D IS FOR DOG

~Punkin is 30 months old.~

Theme: Dogs

Letter: Dd

Number: 8

Shape: Crescent

Color: Gray

Videos:
Mighty Book Jr. I got a free subscription to this site about a week ago, and we watched the following stories online about dogs:
The Lonely Dog

The New Puppy

Puppy Gets a Checkup
Scrappy

Books:

TOT TRAYS

We kept out a lot of the same trays from last week since we only got to do them once last week.

Punkin LOVES, LOVES, LOVES her LeapPad.

Sorting beads by color. I had different "shades" of each color in the bowl, and she did great picking out all the red, orange, etc. no matter what the "shade" of the color was.

We spent a good half hour at least putting this big wooden ABC puzzle together. We had to sing through the ABC's each time to figure out what came next. This was the first time she has put together a "real" puzzle with interlocking pieces like this, and she caught on quickly and loved it.

We had to keep the puzzle together and "display" it in the room. She hasn't let me take it down yet. :)

Last week, I had to basically do most of putting these little 4-piece puzzles together and she was more interested in taking the pieces apart and throwing them in the box. The day after we did the big ABC puzzle this week, she willingly pulled these out right away and did them mostly on her own! (I had to help her on a couple pieces by saying something like, "Look, we need to find the piece that has the rest of the kitty's leg" or something like that.)

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

I don't post every week about our vocab cards that we review every day because it's the same old thing all the time. But this week, I mixed it up a bit and gave her three cards at a time. We put them in different orders and said the names of each one. Then, I'd take one away and ask her to tell me which one was missing. She did fairly well for it being her first time doing something like this.

More Kumon work. She is finally getting really good at curves.

Building our letter Dd's.

Finding all the letter Dd's with her Do-a-Dot markers and then tracing some capital D's at the bottom. (This page was printed from HERE.)

Capital and lowercase Dd doggie sort. I printed these pages from Creative Learning Fun awhile ago, but she doesn't have them posted on her site anymore. (At least not that I can find.)

We spent a LOT of time working on writing the letter Dd. (This page came from Carisa at 1+1+1=1, and I love that it is color coded with Green dots for start marks and red stars for stopping points.) Punkin really loves "writing" with her dry erase marker, so I have been making good use of that. As a former first grade teacher, I am really working with Punkin from the beginning (before she learns her own wrong habits) on correct formation, which by the end of the week, she could do without my reminders! I am a big proponent of not just making the letter look right in the end, but also learning HOW to make the letter correctly with the right strokes in the right direction in the right order. I guess that is also just the "OCD" tendancies in me coming out! To other people and other teachers, it might not matter to them at all. Anyway, sorry for the tangent. I hope that made sense.

More letter Dd writing practice. This one came with the dog capital and lowercase letter sort I mentioned above. On this one I let her use regular markers and we put it in her ABC binder.

Making our letter D collage page for our ABC binder.

Punkin loved this activity! I stuck a magnet on the end of her dog's nose, and put 6 of her magnetic Melissa and Doug letters upside down in a doggie bowl I got at Dollar Tree. (I found that the cheap plastic magnetic letters I got at Dollar Tree didn't work because they weren't strong enough.....there was not as much magnetic space on the back of them, if that makes sense.) Anyway, Punkin pretended her dog was eating, and had the dog pull out one letter at a time from the bowl. Then, she had to tell me the letter and sound and put it on the picture that starts with that sound. We're still working on this skill, but she got the apple (a), bus (b), and dog(d) correct. The others she needed my help on.

We've been working on spelling her name every morning during our calendar / chart time, and we have a song we sing all the time that helps her spell her name. Therefore, she can pretty much spell her name by herself now. But to reinforce it more and to see if she could do it in other contexts, I printed out dog houses with one letter in her name on each one. I asked her to find the letters and spell her name, which she could do without a problem. Then, she had to find the matching dog that had the same letter on it and put it "in" his correct dog house.

We tried this color by number D is for Dog sheet that Carisa from 1+1+1=1 made. The dog had some really tiny spaces in it, but I thought she did pretty well.

I made THESE dog houses as well that Punkin had to put in number order. Then, she counted the spots on the dogs and put them in their correct dog house. She also had a lot of fun with this activity!

I am starting to try to introduce Punkin more to double digit numbers, so I made THIS dog number match memory game with only the numbers 10, 11, and 12. I only gave her 6 cards to start with (2 of each number), and I first just went over the numbers with her and had her find a number I said. Then, she just matched them up by looking at them face up, saying the numbers each time. Then, finally, the next day after reviewing them again, we played a memory game with them and she got to bark like a dog each time she got a match.

I printed out some blank dog bone shapes that I found on Google images, and was going to color some of them gray (our color this week) and leave some white to make patterns. Well, I got lazy and just ended up making dots on half of them which was much faster than coloring them. So, it's hard to see the differences in the bones in the pictures, but she was making patterns with spotted bones and white bones. She insisted on using all the bones each time. We did basic AB patterns, then a few AAB and ABB patterns.

I found that Punkin had around 11 different stuffed dogs spread around the house, so we used them for lots of fun activities. For starters, I had her use her stuffed dogs instead of paper ones to do some size ordering. She can do this very easily now. We did big to little, then little to big. Then, I put them in the wrong order and had her try to fix it. That was a bit harder.

We also put them all in a big laundry basket and had fun playing with them one day together. First, I threw in some other stuffed animals and had her sort them on the stairs by "Dogs" and "Not Dogs." We also were able to talk a bit about "more" and "less" after she got done.

Then, she asked to line them all up in a "dog parade." And of course, she had to pretend to be a doggie and lead the parade. She is getting such an imagination lately!

Then, she counted them all and jumped over them all. When she got to that "taller" dalmation dog, she said, "Lay down, doggie! You're too tall!" So funny!

I also had her sort them by big and little dogs. She put them on the couch next to the capital D if they were "big" dogs and next to the lowercase d if they were "little" dogs.

She also wanted to drive them around in her car. She told me, "See, Mommy! Go, Dog, Go!" (We had just read the book Go, Dog, Go that morning, and if you've read the book before, you know that the dogs drive in cars and go and stop at the stop light.)

ART / CRAFT ACTIVITIES

Punkin made a dog out of torn paper. She tore the paper into big strips and then I tore them into small pieces. (She ended up having to color the nose, eyes, and ears with a crayon since we couldn't find any black construction paper.)

One morning, Punkin worked diligently at painting her paper plate brown. I am not kidding, she made sure EVERY part of that plate was brown and no white was showing.

Then, later that afternoon, we made a dog mask.

Arf! Arf!

Since we had brown paint out, I got out some dog bone treats I had also snagged at Dollar Tree (not really knowing what I'd do with them since we don't have a dog but knowing we'd be doing a dog unit). I had her use them as stamps on her paper to paint dog bones. But it wasn't as easy as I thought, and you can't really tell they're bones, but they are!

We attempted to make a Clifford dog as mentioned HERE....

But to me, it ended up looking more like a red mouse or something!

MISC.

And Punkin insisted on eating her snacks out of the doggie bowl, too, like her doggie did! She never actually stuck her face in the bowl, though, to try to get her snacks without her hands like I thought she would since that is how her doggie did it.

Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Check out 1+1+1=1 for more tot school ideas!