Tot School - Bb

Tot School - Bb is for Bears and Bees

Owen & Eli: 36 months

The Letter B

I'm going to use the animal letters from education.com for all of the capital letters in the alphabet. I also love the alphabet tracing pages from Money Saving Mom that include the capital and lowercase letters and super cute graphics that go with the letters. As you can see, as of Week 2, they aren't that great at coloring with a purpose or tracing! : )

BEARS

I picked a ton of great books from the library this week to go with our Bear and Bee theme, and I think many of them will need to become permanents is our home library. The Bear Snores On series (Bears New Friend, Bear Wants More...) is awesome and we read them probably 20 times each. We read Bears, Bears, Bears! and ate bear pancakes and made grizzly bears and panda bears. That was probably their favorite day!

I printed off these two handouts from Making Learning Fun under their Brown Bear category. I think they are supposed to be used to graph M&Ms, but I painted a wooden cube all six colors in the graph and we played a dice game with it. They loved it! Every time they rolled, they would use that dot color to mark that column. When we finished, we counted to determine which animal had the most dots. Then we rolled a number die to color-by-number the brown bear animals. I loved that they had to count the dots on the die and then find the corresponding numeral on each animal to figure out who to color.

BEES (& other misc B words!)

Our other B word books from the library are shown in the first picture. We used several of the activities from the Bees unit on 2 Teaching Mommies this week too. The dot pages and tracing pages were nice, but a little too quick of an activity for the boys. They got some practice with upper and lowercase letters on the Beehive spelling page (even though I had to get creative since there were so many Es!) They were pretty good with the matching, but I wonder if it's because their odds were pretty good at getting it right with six Es!

Here we're playing our version of the clothespin counting game. I turned all 10 images face down and the boys took turns choosing one, turning it over, counting the bees and then dotting the right numeral for the number of bees. Then we put all 10 cards in order using the stamped answer. I thought it was a nice way to turn it more into a game... and aren't my lion and Spiderman super cute? : )

I've said it before that footprint crafts are always my favorite, but this one might be at the top. The stamped their feet and thumbs (the tiny bees) and then after they dried, glued the stripes and drew the smiles to finish them off. *Love*

We read Jamberry and had a berry snack... including feeding it to each other : )

I used this template (I think from Confessions of a Homeschooler?) to practice counting and 1:1 correspondance. They turned over a number (we just used 1-5 this time) and then matched the card to the right row, then chose the Ball stickers to stick in each box. When all five were filled, we matched the right equipment for each ball too. Stickers are always a hit over here!

Cc is next week - come on back to see what we're up to!

Tot School - Bb

Tot School - Theme - Bb

Owen & Eli: 26 months old

We had a lot of fun with Tot School this week! I focused on Bb is for Butterflies, Buses, Barnyard, Bears and Bubbles, but I also had some good ideas planned for Balls and Balancing. We read the Brown Bear and Polar Bear books this week and matched up the animals as we read the story using these from 1+1+1=1.

We did a few art projects this week too - always a favorite with the boys! They love playing with glue and paint, so I try to come up with a couple ways to incorporate those every week. This week we made the lowercase Letter of the Week from Totally Tots, but I made up my own capital letter B craft. I liked how the butterflies went together. We also used coffee filters and watercolors to make butterflies and sang The Wheels on the Bus as we made our own buses out of foam paper. I found these coloring sheets of butterflies too.

I knew this idea would be a big hit! I filled up the sink with water and tons of bubbles and gave the boys measuring cups and spoons, whisks and cups. They poured and dumped to their hearts' content!

We sang Old MacDonald and played with our farm animal puzzle. We talked about all the animals that live in a barn and played with our Little People barn set too. They are really getting into pretend play and had a good time 'feeding' the animals in the barn.

We watched the Starfall.com B video this week and Eli walked around for the rest of the day pointing to himself saying 'I a boy, me a boy!' We watched a couple videos on the Mister Rogers website too. We watched the bouncy ball factory, the bulldozers and backhoes and Eric Carle's I Can Do It book about body parts.

Baking is another favorite activity around here! We made Banana Bread this week.

The ideas that I wanted to use this week if we hadn't run out of time included an activity using ball stickers and matching them to a picture of each kind of ball (football, baseball, soccer ball and basketball). It would have given them a chance to practice matching and identification. I wanted to play indoor basketball using laundry baskets and create a balance beam using tape on the floor to see if they could walk without falling off. I wanted to do more with body parts too, like singing the Hokey Pokey, Head Shoulders Knees and Toes and tracing outlines of their bodies in chalk for them to color. The other art project we didn't get to was using their fingerprints to make bees and their hand prints to make butterflies. I visualized those in my head so there isn't a link to send you to for the idea, but I'm sure you can figure it out too : )

Onto Cc next week! To see what other Tot Schoolers are doing, click here.

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