ST. PATRICK'S DAY FUN

~Punkin is 31 months old.~

Theme: St. Patrick's Day
Shape: Shamrock / Clover
Color: Green
Number: 11

We ended up having something going on every single morning this past week, so we didn't get to do any morning calendar time or tot trays (except the one below that I found she had gotten into one afternoon when I was using the restroom.) Therefore, we didn't really have much time to read all the St. Patrick's Day books or watch any videos that I had planned either. Oh well. I think we'll keep out the tot trays for next week (since I spent time getting them ready and she didn't get to play with them) even though we'll go onto our Letter O theme. Since we typically do our formal "tot school" learning time in the afternoons right after her nap, we were still able to get a lot of those activities done, and she even asked a few nights to do "schooltime" after dinner as well.

TOT TRAYS

This was the one tot tray she snuck in this week. She was infatuated with the flowers and sticking them into the styrofoam.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Clover Letter match from 2 Teaching Mommies.

St. Patrick's Day Symbol Size Sort from 2 Teaching Mommies.

Punkin used hearts to "build" colorful shamrocks by looking at example templates. I got the idea from The Activity Mom, but I made my own documents, since I don't have any felt or foam at the moment. (I also created a harder version using green patterns instead of different colors, but we didn't try that one.)

Hunting for our number 11 using a green dot marker.

Graphing Lucky Charm marshmallows using the printout from 2 Teaching Mommies. Punkin once again enjoyed the graphing activities this week, and she really grasped the idea of "building a tower" with her graphing pieces (versus putting them in any box or starting at the top).

She also spun a spinner with St. Patrick's Day pictures on it (from Musings of Me) and used stickers to graph her spins.

Punkin did great counting the cute St. Patrick's pictures on these count and clip cards from Musings of Me and then clipping her clothespins to the matching number. She really was able to do this without my help.

Punkin drew number cards and counted that many "gold coins" into her "pot of gold."

She also set shamrocks in number order, then counted that many gold coins onto each one.

For her snack one day, I had her count out green marshmallows onto her number box counting sheet. Then to eat them, she used a toothpick to "poke" each one. She called them "marshmallow lollipops."

We tried THIS shape snake game. I set out the foam cards and told her to find "the rectangle wth a 10 in it" for example.

Then, she laced it onto her yarn and tried to shake it to get it to the doorknob. But, I think she was too short or something, because it didn't work as well as I thought.

Punkin had so much fun with this activity. I saw this idea on Totally Tots and adapted it for this unit. I gave her one shamrock with a lowercase letter on it at a time. She told me what it was and the sound it made, then we sang the "Hokey Pokey" as she put it in and took it out of the box and we did the motions to the song. She LOVED it!

Then, after we did that for each letter, she'd take that letter and line it up in order on the carpet. When she was done, I told her she spelled the word "shamrock" and she walked down the line, saying each letter, and then proclaimed, "That spells shamrock!"

She loved this activity just as much. I wrote numbers 10-12 on about 10 shamrocks and hid them around the living room. Then, she hunted for them one at a time. Before each one she found, we sang this song to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell." (Adapted from a song in the G is for Green unit found HERE.)

We'll find a shamrock now.

We'll find a shamrock now.

And see what number is on it.

And then we'll take a bow.
Then, after she found a shamrock, she'd bring it to me, tell me the number on it, and take a bow. It was so funny!

ART / CRAFTS

A friend that I subbed for a few weeks ago gave me this extra shamrock template, so I had Punkin "paint" the shamrock with glue, and we sprinkled it with green sugar sprinkles. (I was going to use green glitter, but I couldn't find any, so we improvised.)

Using the idea from No Time for Flashcards, I printed out a shamrock template, and had Punkin glue green marshmallows around the edges. I was impressed with how well she did.

Punkin also made a shamrock by dipping her hand in green paint and making three green handprints. I saw this idea in the unit downloaded from HERE.

