Toddler Beginnings Week 20

My notes on Mavi's tot school moments this week

Date: September 13 – September 17, 2010

Mavi is 24 months.

During the weekend I was able to come up with new additional activities for Mavi.  Despite the fact that we were so busy during the weekend because we attended a birthday party, I still managed to prepare materials for this week’s tot school.

 

CRAFT DAY

Turtle        

I think this is the first time we did an animal craft for our activity. So far, it wasn’t a hit, probably because turtle is not his favorite animal subject :-) 

Read about our turtle craft here.

To incorporate coloring and gluing in one activity, I made him color this turtle and later on cut the different parts of the animal.  I made him glue each parts one by one as I try to explain to him the different parts of a turtle.

COLORS/SHAPES/SIZES

Turtle Color Sorting Cards/Semi-circle shapes

I cut these colored turtle cards into half and we played a color matching game.  Again, he didn’t like this activity very much because he cannot snap the two puzzles.

   

Here are some of the things that he did:

• gluing semi-circles.  he’s able to squeeze the glue out of the container
• shape matching using my cardstocks and flashcards
• sticking the semi-circle stickers.  stickers are so expensive here in our place so I just bought my son ordinary paper stickers and cut them into different shapes

 

 

LETTER

Big Letter T

This paper craft was from No Time for Flashcards. Read about it here.

 

I also gave him a bunch of activities that day as he was asking for “more play”, which means more tot school activities. 

 

• I made him do a letter puzzle for letter T.  you can just click the picture to enlarge.  I used scratches of cardstock for the letter puzzle.
• I also draw a huge letter T on a piece of paper and made him color it.  Mavi loves to work on letters and he just kept on pretending that he can write the letter T as well.  By the way, he’s really good of holding his pen. 

 

• We also did Alphabet BINGO game.  This is Mavi’s favorite activity at the moment and the magnetic alphabet is his favorite favorite toy.  The magnetic alphabet is from Melissa and Doug which I ordered from good friend.  The bingo cards, I got them from the The Activity Village. You can just google it and print it out on a cardstock and cover it or laminate it for flexibility.  The Melissa and Doug Magnetic Alphabet and the bingo game was a hit! Read more about it here.

NUMBERS/MATH

Counting and Size Sorting

 

What we did this week for numbers and math:

• Sort animal sizes.  I downloaded it from The Activity Village, printed it out, put it in the cardstock and cut. In line with this, we also read Go Dogs Go book by Dr. Seuss which discusses about small and big dogs. So far, he can identify both the small and big... but not the medium sizes yet.
• We also did some clipping counting cards activity.  I got those artsy wooden clips from the mall and used it for our turtle clipping cards which I got from Confessions of a Homeschooler (kewl site!).  Clipping cards are a hit because we can count and practice fine motor skills at the same time. He’s beginning to show some improvement of using a pin!  See pictures below.

• We also did milk caps and object counting. Read about it here.

FINE/GROSS MOTOR SKILLS 

Because it’s been gloomy and raining for the past days, we did A LOT of Montessori activities instead of our usual outdoor fun at the park.  The only time that the sun is up is during mid-day, when the little guy is napping. By the time he’s awake and ready to play, it would get dark and rain starts to fall, not to mention the chilly strong winds!

I have to say, all our Montessori activities we’ve done so far were a hit.  Mavi loves loves to do the Practical Life activities because he feels like “he belongs” and can be like Mama and Daddy too.  Little ones really LOVE to do what the adults do!

So to makeup for all the things that we can do outdoors, here are the activities we did at home for play:

• Pumping water out of the Nivea Baby Soap tube
• Scooping and pouring beans
• Learning and pretending to cut using the wooden chopping toy I bought for him
• We also did water transfer using a sponge. The rest of our water play is posted here.

 

      

Our sensorial activities includes:

• Playing ice. Learning the aspect of cold.
• Finger painting.  Actually, we painted using car tracks, but we ended up painting using our fingers.
• My son attempted to help me with the watermelon too! I saw him attempting to carry it, so I allowed him to.  I taught him the idea of “heavy”.

And that’s it! See how busy our week was?

Ciao!