Tot School- Letter of the Week- Letter Hh

D is 32 months

Our Letter of the Week this week was letter Hh. We had a LOT of fun this week & I was really happy with the combination of activities that we did. I really felt like we covered lots of "subjects" while having a good time.

Our H words were: Hat, Hand, Hippo, House, Hop, Hot, Heart, & Heavy

   

Since this week was also Dr. Suess' birthday, we couldn't resist making our very own Cat in the Hat hat. We made a very, very simple version out of a paper bag. I cut a strip off the open end of the bag to make a brim. Dude painted the rest of the bag. Then I cut some slits in the back (so it would fit over his head) and reinforced them with tape. After it dried we glued on the brim and had one very cool hat to play with.

Dude also drew some Letter H's in his salt box.

He worked a Hot & Cold sorting game from File Folder Fun. This is made to go in a file folder, but I printed it at half size and we just laid out the piece for now. I really hate to waste materials (or money) so I often alter the way I print things in order to be a little more thrifty.

He colored his letter H phonics coloring page quite thoroughly, but without much care about those pesky black lines.

   

We took our letter tiles outside for Dude to hop on. He named each letter as he went and had lots of fun with this. The loop worked well ;)

He also dot painted his H's with his Do A Dot Paints . This sheets is from COAH.

He did some heart patterning with some candies I picked up on clearance after Valentine's day. This worksheet came from PreKinders.

   

I pulled out our dress up box and let the boys play with the h-h-hats first, then just dig into everything.

Dude also sorted the hats by what they were made of.

We then took our hats outside. I lined them up on our balance beam and let Dude throw beanbags at them to try to knock them off.  He actually did pretty well at this.

Dude did his Letter H letter builders. We do this for each of our weekly letters and some weeks this activity seems so simple for Dude I've wondered if it was even worth it. But this week there was more stacking of the pieces involved in making the H's. He seemed to have a little trouble figuring it out, so I was glad to have challenged him.

We traced our hands. Mama's was much bigger than Dude's. 

We turned our coloring page into a phonics collage by gluing on pictures of things that start with H. I cut out Dude's hand print to go on there too. The pictures are from here. I printed them at 50% of normal size.

Dude circled the letter H's on this letter hunt worksheet.

Dude counted magnets out onto the number cards from 1+1+1=1. (There's a dot on the cards under each of those magnets.)

   

Ahhhhh!

We used the the cut and paste hippo printout from COAH and made ours into a paper bag puppet. If you do this don't make the mistake I did of waiting until the end to draw the mouth on the inside. I just drew some gums and teeth, but mine wasn't easy or pretty.

   

We discussed light and heavy and sorted some objects. After we had done that I had him sit down and close his eyes and I handed him 2 canned goods and asked him which was heavier. He really enjoyed this activity and even asked me for more items to sort.

We finished out our H week by discussing where we live and making this cute House collage.

For next week, it's on to Letter I!

 

I'm linking this post up to Tot School , Preschool Corner, Show & Tell Blog Hop, the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection, For the Kids Fridays, & Tot Tuesdays

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What's On The Trays?- Post 4

D is 32 months
S is 13 months

In addition to doing Tot School with Dude we also do Tot Trays as inspired by Carisa over at 1+1+1=1.

I try to put these trays together with both my boys in mind whenever possible.

 

On the trays for this week we had:

1. Playdough & a couple of cookie cutters

2. A piece of styrofoam packing & some toothpicks

3. LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Letter Set

4. Multicolored hole reinforcement labels & a piece of paper with matching highlighter dots (The items beside the tray are only there for reference.)

5. Lincoln Logs an empty peanut butter jar with lid

6. Paper towel & toilet paper tubes, balls to fit in them, & an empty juice bottle

And what they did with them:

Playdough was played with. Dude still isn't incredibly fond of the texture of playdough, but is getting much better about it. I had really wanted to let Spudder get his hands on it for the first time this week, but he got sick and we never got around to it :(

Dude loved pushing the toothpicks into the styrofoam.

The LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Letter Set also got played with a little bit. This was another one I had hoped Spudder would enjoy, but we never actually got around to with him getting sick.

