Tot school: letter P

Tot school: letter P

Age: 30 months

P is for pig

we like paper plate crafts! The pink paint was still packed away, so we did a mosaic to cove the pig.  I cut out the ears, nose, eyes, and mouth and let Raelynn glue them.  I was impressed that she put the nose in the middle, which was pretty accurate...but then she stuck the eye balls over top of the nostrils and the mouth upside down. Haha....but she was very happy with it and that is what matters!

Pink was the theme color of the week since it starts with P! These are just scrapbooking stickers we use each week.  I have two sheets and there are three on each sheet of the entire alphabet.  She is always free to do what she wants with them.  This week it is interesting that she put the same colors right next to each other

P is for Popsicle

I bought a big box of 1000 popsicle sticks a while ago.  I came up with this idea on my own:)  Athough I'm sure it is out there somewhere! Raelynn LOVED this one and was trying to lick the popsicles.

This week for stamping I wrote the letter in each of the corners.  I stamped over top of one to show her that idea and she kept stamping on the same one as I did.  She likes to do the stamping....but this week she was more interested in getting blue ink on her fingers:)

P is for piano

Raelynn loves pianos, so this was a hit.  I cut out the P and then cut the keys.  She glued and placed the keys on her own. And then she 'played' the piano on her own too:)
I also pulled out all the pianos we have here for her to play with this week.

A big moment this week! Raelynn actually tried tracing the letters on her own for the first time! I was excited:)

this is one of the pages for the tot time notebook from 1plus1plus1equals1.com

P is for Pencil

For each letter on 1plus1plus1equals1.com there are some 'extra' pages that don't go in the notebook.  These I printed on cardstock and laminated.  This is one of the extras that we do each week. It is putting in order smallest to largest.  She still needs me to show her and tell her the right way, but it gets us talking about it and also helps identify numbers 1,2 and 3.

 

P is for Potato and Painting

I found the paint midweek because I had this idea I wanted to do!!  I remember doing this in girl scouts as a kid and thought Raelynn would find it fun.  We started off with P but then kept cutting it off and adding new shapes.

And she liked snacking on the potato as well!  Here we made a picture for Mimi with our heart shaped stamp. I had to take a picture of her because it looked like she had a black eye with all that paint! haha 

 

P is for Pizza

This came from something we have called the 'Big Busy Box' for kids or something like that!  It was a Christmas gift for Raelynn last year and has a lot of neat projects that have tied into our alphabet

 

Little sister had a day she didn't feel like napping...

So she got popsicle sticks to play with! And other things to keep her busy in the high chair

 

 

Learning the States:

I saw this on a blog through pinterest a while ago.  I remembered it and we started a few months ago.  Raelynn LOVES this.  I'm sure it is because she gets food as her reward and probably because mommy makes a lot of silly cheering noises as she gets the states right.
I thought I'd share this because maybe you'd like to try with your little toddler.  It's really fun and it is a nice way to get them a snack.  We started with just Michigan, Arizona, and Ohio because those are important states to us with family living there. Then we added Indiana and she knows that Brown Bear and Kari live there.  She knows Ryken lives in North Dakota and Mickey Mouse is in California:)  Texas and Florida were also some of the firsts we did because they are on the boarders.  Then as she was picking it up so quickly, I went back to the West coast and we are working our way East.  She wants to do new states all the time, but I do wait for mastery on these.  I don't know if there is a better way to do it or not, this is just the way I did.  Right now she is up to 18 states and will get them all right!!  BUT, it is important to remember receptive language comes before expressive, so she gets them right when I say the state name and she grabs the treat off the state.  If I ask her the name of the state, she only knows about 5 of those. 
I know it is all just memorizing the location and colors for her right now (I do want to try to do it with a black and white map and see how she does!) but I figure it is still good for her because at least she has that knowledge of the regions where states are when we do start to learn more about geography.
 

Kumon Books

We LOVE this book!! It was packed away for a while because we got through the activities she was doing well with.  They get harder as the book goes on.  We just pulled it back out today and finished it up. 

Here is the title:

Thanks Auntie Dre for the great gift!! 

Another page in the book

 

Sensory Bin

This idea I have seen a lot on pinterest and blogs.  It held her attention for a while, so that was great! It's funny though, because she wasn't interested in putting the letters in the puzzle. She was just interested in using them to scoop rice. She kept asking for the scoop because usually when she does sensory bins there are scoops and manipulatives in there.  This is the first variation I've done, and I see that I need to keep changing it up because she did so well.  She likes anything that will make a mess! :)
She did end up eventually doing all the puzzle pieces.  And it was adorable because as she would drop some rice she would say "Sorry bout that. Mommy will clean it up?" and then after we were done she moved all the kitchen chairs and got her little broom and started sweeping.  It was precious.

***And don't you love her overalls?  With no shirt on under? She is REALLY into dressing herself right now.