Tot School: Purple cat

This is Purple Cat week from our Brown Bear Brown Bear unit.  We did this several months ago and I'm finally getting it published! I don't It was a fun week!

 



 

When Raelynn was learning to spell her name I would give her lots of letters and tell her to pick out the letters of her name.  Even today, now that she can write her name, she still does it backward sometimes.

We have Three Little Kittens!

 

We watched and read The Three Little Kittens a lot this week and then the kids loved acting it out themselves and singing the song

 

Fun trip to Grandma's to feed the cat and drink purple kool aid

I had Declan stamp the dot marker on top of little marks I made on the paper then he was to put the little plastic animals on the dots.  He did great!

covered Barney the purple dinosaur with stickers

 

Tot School: Green frog

Continuing our color theme through the book Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? And slowly but surely I am getting these posted:) 

 

Green was a very fun week.  Another week with so many options of things that are green! And so many fun frog activities. 

 

Color: Green

 

As we have done with the other colors, the kids colored the coloring page with markers, crayons, and colored pencils.  They also explored the green bucket of items I gathered from around the house.

 

 

 

2. Bible Story/Scripture:  The Ten Plagues (specifically the frogs over the land) in Exodus 8

 

The Jesus Storybook Bible has this story with pictures of frogs on the pages. The kids did green dot markers on a coloring page

The Gospel Story Bible has the story in it and the kids did an activity gluing pictures of the plagues on a paper as I read the story.  I think I found the pictures from a Sunday school curriculum through a google search

 

3. Hands On Craft:  Green Frog

 

 

 

4. Food Experience: Celery, Green apples, Kool-Aid popsicles, Green Grapes

 

ants on a log

The green apple frogs were fun to make and the kids loved them!  The eyes are banana slices with chocolate chips, arms and legs are green grapes, and I used peanut butter to hold the pieces together

 

 

 

5. Memorable Experience:  Growing Grass and learning the song "Little Green Frog" and "Five Little Speckled Frogs"

 

The kids planted grass seed at the beginning of the week.  It was perfect timing because daddy had just planted our winter grass in the back yard and this week it was sprouting! The kids had fun watering their grass and watching it each day.

 

 

By the end of the week the grass had grown very tall! And of course we kept it around for a while after "green week" was over.

 

This is our log and our speckled frog.  Not real cute or exciting, but the kids LOVED it! Loved singing the song and acting it out with the frogs.

 

This was a very last minute impromptu activity.  I had green crate paper but didn't know what I was going to do with it...but the kids love riding their bikes around the island so it was perfect to hang in there and make a "car wash" for them to drive through!

 

I cut lily pads and numbered them.  I had Raelynn put them in order and then we all played leap frog with them.  They enjoyed that for a while.  Then we took the plastic frogs and counted them onto the lily pad.  Lastly, before they were ready to be thrown away I had Raelynn dot marker the correct amount of dots on each lily pad.

6. Sensory Experience: Painting with Shaving Cream

I added a couple drops of food coloring to some shaving cream and the kids all had a paintbrush and had fun in the shower.  It was an easy clean up because we just turned the water on! They also had a green kool aid popsicle in the shower and I threw in some frogs so they could remember our Bible lesson from the week.
 

 

 

Another fun activity the kids enjoyed was telling the story with the felt board.  I traced each animal from the story onto felt and when we read the story they like to go up and put their piece on and then take it off.  It was easy to make...a little time consuming, but really easy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tot School: Blue Horse

It was blue horse week in the Brown Bear, Brown Bear thematic unit we are doing.  It was a fun week.  It was a very busy week for us outside of tot school, so we didn't get to all I had hoped.  But we surely got to enough and had a great time!

Again, to keep it all in, I have to limit our activities.  The six areas I tried to cover are:

1. Color

2. Verse/Bible story

3. Hands on craft

4. Sensory activity

5. Food experience

6. Fun memory

1. Color: BLUE!

As we have the past few weeks, we started the week off with coloring a page with markers, colored pencils, and crayons to introduce the color.  We also looked through the "blue box" and did an eye spy game for blue things around the house.

 

2. Bible Story/Verse: Exodus 14:16-23 (Moses parts the Red Sea) 

"The Egyptians pursued and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen." vs 23

When I thought about horses I thought of chariots. It would have been fun to make a model of the water and take little people and walk them across then have the horses covered by the water afterward.  But I didn't feel that ambitious:) I just read the story from the Jesus Story Bible and it was great because it had a picture of a chariot on the page! 

The kids also colored a picture of a chariot and expanded their vocabulary with that new word. 

3. Hands-On Craft:

No paper plate craft this week.  I had a few crafts planned, but this was the only one we got to.  The kids always love painting their hands!

4. Sensory Activity:

I had hopes of making this cool fizzing ocean sensory bin (because water is blue!) but it just didn't happen.  I was totally ok with that because this week we were able to attend a "messy play" activity with a local resource center.  It was SO neat with digging through jello for bugs and colored spaghetti and slime.  It was quite the sensory day!

5. Food Experience:

Blue Berries, Pasta died blue, and pop corn died blue.   

Also thought blue moon ice cream would've been fun, but didn't do that.

6. Memorable Experience:

Pool Noodle Horse: So bummed my plan didn't work out! I wanted to make this pool noodle horse for them, but I couldn't find any pool noodles! I am still planning to make them one day for them because they would love it!

We did go to the zoo this week and saw horses there.  

I also had a Thomas the Train puzzle I had been hiding away for the kids, so I gave that to them.

And I came up with this very last minute idea because I remembered that I had blue yarn and wanted to do something with it.

 

Other activities this week:

I read the story and as I read the kids put the animals in order. (link to these is on my original Brown Bear post)

Rotating stations:

1. heads and tails matching

2. memory game (matching)

3. letter matching (Raelynn did lower to upper, Declan upper only, and Elliana just stuck letter magnets on)

Add caption

 

I try to have several tot trays out during the week.  One is usually always the unifix cubes and counting bears. It's nice for when kids are waiting at the table for a meal time or when I need them quiet and busy.

This week we used Q-tips to paint the circles on the dot sheets.

It's always nice when I have things around the house we can use for learning colors.  We took blue play dough, uncooked spaghetti noodles, and blue beads and the kids stacked the beads on the noodle.  They also love to eat the raw noodles so that is their prize at the end, ha!