This week in Tot School, we reviewed lots and lots of animals as our theme! Each day we focused on a certain type, starting with Zoo Animals on Day 1! We wanted to read Dear Zoo as our focus book for the day, but none of the libraries had it available since I waited a little too long to reserve them. Instead, we used our own Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? book, which is one of Nolan's favorites, so he was excited to get to play with this one for school. For our first activity, we followed the Feed the Elephant game found here, but modified it to Nolan's skill level and I even printed out a cute little elephant just from a quick Google Images search. This was Nolan's first time using the tongs, and he definitely struggled and needed my help for the majority of the activity. Instead of running back and forth to place the peanuts in the bowl, we just sat next to both bowls and maneuvered the peanuts back and forth.
Our next game was a favorite for the whole week, as we applied this to each themed animal day. Particularly for Day 1's Zoo Animals, we used these animal movement cards (found here) to imitate each animal card Nolan would choose. He absolutely loved this game and really loved watching Mommy show him how to do certain movements, and we both laughed our heads off during this activity! I tried to get pictures, but it was pretty difficult since he was ALL over the place!
We tried out some animal tracks in Play Doh, which we found on Pinterest, and this held Nolan's interest for about 5 minutes and then he was over it and wanted to play with the Play Doh in his own way, by balling it up and then tearing teeny, tiny pieces off of each one (ugh. Does anyone have a solution to this!?)
Day 2 of our Tot School Animals week consisted of Farm Animals, and I started Nolan's morning introducing this by making a fun Chicken Toast for breakfast!
We read the book The Noisy Noisy Farm, where Nolan shouted out each animal sound that we came across on each page. We followed up with a matching activity (found here) of matching baby animals to their Mommies. Nolan knew most of them, but wasn't familiar with a couple names (such as calf and fawn), so it was a good opportunity to introduce some new vocabulary to him.
We tried out some pre-writing worksheets (found here), but were a total fail as Nolan had zero interest in them and definitely didn't like me assisting him in writing out numbers and tracing lines. Good to know... and we'll revisit this at a later time!
We did a fun arts/craft activity of Muddy Pigs, found through this site, and Nolan enjoyed making his pig nice and dirty! He first practiced using the gluestick by placing the pig on some card stock, and then went to town on dirtying up his piggy! This was a fun and cute activity and end project that we both enjoyed!
Our final Animal themed day consisted of Ocean Animals, where we read Rainbow Fish to the Rescue! (since I couldn't find the original Rainbow Fish book in any library). We played another round of Animal Movements by using the ocean animal action cards found here, where Nolan really got into it on the final day and acted out each action so well!
He was extremely excited to see we were using Goldfish for our next activity, and initially had a hard time following instructions that we needed to use the goldfish for our activity before we could eat them! Once he understood when the activity was finished, then he could eat the fish, he was completely focused and ready to go! The first was color sorting each fish to it's designated color, which was a breeze for Nolan. The next one was a bit more difficult for him, and needed my guidance to count out each fish and place them in a row. We only did about half of the sheet, for loss of patience on his part. :) Finally, we ended with calling out numbers of the fish in the bowl, and he was to place the Goldfish cracker on the number called out. He did a great job with this and focused extra, especially on the higher numbers (and sometimes needed my help to identify the ones over 15). (All printables found here).
We painted our own Rainbow Fish plate by using cut up toilet paper rolls, and it came out ridiculously cute! I had to assist him with holding the cardboard for some of it, but for others he stamped the scales decently well on his own. I had him color the rim of the paper plate with his fingers and then taped the tail on the back when it was complete.
Finally, we ended the week with an Ocean Underwater Sensory Bin using Daddy's shaving cream... of which I didn't realize until that morning was a gel rather than a foam. We tried making it extra foamy, but it wasn't exactly the best consistency and Nolan really hated the feeling of it initially! I ended up adding some water to it and all was good. He played with the shaving cream/water mixture and his ocean animal bath toys for a good 20 minutes, and then I added a couple drops of blue and green food coloring to make it a whole new activity of color mixing and swirling. He loved it, plus it smelled great in our kitchen the rest of the day!
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