Tot School Wrap Up Week 10

May 1 to 8, 2011

Mavi is  32 months old.

Here’s what we did during this week.

ARTS

Lots of painting.. including body painting!

He started to paint his animals.

 

Then considered painting his hands.

 

Until he discovered how cool it would be to paint his arms too!

 

He also got interested with his do-a-dot markers again, and started to scribble using my Gtech Pilot pens.

 

MATH

Found his Hundred Boards puzzle in the drawer and remove it so he can play with it again.  Still all he can do is from numbers 1 to 20 and he loses interest in finishing the rest of the puzzle.

 

Still loving counting using his do-a-dot markers.

Our first attempt to play graphing game using ice cream flavors.  But he couldn’t grasp the idea.  He just loves tossing the dice and counting the number of dots.

He loves my ice cream cut-outs thought.  He kept on stacking them on one ice cream cone.  But I why he couldn’t understand why the pink is strawberry ice cream, the brown is for chocolate and white is for vanilla.... that’s because have never eaten a “real” ice cream with those flavors.  All he tried was those on popsicle sticks.

He wants his car to eat the ice cream.

 

LANGUAGE

We did a lot of things for language this week!  I think we reviewed the rest of the red series this week.

The picture below is Mavi reading his letter F Itsy Bitsy book  and builing the letter M using foam sheets. 

He traced his letters M, F, B and I. 

Traced small letters of the red series using this, and read our sound books.

Traced our sandpaper letters as well and form the letters using our playdough.

     

PRACTICAL LIFE

Dropper.  He did his best to do this but still a lot of miss! He still couldn’t get the water from the cup using his dropper.  Now I’m lost and doesn’t know how to teach him how to use it.

 

SCIENCE

We did botany this week, studied the parts of the leaf.

Fun with Shapes!

Playing with wooden blocks, using them as tools for stamping activity.  We use poster paints.

   

Reading this books about shapes.  This is his current obsession.  From the moment we read this, he started to identify shapes he sees around the house, starting from phone, to kitchen utensils etc.

Matching shapes using the watermelon card which I printed on a cardstock.  Sorry I forgot where I downloaded this printables.  I have it since last year and totally forgot all about it until today.

I also made Mavi glue colored shapes on a paper using glue (brush).

Wooden Blocks Stamping

Yesterday I decided to pick up Mavi from school earlier than usual so I can get to spend more time with him and we could do painting together. 

I have planned this activity for a quite a while but I didn’t get the chance do this activity with him.

So this activity was all about stamping (supposedly) using his wooden blocks and paints. This activity was a hit! First I showed him how to do the “stamping” by dipping the wooden block to the paint and “stamp” it on the drawing paper.  I use the words “stamp” and press so he can associate pressing the blocks with stamping. 

 

 

Then he started to ask for more paints in colors brown and red.  He tried to cover the blocks with paints and started to form castles, buildings and houses.

 

He enjoyed this activity so much that it kept him preoccupied for hours!

So much with learning shapes :-)

Our Dinosaur Craft

This idea came from No Time for Flashcards.

I draw a dinosaur on a piece of cardboard and prepared shades of blue, yellow and green as our paint.

I let Mavi do the painting.

While we let our dinosaur dry, we painted the wooden clips green.

I cut the dinosaur and Mavi assembled the Dinosaur.  I just gave him the instruction and he did it all by himself.  He was so happy with his work. It’s just sad that this dinosaur is one of its kind and doesn’t have any friends around here.  So maybe we’ll create another one using different colors.  It would also help if we have dinosaur models.  Too bad we left all his dino toys back in Belgrade... tsk tsk tsk.  I regret leaving them, they’re really nice toys and even if I bought them in just a random Chinese store, they’re in good quality.

The Moon

This book inspired us to make our moon using a black cardstock and poster paints.

First we looked through the pages and discussed the different colors used by Eric Carle. Mavi is doing well with his color recognition but he cannot identify the gray color yet (the color of the moon in the book).

We started by making the sky (blue hues) .  The green were supposedly for the grass, but he insisted to add it up in the background hehe.

He had a beautiful shape of a circle, but he wanted to add a another one

To finish the painting, I told him that he should paint the circle white, just like in the book so he can have his moon.  After a while he got tired of doing the white and asked me to finish it for him.

Here's how it ended.

Tot School Wrap-Up Week 3

Mavi is 30 months old.

BOOKS

Books we’ve been reading this week:

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Mr. Brown Can Moo
• The Very Busy Spider
• Usbourne’s Chicken Licken

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CRAFTS

For this week he was the one picked the letter craft.  After scanning all through the letters that we have, he finally picked uppercase letter I for our activity.

 

This is Mavi’s I for Iguana version.  If interested, you can view the basic procedures from here.  I wanted to make a separate post for our letter crafts but I’m a little bit preoccupied right now. Promise to do interesting post next time.

Then I showed to him the oil pastel and talked about how it’s different from crayons.  We later did the Oil Pastel Art that I posted here.

Since coloring books are so expensive on this side of the planet... I collected a view clipart from the net and printed them all out on a piece of A4 paper.  At first he just shaded everything.  Then I showed him how to properly "color or  shade” areas of a picture.  So tried another set of coloring pictures and finally he was able to color each photos.  As you can see, he can color areas of each clipart... he needs more practice though.  I want him to learn that each picture is different from the other so he can color each one separately and just within the area or lines.  But of course with his age, I can truly understand that he can’t color images within the lines yet.

MATH

We did the math color-number wheel here.

Then arrange butterflies and caterpillars according to their size.  He learned how to use the word “medium” with this activity.

And we did a lot of dot-math using our do-a-dot markers.

 

LANGUAGE

I introduced a new activity for this week.  Was a little bit inspired on the language section.  You can read about our activity here.

 

We re-visited our Itsy Bitsy Books and this time he wanted to read it all by himself.  He reads the book by sounding each letters first, then read the pictures.  He can’t read yet but I know that he can identify all the pictures on the Itsy Bitsy.  So everytime I took these books from the shelves, he would pretend reading it hehe.

 

PRACTICAL LIFE

In line with our Very Hungry Caterpillar book, I printed out this “ordering” printables from the internet.  The point here is to order the events of what happened from the book.  I was so surprise to see Mavi identify all the fruits and foods mentioned in the book without me telling him.

Say, I asked him about the 5 oranges... he would look at the cut-outs for a while then pick the 5 oranges pictures.  Can he actually count the 5 items? Or can he just identify the oranges?  I asked him about the plums too... and he picked the correct cut-out again! 

Some sensorial activities... making our very own caterpillar and butterfly.

Then he helped his grandmother arrange the spoons and fork in the kitchen cabinet.  We didn’t ask him to do it but he did.

And while his Dad was sick, the little guy behaved the whole time... for he was very very busy painting his car!

SCIENCE

Yehey! We did science this week.  I took out our “Butterfly Life Cycle” and the “Life Cycle of an Apple” nomenclature cards and we matched the pictures.  Since I guess he’s too young for some detailed stuff, what I do here is I would tell him a story based on the pictures of the chronological event of a certain species..which is the butterfly and the apple.

After having discussions with him, asking him the colors in the picture, how big it is or how small... we would match the pictures cards to the control cards.  I am surprise that he’s learning a lot from this activity.  His word bank just keeps growing and growing. Aylavet!