~Punkin is 32 months old.~ Theme: Elephants
Letter: Ee
Shape: Trapezoid / Review
Color: Gray
Number: 12
Videos:
"I Like Elephants" (This is such a cute song that Punkin loved!)
"Elephant Steps" (Another cute kids' song)
Books:
TOT TRAYS
I kept out her shape / animal train puzzle, and this week, she actually got around to putting it all together! 
I got this idea from Fumbling Through Parenthood. I cut off the top of an empty 2 liter soda bottle and Punkin used this as a funnel to scoop noodles into the milk jug. She also used her hands and just finally dumped them all from the bag in, too! 
She had fun pounding in the letters to her foam puzzle using her hammer that makes noises when you use it. 
I also had kept out the shape pages with colored dots that she had to match the ring stickers to. She worked really hard this week making sure the colored dots on the page "peeked" through the center of the ring sticker. 
I brought out the animal lacing cards again. I try every so often. She is not usually all that interested. This week, she did work hard on finishing the cat card one day, but wanted nothing to do with them any other day. LANGUAGE ACTIVITIES
Working some more on her Kumon book. 
We did a lot of prewriting from COAH. 
And she worked really hard at making her letter Ee. She did well on the capital one, but the lowercase e was a bit hard for her. 
We did some vocabulary / memory work again this week. I'd set out three cards and we'd say the pictures in order, then I'd mix them up and she'd tell me them again. After doing this a few times, I'd set them down with one turned over and she had to tell me which one it was by looking at the two that were showing and figuring out which one was missing. 
Building her letter Ee. 
Letter Ee elephant capital and lowercase letter sort. This came from Creative Learning Fun. 
Punkin always loves noodle pounding her letters. We hadn't done it in awhile, so she was really excited to do it again. 
I printed out this magnet page from Making Learning Fun and wrote capital and lowercase letters in the circles. I had her put pink magnetic pom poms on the lowercase letters and black pom poms on the capital letters. 
We did some more beginning sound clip cards this week from PreKinders. 
And I made this sight word graphing game for Punkin, which she loved and did a great job on! I hid the little elephant cards with her sight words on them in her bin of colored rice. When she found one, she read the word and put it on her graph in the right spot. She did great! 
And she spelled her sight words on her Leapfrog jet. MATH ACTIVITIES
Punkin sorted elephants by large, medium, small. I printed these from Life with My Giggly Girls. 
She found and dotted all the number twelves on the page. 
We attempted this elephant color by number that I printed from COAH. She understood the concept just fine (finding the matching number and coloring it the correct color according to the code), but I wished she had colored more of each space. Oh well. It still was a great activity for her since she loves to draw and color these days. 
Punkin played "Feed the Elephant." We have done many activities like this in the past, and she still loves it every time. She drew a number card and had to count that many peanuts to "feed" the elephant. I used the printouts from Life With My Giggly Girls. 
We played a fun elephant game that Punkin really enjoyed. First, I had Punkin set some of our not-so-common shape cutouts out around the kitchen. I would tell her, "Go put this [trapezoid] in a square (on the tile) by the dishwasher" or "Go put this [octagon] in a square by Mommy's chair (at the table)." Then I sang a silly song that I made up about an elephant who liked to eat shapes. Punkin would pretend she was an elephant (she's making her "trunk" in the first picture), and go "stomp" around the "jungle" until she found the shape that I mentioned in the song and pretended to eat it (see the second picture). The song was to the tune of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It went like this: "I'm a big gray elephant, elephant, elephant. I'm a big gray elephant who eats [trapezoids.] Oh, I see one over there, over there, over there. Oh, I see one over there. I'll eat it up....GULP!" 
I attempted to start introducing ordinal numbers to Punkin this week. I had her put the elephants in a parade by saying, "The first elephant is yellow. The second elephant is green." And so on and so forth, as she set them in the right order. Then, after they were lined up, we went down the line together saying, "The yellow elephant is first. The green elephant is second." And so on. Then, I attempted to have her give me the fourth or the second elephant, for instance. Well, she didn't quite get it, and she wasn't all that interested in our "parade." So, we'll keep introducing it in a variety of ways over the next few months. ART / CRAFTS
I think this lowercase e elephant (from COAH) is just so cute! I cut out the pieces, obviously, and then had Punkin glue them all together. 
We also painted two paper plates gray one day. Then, the next day, I cut ears and a trunk out of one of the plates, and we made a cute little elephant! I got this idea from Pocketful of Posies. 
Punkin wanted to name her elephant. So, she named it "Ellie" all on her own. (She has a stuffed elephant named Ellie, so that's where the idea came from.) 
This one isn't elephant related, but we marble painted some eggs to hang up in our entryway for Easter. I wanted to get them hung up so we could enjoy them for awhile before Easter. (We will be doing our E is for Egg unit next week.)MISC. FUN
Another fun song that we sang all week was another one I made up. (I don't really know what the tune was, though I am sure it is a pretty familiar song....I just can't remember what it is. The tune just came to me as I was making up the song.) Anyway, she stomped around the kitchen (or wherever we happened to be) as we sang it. It goes like this: "Stomp, stomp went the big gray elephant. Stomp, stomp went the elephant. Stomp, stomp went the big gray elephant. And he stomped in the jungle all day." 
This Wiggle Worm game was a flop, even though I thought she'd really like it. (I got the idea from Little Family Fun.) It had nothing to do with elephants, but I was sure she'd have fun with it. I put some strips of paper in a can - some with "wiggle worms" on them, and some with hearts. The idea was for us to take turns picking out a piece of paper. If we drew a wiggle worm, we had to get up and dance (which she loves to do). If we drew a heart, we had to give each other a great big hug. Well, she must not have been in the mood for games that day, because she wanted nothing to do with it.....even though I found her later with the can on the couch, taking out each piece of paper, opening it up, and setting it next to her. When she had them all out of the can, she put them back in one by one. Oh well. I guess she got some use out of the activity at least. 
After our hunting for sight words in rice activity, we noticed that there was some rice on the floor. Punkin immediately said, "I sweep it up for you, Mommy." She went to the closet, got out the little broom set and proceeded to crawl under the table and sweep up (most of) the rice. She even carried the pan to the garbage can and threw them away (only spilling a little bit in the process.) 
Our local zoo had its annual "Free Admission Day" this week, so we ventured out with Grandma to the zoo for a fun Ladies Day Out! It was a bit chilly when we first got there, but it ended up being a pretty pleasant day later on. Punkin would have stayed and played with the goats all day if I had let her. 
She got to see a lot of neat animals, although she kept asking when we were going to see the "elpants." Even though I told her our zoo doesn't have elephants, she still insisted that we go see them. :)Well, that was our fun week. Check back next week to find out what we do with eggs all week. To see what other tots were up to this week, check out 1+1+1=1.
**I am having so much trouble with spacing and formatting in Blogger lately. I spend more time hassling with spacing and formatting than I do actually typing up the post. Is anyone else having these issues?
Posts
