This week in Tot School, we learned all about the season Spring! It was a perfect week for it because we were met with some awesome park weather and even surprised with some great spring storms on the weekend, which fully rounded out our lesson and will carry over into our following week: Rain and Rainbows!
We started off day 1 of Spring Week with Nolan's Baby Loves Spring book, which he loves to lift the flaps, so he was super excited to get to read this all time favorite once again. We also read And Then It's Spring, which taught us about planting a garden and waiting patiently for it to grow over time. I put together a fun Spring Sensory bin that included some Target $1 bin garden tools, as well as some laminated carrots and garden flowers and bugs (pages found here and here). Nolan enjoyed burying and "hiding" the printables and then digging them out, one by one, as we identified colors of the flowers and names of the bugs.
We had to cut our activities short this day, but we ended with a contact paper flower, where Nolan created his own flower petals and put them on each of the petals of the contact paper flower (assimulated the idea from this). I simply cut my own flower pattern from construction paper, taped to the window, and covered with a sheet of contact paper for him to enjoy the stickiness. The petals were shred up tissue paper that worked nicely for another activity later in the week.
I had Nolan create his own flowers at first, and then I had him organize them by color on each petal. He liked to stop to "smell" each flower petal before putting them on, too! Silly boy.
Day 2, we enjoyed the book, In the Tall, Tall Grass, and followed a caterpillar through his adventure in the garden and the different things he saw throughout. We played a caterpillar color sorting game that I came across on Pinterest (found here), where Nolan used the tissue paper colors from Day 1 of Spring Week to cover each corresponding color of the caterpillar's body. We made it into a fun game where he would run back and forth and I would yell out which color to select from the bin and place on, and then he was able to create his own freestyle on various rounds after.
For our arts/craft project of the day, we made our very own caterpillar out of pom poms and a clothespin. Nolan was able to glue the clothespin independently and then I assisted him with sticking the pom poms down since they didn't want to stick that well, initially. At the end, we met a fuzzy little caterpillar friend that Nolan gave hugs and kisses to!
We spent some time outside enjoying a nature hunt, where Nolan was able to pick freely any item he wanted in the backyard that related to nature, such as flowers, leaves, and even some weeds! Haha! Afterwards, we went back inside and created a Sticky Garden (idea found here) where Nolan simply took his items from outside and created his own masterpiece by placing it on contact paper. He absolutely loved this activity and was super proud to show Dad when he came home from work! We left it up for a couple of days because it looked pretty cool and he was so happy and proud over it!
To end out our lesson for the day, we ended up at the park, and since it was pretty windy, we tried out our new kite that Grandma had given him for Easter. Although the wind was pretty strong, the kite didn't want to go too high, even when I flew it, but that didn't stop Nolan from thinking it was the coolest and funniest thing ever! He had a blast running around with it and even just simply standing with it held out in front of him, watching the wind blow it gently in the air!
On our last day of Spring Week, we read all about ladybugs and counted them by fives in the book, Lots of Ladybugs! I found these great printable ladybugs from the Fun With Mama blog and we placed and counted the spots on one for our table time activity. I wanted to use velcro on the laminated pages to stick the spots on so we could reuse them over and over again, but once I realized I had run out, I had to resort to using Command strips instead. It worked, but definitely wasn't easy getting them off so I wouldn't recommend it!
I printed the same ladybug template and shrank them down in size, and wrote our own numbers and corresponding spots on them. We played a game similar to the "High 5" game that Nolan was crazy about during Colors week, except this time, I shouted out the number he was to "slap" and once he found it, he had to point and count off the number of spots on the same ladybug. He loved it!
Finally, for our arts/craft project of the day, we used our awesome Fingerprint Activities book to make our own ladybugs! I helped draw the lines with a Sharpie, but Nolan had other plans and wanted to do it himself, so I let him and he made his mark, quite literally! I absolutely love how each of these has turned out that we've done so far, and we always date it to see how he will progress through the months!
To cap off our Spring Week, the weekend gave us some beautiful spring storms, and Nolan enjoyed playing in the sprinkles outside on Saturday morning. We spent an hour jumping in baby puddles and having a blast wearing his rain jacket and hood! We don't get much rain here, so when we do, we take advantage of these warmer sprinkle days, and now that Nolan is old enough to enjoy them, too, they make those relaxing weekend storms that much better!
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