I was really excited to introduce this stickering activity to Dude. And he LOVED it! I had drawn dots with different color highlighters and gave him colored hole reinforcement stickers to match up to them.  I put the dots in the shape of a few letters we've already covered in our letter of the week studies. He wasn't nearly as particular or careful with this activity as I'd expected him to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. He can be extremely particular and hard on himself at times. I was very glad to see him get some relaxed fine motor practice! This idea occured to me while I was looking for supplies to do a similar sticker matching activity I saw over at The Princess and the Tot. 

   

The Lincoln Logs made for a fun tray for both boys. Spudder didn't have any problems turning even the longer pieces vertically to get them into the jar. He seemed to just do it naturally. I thougt that Dude might have wanted to screw the jar lid on and off, but he could have cared less about that. He just wanted to build a fort and do a little pretending. I certainly can't complain about that! I loved watching him play :)

Where are the paper towels rolls, you ask? Still on the shelf where they've been sitting all week! I thought that Dude would be all about checking out that tray, but I was wrong. He never wanted them and I didn't get around to offering them to Spudder. We did have a busy week though, so I may add some more items to that tray and see if I can't tempt Dude this coming week.

I'm linking this post up to Tot School at 1+1+1=1, Tot Tuesdays at My Delicious Ambiguity, & Box Ideas Tuesdays

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Tot School- Letter of the Week- Letter Tt {Part 2}

D is 32 months.

We had another slow week in Tot School as we finished up our letter T activities. We were in a bit of a recoup & regroup mode as we got over being sick, spent some quality time together as a family, and I worked on getting a bit better organized with my tot school planning. We also let tot school take a back seat to outdoor play as the weather here is now absolutely fabulous! Hopefully I can find more ways to take school outside in the coming weeks.

You can view our first week of letter T activities here.

We spent quite a bit of time playing on our homemade balance beam this week. I'll try to share some more game ideas for this in a future post. But for now we're mostly just playing simple stepping games as in the picture above.

 Dude did an upper/lowercase letter T sort from COAH. I printed the mat from there and then just drew the Ts on scraps of paper so we'd have a few more and to save on ink.

He also did his letter builders. Once we're finished with these, my plan is to put all of these sheets into a notebook for him to play with freely.

Our coloring sheet from last week became a phonics collage when Dude glued on pictures of things that start with letter T. I got the pictures from here and printed them at 50% of normal size.

To try something different I let Dude attempt his first color by number. This one was of a train and is from Making Learning Fun. I think he did pretty well considering.

He covered the letter Ts with erasers on this letter hunt page.

We did a train measuring activity I found at 2 Teaching Mommies. I asked him how long the train was, which numbers it was driving on, & where it started & ended. I'm pretty sure this mostly went right over Dude's head, but I was glad to have introduced the concept and now we have the materials to repeat it again later.

We did this transportation sorting activity that I found at Printable Share. I printed it all at 50% of normal size to save on materials. It's now the perfect size to make into a file folder game, so I plan to do that soon.

   

We made a number train from Homeschool Creations. After he put the train cars in order (with lots of help) we moved the train forward. I had him move the engine car forward and then slide each number car in behind it as he said the numbers. We did this to help work on 1 to 1 correspondence. Dude still verbally counts faster than he points sometimes when he gets excited.  

Dude got some cutting and sequencing practice doing this tree craft. You can see the full instructions with more pictures and a free printable on my Tree- Cut & Sequence Craft post. 

   

We also got some wiggles and giggles out indoors playing a Tickle game. We used the Wheel of Tickles printable I found here. I made mine into a spinner using a brad, a scrap piece of plastic and a soda pull tab, but the link describes another method of doing it with some string and a plastic spoon. Just use whatever you've got I say ;)

We made this into a learning experience with the addition of the die. We played by having the Tickler both roll the die and spin the spinner. He then had to start at the far wall and take as many steps as he'd rolled on the die toward the Ticklee. When the steps were complete he could then run to the Ticklee to tickle them on the correct part of the body. My son prefered to be the Tickler, which worked out perfectly. As the Ticklee I also held up my fingers to help remind him of the number of steps we needed to count out. Dude LOVED this game and we played quite a few times! I breifly considered pulling Spudder in to be the Ticklee, but decided I wasn't that brave yet. I'm sure we'll be pulling this one out for some rainy day fun in the future!

 

 

I'm linking this post up to Tot School , Preschool Corner, Show & Tell Blog Hop, the Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection, and For the Kids Fridays

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