M IS FOR MONEY

~Punkin is 31 months old.~

Letter: Mm

Number: 10

Shape: circle and rectangle

Color: gray

Videos:

Elmo's Money Song

The Coin Song

Just as I thought, Punkin LOVED this week's theme of M is for Money. My goal was to not only focus on the letter M but also to expose her to the 4 basic coins and their names (instead of calling them all "moneys"). She knows penny now, due to it being the only brown coin, and she does pretty well identifying dime (the "tiny" one), but the nickel and quarter she gets confused, which is understandable. Due to the fact that I subbed two days this week at the school I used to teach at, we didn't get to some of our activities like coin patterning, coin bingo, coin tic-tac-toe, and money dominos. But here is what we DID accomplish this week....

TOT TRAYS

Scooping, pouring, and spooning real coins into glass jars. She loved this, of course.

I had this play money with velcro on the back from my teaching days, so I printed out an M do a dot page and put velcro backs on the dots. Punkin had fun sticking the velcro coins to the M.

I kinda adpated an idea I saw on Fumbling Through Parenthood. She used a paper towel holder and fabric pieces. I just stuck 2 big craft sticks in styrofoam and cut slits in laminated play money. Punkin had to put all the "ones" on one stick and the "tens" on the other. She got frustated by this one quickly, so it wasn't necessarily a favorite, but she did it once or twice.

I added her Melissa and Doug magnetic pattern block set to one of her trays this week. She wasn't into using the picture boards to make pictures. She just liked making her own creations.

Punkin got this magnetic word book from her grandma for Valentine's Day. She enjoyed matching up the letters and saying "That spells ____" by looking at the picture to help her.

Oh, and she had to take a break for some "tumbling." :)

We attempted to put this monkey puzzle together (left over from our monkey theme), but it ended up being a tad hard, because she lost interest pretty quickly.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Practicing writing the letter Mm using her beloved dry erase markers.

Making her M collage page for our ABC binder.

"Build a Letter"

I had Punkin use some coin stickers (that I had left over from my teaching days) to cover the letter Mm on our Find a Letter sheet from HERE. Then, she worked on writing her letter m at the bottom.

I was going to have Punkin practice cutting apart the coins and then gluing them on an m, but we couldn't find her little scissors for anything, and she was having trouble using my scissors, so I ended up just cutting them apart for her and she glued them on her letter m.

She also used her coin stickers to cover her Mm letters. On her own she insisted on putting the "big quarters" on the big m, and the "little dimes" on the little m. She got frustrated when she ran out of dimes and had to use one nickel because it wasn't "tiny." :)

Sorting "coins" with pictures on them. The ones that had pictures that started with the letter M sound, she got to put in her kleenex box "bank" and the ones that did not start with an m sound, she put in a line next to the "bank."

This was Punkin's favorite activity all week. I hid real coins in our colored rice bin for her to find. (She kept saying "Ah-hah!" every time she found one. It was hilarious!) Then, as she found them, she put them on a coin sorting mat that I had from my teaching days. I also had her say the name of each coin as she put it on the mat. This is really how she got to know what the names of the coins were. She did this a few days this week.

After she had all the coins on the sorting mat, I had her take each set and put it in this coin box as we counted them. (I got the idea for this from Shining our Lights.)

Punkin also really enjoyed graphing her coins this week. (I have tried other graphing activities in the past, and she hasn't been all that interested.....until now.) We said the name of each coin as she put it on the graph. When she was done, I had her find the "tallest tower" and the "shortest tower" and we talked about which one had the most and which had the least. Then, she counted how many of each coin there were.

Punkin did a very good job with this clothespin wheel. I had put money stickers on clothespins and she had to clip each one to the right spot on the wheel.

I got this idea from HERE. Punkin rolled our 1,2,3 dice and stacked that many quarters. We kept going until it fell over.

Counting the correct number of pennies onto piggy banks. This was such a simple activity, but Punkin had a ball with this!

I had Punkin toss some quarters onto a piggy bank mat. We started off standing, but most didn't make it onto the mat, so we did it sitting down.

Then, we sorted them by heads and tails and counted how many of each. Once again, we compared the two "towers" and talked about which had more and which had less.

I tried to have Punkin do this Roll and Cover activity from Making Learning Fun. However, she was more interested in just covering up all the piggies with a coin without rolling the dice or taking turns. So, it became a one-to-one correspondence activity, which was just fine.

She also used my big bulletin board coins (from my teaching days) to put them in order by size.

Punkin sorted "circle money" (coins) into our "circle bank" (an empty sour cream container with a slit cut in the lid) and "rectangle money" (bills) into her "rectangle bank" (kleenex box).

As you can see, she got really excited about "playing" with money!

We worked on spelling the color word "gray" and then she used coins to cover the letters g-r-a-y in order on a scrambled letter page.

We also sorted pictures into "GRAY" and "NOT GRAY."

Another favorite activity was hunting for the big bulletin board coins that I hid around the room and running to put them into the "bank." Later in the evening, she got them out and told me she was going to hide them for me to find.

FUN MISC. ACTIVITIES

"Washing" her coins in the sink.

Then, she asked for a towel, and she began setting them out one by one to dry.

I got this great idea (from HERE) to set up a little "store." I put stickers with numbers on them on some of her play food and set them out for her. Then, I put some pennies in her little coin purse and brought up her grocery cart. I wanted her to pick a food, put it in her cart, bring it to me and "pay" me the amount of pennies that it said on the sticker.

She did it one time, and then preferred to dump out the pennies and take all the stickers off the plastic food. Oh well. I tried!

During her playdough time, she asked for her coins. I gave her the play money and she stuck it in the playdough to make prints and enjoyed putting them in her mini muffin tin.

And she still could be found at the table coloring a LOT this week!

We had so much fun this week! Next week, I think we'll take a break from a letter and just do a theme on transportation. To see what other tots did this week, you may want to check out 1+1+1=1.