MISC. FUN

Punkin had so much fun making "Green Fizz." I saw the idea at I Can Teach My Child. I colored some vinegar with green food coloring and Punkin worked on using the medicine dropper (a skill we've been working on) to drop green vinegar on some baking soda. She kept doing this until she used up all the liquid. Each time she saw the fizzy reaction, she'd look at me and go, "OOOHH!"

On St. Patrick's Day, Punkin enjoyed a green muffin tin meal for dinner.....in our blue muffin tray. LOL! Anyway, she had green milk, green cottage cheese, celery, broccoli, green goldfish, green tortellini, and a green cookie.

She helped make those green cookies at Grandma's house on Tuesday. We just added some green food coloring to a sugar cookie mix. She "painted" on the frosting, dumped on the sprinkles, and even helped Grandma wash the dishes when they were done.

She also had fun peeling her first hard boiled egg....and taking a bite! She found out that she really likes hard boiled eggs.

And of course, she spend HOURS this week coloring and drawing on her pad of paper. She can spend LONG stretches of time just "writing" and "drawing."

That was our St. Patrick's Day theme! Thanks for reading. To see what other tots were up to this week, go to 1+1+1=1.

TRANSPORTATION THEME

~Punkin is 31 months old.~

We didn't have a letter we focused on this week. Rather, we focused on "things that go" and did some review of letters, numbers, shapes, colors.

I really didn't have much motivation this week, however, and combined with the fact that I was having issues with my memory card on my camera, and our printer broke, so I could only print in black and white......sigh. It wasn't as thrilling of a week as I had anticipated in my head it would be. (Activities printed in black and white are just not as exciting as when they are in color for some reason!)

Here are the books we read this week. Punkin's favorites were "Toot, Toot, Beep, Beep" and "Red Light, Green Light."

And here are some videos we enjoyed watching:

Transportation for Kids

Airplanes

The Little Engine That Could

Cars Movie Soundtrack

TOT TRAYS

At the beginning of the week, I couldn't take any pictures or edit anything because my memory card was "locked." I didn't know what that meant or how to fix it. But I finally looked it up online, and with a simple fix of switching a tab on the card that had somehow gotten flipped, I was back in business. But the first few tot tray pics are just of the tray because she was playing with them while I was trying to figure out the memory card thing, and then I forgot to take pictures later in the week when she was playing with them again.

Shape block train

Pattern block train

Pattern Train: She mostly just lined them up in a big long line since I wasn't right there to keep her on track making patterns.

Working on our sight words by "driving" a car around the letters. I printed these letters from Making Learning Fun.

I had gotten this Thomas the Train game at a garage sale this summer. Punkin wasn't interested in playing the game, but she had a lot of fun making the trains go up and down the hill on the tracks and building towers with the number tiles.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

I switched things up a bit during our calendar time in the morning, and gave Punkin mini clothespins to clip to her pocket chart for counting our number of the week instead of having her just put buttons or cards in the chart. She really enjoyed this new addition!

Working on her Kumon book. This book is still one of the best purchases I ever made. I need to go get out some of the other Kumon books I bought at the same time, like the cutting one.

I printed out a Cars prewriting page (from the preschool pack HERE) and a train prewriting page (from the train tot kit HERE). Punkin loves anything involving dry erase markers!

We also did this Tt writing page from the train tot kit. She is an expert at making Tt's.

A couple days this week we worked with our vocabulary cards to play a "What's Hiding?" game. I would set out three cards to focus on, then mix them up and set out two facing up and one face down. She had to guess which one was "hiding." She did very well!

I helped her do this transportation comparison chart from 2 Teaching Mommies.

I really wish these could have been in color....but she still had fun putting together these vehicle puzzles from 2 Teaching Mommies as well.

One thing we're working a lot on lately is beginning sounds. I helped Punkin with these vehicle beginning letter sounds clip cards (again from 2 Teaching Mommies). She had no problem putting the clips on by herself, though, which is a huge step from a couple months ago!

Another beginning sounds activity we did was from Making Learning Fun. She had to look at the letter on the train car and find the picture that started with that sound.

