a jump.The flame is yellow foam sheets, cut to flame shape and glued at the top. I discovered this book, Over the Candlestick, at the library. It is a real gem. It has very cute illustrations for the littlest kids among us, but it also explains the meaning behind some of the most popular nursery rhymes. We have all enjoyed this, from the age of 2 to the age of 42.

Here are Kim and Luke demonstrating how they "jump over the candlestick" We sing, "Kimmy be nimble, Kimmy be quick, Kimmy jump over the candlestick." This was a BIG hit this week.

This was an important week, because this week was the first time Luke did this Bead Sequencing Set successfully with no help. He set it up himself and then followed the pattern perfectly. Way to go!!

I also introduced the My First Leappad to the kids this week. They both enjoy it, and have spent quite a bit of time with it. I sat with each of them individually and showed them how to use it. They caught on quickly. At the ages of 2 and 3 it is educational when I do it with them and discuss what they are working on. When they use it alone at the table, they enjoy just listening to the different results they get from touching different parts of the page.

Make sure you visit other Tot School posts this week.

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.

Tot School

I have been enjoying the "Tot School" that is headed up weekly over at the 1+1+1=1 blog. Since we do a lot of Tot School around here, I thought I would join the fun and contribute to this great site occasionally.

This week we are concentrating on Halloween, especially the spiders of Halloween. Today we made these cute handprint spiders from the DLTK site.

We used these spiders to accompany the recitation of the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet.

We have been memorizing a nursery rhyme every week, so since Halloween is on its way, I wanted to learn about spiders along with our rhymes. (Soon we will move on to Itsy Bitsy Spider.)

After making our spiders, the littles took turns acting out the poem. Luke performed the part of Little Mr. Muffet and did it perfectly.

He even was so "scared" of the spider, he let the bowl and spoon fly across the room. On his fourth performance, the spoon hit the wall opposite him, that is when I decided to change subjects from nursery rhymes to numbers.

We haven't really touch on number recognition yet, so this is our beginning. Both kids can count from 1 to 10, but they don't recognize the written digits, or what they stand for. Today I just made simple cards with the number 1-3 on them. We then match the correct number of gears to the correct digit. I used similar colors for each number to help them do this. After demonstating a few times, they both could do this flawlessly. Tomorrow I will try mixing the numbers up and see how they can do.

Make sure you visit other Tot School posts this week.