We started Day 1 off by reading A Rainbow of My Own and Rainbow Shoes... highly recommend the first and the second we stopped reading halfway through because it was so boring and Nolan lost interest quick. Ha! We revisited one of Nolan's favorite Tot School activities- Color High 5, and he enjoyed playing this round just as much as the first time.
We followed up with literally, a Rainbow of Our Own, by playing with this Sticky Wall Rainbow (idea found here) where Nolan absolutely loved placing the cotton balls as clouds onto the wall. Halfway through, he started pulling the cotton balls apart and sticking them everywhere, which I figured helped with texture so I let him continue to destroy them and add to his masterpiece. Once we moved onto the rainbow portion, Nolan had a difficult time placing the colored paper on the corresponding colored line and following it through, so I helped him quite a bit with the activity at this point. He was really into the first two, red and orange, but then grew tired of the paper and wanted to go back to the cotton balls. We finished it up quickly and continued with another activity shortly after.
For our worksheet and table time activity, I brought back the Rainbow Do-A-Dot sheet (printable here), this time not laminated like our first experience! We definitely need practice with these as Nolan just likes to dot everything and anything rather than the corresponding colors and in a row, so I'll try to bring out the Do-A-Dots a bit more often in the future. I showed him how to dot the first row, and he followed my lead... sort of. :)
For our arts/craft project, the plan was to make a fingerprint rainbow by dotting each of his fingers of one hand a different color and then spreading it across at one time. Nolan had other plans and wanted to just finger paint everything, so I let him have a creative art session and go to town. This lasted for just a few minutes and then he was over it. I tried to get him to do the rainbow anyway, which ended in a total failure of a three-finger smear and some angry screams. Haha! Oh well!
For Day 2 of the week, we focused on clouds and rain by reading Little Cloud, which was a super cute and interactive book that Nolan actually sat and enjoyed. We then did the Rain Cloud experiment (which we found all over Pinterest and specifically used from Simply Learning Kids) and Nolan absolutely loved watching and participating in each part of this activity! We used simple ingredients of water, shaving cream, and food coloring, and got to it!
Nolan poured his own water into the vase, while I sprayed the shaving cream to serve as our "clouds" on the top. Of course he had to evaluate by poking it to check it's consistency, and thought it was "so cool!"
I let him pour drops of blue food coloring into the vase, on top of our clouds, and we watched to see them seep through the clouds and dissipate through them, and drip down into the water below, just as raindrops do! Of course he wanted to do more and more, so in the end we ended up with some pretty blue water, and fingers! (FYI: if you let your toddler do this, be aware that food coloring will NOT come out for the rest of the day- so watch skin and clothes!) We highly recommend this activity- so simple and easy and he was amazed by it for a good ten minutes!
Next up, we played with a fun and fluffy sensory bin of cotton ball "clouds" and some new Tot School supplies that I recently picked up from Amazon. We used printable clouds with the letter "C" and "R" for cloud and rain, where he sorted them into corresponding bowls after "finding them" from being buried in the clouds. We also tried out our scooper and toddler tongs, which he didn't like at all because he got frustrated with them instantly. We will continue to work on this to help out those fine motor skills! I also threw in a toilet paper roll so he could pass the cotton balls through them and stuff it full.
For the arts/craft project, Nolan was actually really into creating his own cloud and rainbow craft, which surprised me but made me happy and proud! I started by letting him glue the bottom portion of the cloud himself, choose his colors in order and helped him place the rainbow crete paper, while he was responsible for sticking it down. Once we finished, we flipped the cloud over, where he glued the cotton balls all over to create his fluffy cloud. The final project came out super cute and he was happy to show Dad as soon as he got home from work and display it in our kitchen!
We had a busy week, so we didn't have a ton of time leftover towards the end of the week for Day 3 to do all of our planned activities, but to make sure that we got something done, I allowed for us to do the one activity I thought Nolan would enjoy the most. We learned all about Rain and splashing in puddles from our two books, Rain! and Splish, Splash, Spring. This correlated well since the week prior we had some nice spring storms, where Nolan got to splash in the puddles out front, so he could easily relate to the idea!
We made some coffee filter rain umbrellas, which we found on Pinterest from this source, where Nolan made one and I made one. I colored mine a ton where Nolan kept it a bit more simple, but the funny part is less definitely went more as his umbrella came out much cooler than mine! After we colored the coffee filters with markers, we brought them outside and sprayed them with water (the best and most fun part, obviously), where we got to see the colors spread throughout the "umbrella" and make some fun designs! I let them dry inside for the day, and in the afternoon, attached some pipe cleaners to the bottom for their handles. Fun!!
No comments