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.

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.