We did some patterning on a road with the "car" and "truck" that I printed from a page in Carisa's Cars Preschool pack. (Punkin has never seen the movie Cars, so we didn't bother with their official names.)

Counting cars and drawing a line to the matching number. This came from the Cars Preschool Pack.

We tried the Parking Lot Game from Happy Brown House this week. I could only find 7 cars, so we had to use the 1-6 page instead of the 1-12 page as I had planned. Punkin loved the big foam dice. She rolled it, counted the dots on the top, then "drove" a car into the "parking space" with that number. I hadn't told her what to do if she rolled a number a second time, but the first time she rolled a number that was already covered, she said, "Oops. We already did that one. I have to do it again." I was impressed that she understood that without my help!

Lining up trains in number order.

I had gotten this shape train file folder game at a garage sale this summer along with about 20 others for really cheap! She had to match the correct color, shape, and size to the right train car.

ART / CRAFTS

One day we kinda focused on stoplight activities. After we read "Red Light, Green Light," played the game of "Red Light, Green Light," and sang our Traffic Light song from Dr, Jean, Punkin had fun cutting up red, green, and yellow strips of paper.

Then, she glued all the scraps that she had cut onto the correct place on her stoplight. She has always been fascinated with stoplights, so she knew what order they went in, and she can tell me what each color means.

Proud of her finished product.

Punkin loves to paint, so I came up with this little art project on the day we were focusing on traffic lights and cars. I used painters tape cut in half (to make it skinnier) to tape off a road on a piece of white tagboard. Then, I had her paint the top of the paper blue, paint over the painters tape with black, and paint the bottom green. I put another sheet of paper covering the parts that I didn't want her to paint at the moment so she wouldn't get confused as to where to paint. She did a very neat, careful job.

The left picture shows what it looked like right after she finished painting, and the right picture shows what it looked like when we carefully pulled of the painters tape after the paint dried.

Then I had Punkin color a picture of a car and color in the circles of a stoplight that I printed from google images.

Then, I cut them out and she glued them on her dried page, along with some cotton ball clouds.

MISC. FUN

Sorry for the blurry picture, but it was hard to capture this game on camera. We had so much fun one day playing "Red Light, Green Light." I would say, "Green light!" and she would run in circles until I said "Red light" and she would stop. We did this over and over again to burn off some energy! Then, she wanted to have me play, so she said "Green light" and "Red light" while I was the "runner."

Coloring a picture of an airplane. She has discovered colored pencils, and now prefers those over crayons.

One day during Punkin's nap, I got on this website and followed the directions to make some paper airplanes.

Then, when she woke up, we had fun flying the airplanes and seeing which one went the farthest and worked the best.

The one that worked the best by far was the third one in the picture above. It didn't always go WHERE I aimed it to go, but it sure did glide pretty far!

We made a paper plate boat and floated it in the water. Then, I had Punkin put uncooked macaroni on the plate to see how long it would take to sink the boat. I got the idea from HERE and they used beans, but all I had was macaroni. It took her awhile to sink the boat, which was fine, because it kept her occupied while I made dinner beside her. She also enjoyed picking all the macaroni out of the water when she was done!

I had intended to make letter template cards for each letter in Punkin's (real) name so she could trace them in her salt tray. But as I began to cut them out, I realized it wouldn't work for some of the circular letters that had "centers" in them. So, instead of doing her whole name, she just did some random letter cards that I got to work.

And then she just had fun drawing with her finger and driving her car to make tracks.

Punkin also had fun with her snap button board this week.

Our neighbor down the street just had her fourth baby this past week, so to give her a break one morning, I had her older three girls over here for a playdate. They had fun doing "art time" together using Do-a-Dot paints, stickers, foam shapes, crayons, colored pencils, stickers, etc. (The one year old got to use Color Wonder markers so I didn't have to worry about the mess.)

All the girls had fun dancing to the songs in a Dora movie as well.....

... and playing with dominoes.

I guess in spite of not feeling like this week turned out all that exciting, it WAS a busy one! Next week we'll focus on St. Patty's Day! To see what other tots were up to this week, visit 1+1+1=1.