WEEK OF JULY 11 - MORE ICE CREAM

~Punkin is 23 months old.~

We had such a busy week! Between a day at Grandma's, a trip to the zoo, a morning spent getting shots, a morning running errands, a birthday party, and time spent with family from out of town, we actually managed to get quite a bit of Tot School done. Whew! I'm tired after this week, but I feel good knowing we accomplished so much. Oh, and Punkin took a tumble down about 5 stairs which left her with a black and blue eye and lip and left us with frayed nerves. (We called her doctor and had to wake her every four hours that night, but she has seemed to be just fine.)

TOT TRAYS

Sorting beads into a heart ice cube tray. I gave her a tweezers to use, though she has always hated tweezers or tongs or anything like that. I just set them out to see if she would be interested this time. She couldn't use them real well, but at least she let me show her and help her try without crying this time. One thing I noticed this time as well was that she'd try to pick up 3 or 4 of the same colored bead in one hand and then put them in the correct spot (instead of doing one at a time.)

I found these round styrofoam pieces at the Dollar Store along with these toothpicks with pretty colored tops. We have had lots of birthdays around here lately, and she is really into singing the birthday song, so I had her "put candles on the cakes" and then she pretended to blow out the candles. She LOVED this tray, and got it out a LOT. She often would sing "Happy Birthday" as she did it, too. One day I noticed she took quite a few "candles" in her hand, then put them on her "cake" one by one as she counted them. She got to 7, then stopped. Also, sometimes I would call out a color of "candle" for her to find and put on her "cake."

I saw this simple idea at Counting Coconuts. She took her favorite buttons and put them in her "bank." She loved the "plink" they made and had fun opening the can to get them out.

She got this Fisher Price Magnadoodle with shapes for her birthday, and has loved making pictures on it. She will take the pen and make lines all over and declare, "I writing."

This was another simple idea (from Home Grown Families) that Punkin loved....shoveling packing peanuts into her bucket. I knew there was a reason I saved all those! After she'd fill her bucket, she would push them all down and "smoosh" them so she could try and fit more in.

She found many other things to do with them, too....like dumping them all over the floor, rubbing her face in them, and balancing them on her knees.

The last tray I didn't get a picture of her doing, but I had a bucket of random things from around the house, and two different sized cardboard tubes in the tray. She had to try and find the things that fit inside each tube.

LETTERS / ABC'S

I have seen this idea on a lot of blogs, but the one that I remember recently is Creative Learning Fun. I made the capital and lowercase letter i on her paper and made dots where I wanted her to put the pins. This was a great fine motor skill activity as well. She worked very hard to get the pins right on the dots.

We started off doing it on a stack of towels, but it wasn't working too well, as the pins kept falling over. Daddy noticed we needed help, so he brought us this thick insulation piece he had leftover from the basement, and it worked so much better. Punkin really enjoyed this activity. I think I'll have to do it more often. (I have just been hesitant about the pins...but she did great.)

I finally got a laminator from Amazon, thanks to Carisa's recommendation here. I was excited to make my first file folder game (from Making Learning Fun). I used the lowercase letter cones and glued them onto the file folder and then had Punkin match the correct capital letter scoop. I folded over the folder and only gave her the pieces for one side so as not to overwhelm her. She loved this game and completed it without my help! I was thrilled!


Grandma had these new ABC cards for Punkin this week when she went over to her house. Punkin loved seeing what picture was on each card. She'd call out the picture and I'd ask her what letter it started with. She didn't get what I meant at first until I pointed to the letters each time I asked her.

NUMBERS / MATH

I made this worksheet to help Punkin with one to one counting.

She had fun using the stickers, and I was surprised how good she has gotten at putting them on the dots.

We worked on pointing to them one at a time with her finger as we counted.

And of course, she likes sticking her sticker on places other than the paper.

I also gave her an ice cream cone sheet with numbers 1-10 on it from Home Grown Hearts. Instead of cutting out the matching numbers to glue on, I gave her the yellow do-a-dot marker and had her stamp the number I called out. She did great, although she still mixes up 6 and 9. I did give her a plain piece of paper first to mark all over as much as she wanted to get that "out of her system." That always seems to help us a lot. When we were done with this activity, she surprised me by putting the cap back on herself without my help. You have to twist it back on, which I didn't think she knew how to do very well.

We also did another size order activity, which she did very easily. I think I need to add a few more into the mix. I forgot to take a picture of her actually doing it, though, because this was the day she fell down the stairs, and I was a bit flustered.

COLORS

I found these great ice cream cone bowls at the Dollar Tree, and couldn't resist. I wanted Punkin to sort the beads by color into the correct bowls. She used her fingers to do a few of them that way.

But then she had more fun stirring the beads in her bowls.

And on the floor.

ART

I printed out an ice cream cone and let her color it with markers. Then, we got out glitter glue and she had fun squeezing it on her cone.

It was even her idea to put the pom pom on top.

MISC. STUFF

She got this Fisher Price Little People set for her birthday. She has spent a lot of time playing with it this week. She loves moving the colored discs back and forth and listening to it count as she does it.

Grandma had this new game for Punkin at her house this week. It is a Fisher Price Animal Farm Bingo game. She didn't actually play the game, but she enjoyed putting the pieces into the top of the barn....

...and then releasing the lever to pop them back out again.

One day Punkin wanted to make cookies for Daddy, but I didn't have time, so while I made lunch I told her she could pretend to make Daddy cookies. I gave her a tray of flour and sugar along with a couple cookie cutters and a spoon. She absolutely enjoyed this! She made lines and shapes with her fingers and had fun filling up the insides of the cookie cutters with the mixture.

And of course we spent some time in her pool. She had more fun pouring water around the deck and using her squirt bottle to make "pictures" on the deck than she did actually being in the pool.

Well, that was our week. To see what other Tots were up to this week, visit 1+1+1=1.