Tot School - Mm

Owen & Eli: 32 months old

We're back on track with our letter of the week and this week we covered Mm is for Mice, Moose, Muffins and Marshmallows!

During the week I try to mix the 'school-ish' stuff in between the craft/cooking/fun activities that I have planned. They played with this ABC book with four piece magnet puzzles for all the letters we've learned so far (Now I Know My ABCs by Nora Gaydos) and completed several of the Monkey prewriting practice worksheets and 'find the M' worksheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

MOOSE:

We don't have a library close by that has a very large selection of children's books, and I'm not about to purchase every book that I would like to use every week, so this week I finally found a solution... YouTube!! I'm not sure why I never thought of it before, but you can type in just about any book you want and someone will read it out loud. I had to search around for videos that included the words of the books as well as the pictures, but I was successful for all three that I selected. We started with If You Give a Moose a Muffin. Then we made muffins and I came up with this Capital M Lowercase m craft that I think rivals anything out there. I'm pretty proud of it : ) The capital M is a moose and the lowercase m is the muffin! (I think our whole day would fit in great with the Once Upon a Book posts on Totally Tots!)

MICE:

We listened to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie too, then had cookies and milk for a snack and made the Capital M into a mouse as seen on Totally Tots. We also listened to Mouse Paint and then mixed up the secondary colors just like in the story to paint our rocks to look like mice. I saw the idea on Mama Jenn's blog, but I think if I had to do it again (with less than 3 year olds) I would to fingerprint mice instead. Put their fingers in the red, yellow and blue separately, then mix the colors together and continue fingerprinting, then draw on the mice features. Not to mention that I didn't want to buy six new yarn colors to complete the project!

MARSHMALLOWS:

We did size sorting using the big and little marshmallows, then color sorting just using the little ones. After that, they filled in the M outlines with mini marshmallows... and then they ate a ton of them! We made smores this week too - a huge hit!

Hope you found some useful ideas for Mm! Next week we're doing Nn is for Names and Numbers - so if you have any good counting/number ideas, pass them along! Click over to 1+1+1=1 to see what other Tot Schoolers are doing this week.

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