Picnic Table Talk-ABC's

The topic for this weeks picnic table talk over at ABC and 123 is the ABC's. One of the suggested topics to discuss is to make an ABC list centered around a theme of my choosing. I chose to do a list about my daughter M&M's favorite things. I couldn't choose just one for some of these.

A: apples, alphabet, animals
B: balloons, butterflies, balls
C: cookies, Care Bears
D: dogs, drawing
E: eggs (scrambled)
F: flowers
G: games,
H: high fives, happy faces
I: ice, ice cream
J: jumping
K: kites
L: laughing

M: M&M's (of course!), Mickey Mouse

N: noodles
O: (being) outside
P: princesses, painting, purple
Q: quarters
R: rainbows
S: swimming, stickers
T: toys, Tot School, trampoline
U: umbrella
V: violin
W: water
X: xylophones
Y: yo-yos
Z: zoo

I also want to share my favorite and M&M's favorite Alphabet game. It's called Letter Hide and Seek. Click here for my post about what we did and click here for where I found the original idea on the Childcareland website. Scroll down on each of these pages to find the actual activity.

Tot School

M&M is currently 35 months old

Tot School was pretty non-existent this week, but we did do a few things. With a sick little girl, we really didn't feel up to doing much. I'm still trying to figure out how to best make this work for us as well.

I made an I Spy Bottle this week. I've seen these are several blogs and thought that it would be something I could handle making. A few weeks back we made colored rice. I don't have any pictures of that, but here are some pictures of what I did to make the I Spy Bottle. I pulled this out for M&M, but it didn't work out. She wanted to open it up and take everything out. I hadn't glued on the top yet so I'll bring it out again next week and see what happens after I glue the top on. To find out better directions on how to make this click on the links.
Since that didn't work I had a few more activities up my sleeve such as tracing M&M's body outline onto poster board. I found this idea here. She really liked this a lot and I knew she would because she asks me to trace her feet and hands all of the time.
We had just painted her toe nails so she had to add in the purple on her toes.

She added the details and I was so impressed to see that her drawings actual resembled body parts. She told me the oval below the head is her "tummy and there's another scribble that is her heart. I love the hair that she drew.

She wanted to draw a doctor. I guess since we were doing stuff about the body she thought we needed a doctor around. I was so impressed with her picture! This is the first time that I could actually see a person in her drawing.
M&M L.O.V.E.D. this next activity. We played hide and seek with letters. (Scroll down after clicking on the link to find the actual activity) Sometimes with things I have a hard time getting her to finish it, but with this we played it twice. To play I put cards with letters in a paper bag. She would pull one out and then go find it. You can make this yourself or print them off from the link above. I didn't really hide the letters I just put them around the room and she would have to go find the right letter. While she waited for me to hide the big letters she lined up the cards in her playroom. After she found them all she wanted to hide them so that I could find them. She kept saying that this was her "letter factory." Compliments of the Leapfrog Letter Factory DVD she is beginning to understand the sound that each letter makes.
Then we made a contact paper collage. I taped contact paper up on our window and then I gathered up some crafty items such as: feathers, beads, pom pom, confetti, gemstones, and foam shapes and put them on a plate. She loved doing this and got everything put on with a little help from mommy. It looks green because of the grass in our backyard.

We had some good ol' playdough fun as well. I brought out some laminated letters but she only did two of them, which is fine.
Lastly she wanted to use the "counting thing" as she calls it which is my ice cube tray. She wanted to count balloons this time. That led to sorting them by color and then we did the same thing with pompoms.

So after doing this post I realized we did do a lot this week, but I guess it was just pretty sporadic.

Tot School

I will probably end up doing Tot School posts weekly, but for now I'm too excited to get these ideas out there. Tuesday we didn't do much because M&M wasn't feeling very good, but we did play Color and Shapes Bingo.

Then today she played with some nesting dolls. She cradled the littlest one like a baby.

Before I could get her to go on to anything else we had to play "Let's Go Fishin.'" Even though this game says it's for 4+ she enjoys playing it and can get some fish every once in a while all on her own. It's great practice for her to try and keep her hand still.

We finally got to our ABC overview since I want to start Letter A next week. We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. It's a lot of fun and has a lot of activities to go along with it. I got the book through a book order because my sister is a teacher and it came with a CD. The CD had some fun songs that had good rhythm that M&M loved to dance to. We made a poster with our own coconut tree and letters. I got this idea here. For more Alphabet ideas go to the "Now I know my ABC's" section of the Totally Tots website.

M&M wanted to do more so I got out my ice cube tray number sorting activity that I found here. We counted plastic gemstones. She didn't really want to count after number 8 so we enjoyed just pouring the stones into the tray.

First Tot School....Finally

Click on this button to find out more about what Tot School is all about.

So even though I wasn't as organized as I would have liked to have been I did some activities with M&M today. We started off with doing a lentil tray idea that I found on the Chasing Cheerios blog. I thought that M&M would really like this and I was right. After awhile I put a towel under the tray because she was very messy and the lentils are the same color as our carpet.

M&M spent a lot of time on the computer today doing "her" letters on Fisher-price and Starfall. It amazes me that she can pretty much maneuver these sites by herself. I was tending to a sick baby most of the morning so that was very helpful.

We got a package from grandma today and it had a new book for M&M in it...Purplicious!

She already has Pinkalicious and her favorite color is purple so it seemed only fitting to have this book as well. The book talks about how pink and blue mixed together make purple so I took this opportunity to demonstrate this to M&M. I put blue and pink paint in a ziploc bag and she squished it around to mix it together. I got this idea from a blog a few months ago when I wasn't as good keeping track of which one it came from so I can't link it back.

M&M pretty much knows the alphabet in it's capital form, but we need to work on the lowercase letters. So I bought a matching/puzzle thing at our education store here for her to practice. I wanted to do this as sort of a pre-test to see what she already knew. I was surprised that she could match Q. She got frustrated with it though and only did 4 letters before she wanted to quit. I think next time I won't put out the whole alphabet at once so she won't get overwhelmed.