Tot School May 18-22

Again another random week, but I am planning out the next few weeks so that we can do some letters of the week. I plan to do letter C next week and letter F and R in the next few weeks. I thought I would do the letters in order of the alphabet, but I decided not to because the activities that I want to do now correspond with random letters in the alphabet. We finally got some sun here and some warm weather so we spent a lot of time outside. I got some flowers for Mother's Day and M&M wanted to go water them. She's a lot better at remembering to do it than I am. She practiced pouring water from the pitcher into her watering can.



In an effort make healthier meals for M&M and myself, I tried to make it fun and interesting by making little fruit kabobs with toothpicks. I used grapes, slices of banana and strawberries. We both gobbled it up.


I've seen a lot of Wikki Stix and Bendaroo activities floating around and so I got some and we tried them out this week. We made a rainbow. We also made our family by using the picture on the front of the box.




I saw this activity somewhere. I still forget to write down where I get every activity sometimes. I guess this would be a sensory tub. I hid little plastic ladybugs in the rice and had M&M dig for them. She loved putting her hands in the rice and feeling and scooping and pouring. To be honest I liked putting my hands in it too. The ladybugs were little buttons that I found at Michaels I think.



I've had this activity in mind for a while now, but found a great opportunity to do it this week. It's a Montessori inspired activity using a water dropper. She's suppose to transfer the water from one bowl to the other using the dropper. She got frustrated with it because she couldn't figure out when to squeeze and when to let go in order to get the water in the dropper. I think I need a bigger dropper. She got bored with it because she wasn't getting very much water at a time and there was probably no end in sight for her. It was also probably very frustrating for her that she had to be so precise and clean with the water. She loves to splash and play with water anytime she can get her hands on it. Hopefully going swimming this summer and playing with water in the backyard will help get that out of her system.


Next we did an activity using Magic nuudles found on the Childcareland website. (It's the first activity on this page when you click on the link.) I have used several activities from this site because I love all of the ideas they have on there. They provide you with links to all of their paper activities as well which is really helpful. M&M made letters using the nuudles and I introduced her to patterns. She basically just copied what I had put on the paper.




Again another activity found from Childcareland using popsicle sticks. (Scroll down on the link.) I wrote capital and lowercase letters on the colored popsicle sticks to make a matching game. As I learned from another letter matching game I tried earlier I didn't put the whole alphabet out at once. This was too overwhelming for M&M. I gave her about 4 groups of letters. She did really well with this and finished it.


Then we did some classic bead lacing. I found these beads on clearance at Walmart for like a dollar. This little girl loves pink and purple so these were perfect for her and renewed her interest in something that she has already mastered.



I've had this birdhouse for a while as well and brought it out this week for M&M to paint. I used to paint wood a lot with acrylic paints and so I had a lot of colors. I usually only let M&M paint with washable paints, but I didn't think that would go so well on wood so I let her choose some colors from my collection. She loved being able to paint with "mommy's paints" because it is usually a forbidden activity. Of course she chose 2 kinds of purple to paint with. Everything has to be purple. She used some dot paint brushes to do the dots on the roof. She really enjoyed this and I think it turned out pretty cute! She wanted to put bird seed in it right away and hang it up outside for the birds. Unfortunately, I didn't have any birdseed or anyway to hang it up so I will figure out another kind of birdhouse that we can do that with next week.