Tot School - Oo

Tot School - Letter Oo is for Ocean and Owen!

Owen and Eli: 41 months old

We hit up the library before the week began and chose lots of Ocean themed books. We even found a really cute book about a little mouse named Owen!

Since Owen and Eli are fairly good at drawing O's at this point, we didn't do a whole lot of writing this week. I used the letter maze from here and the Roll-an-Ocean-Animal game from here.

We played a few 'following directions' games this week. For the first one I would draw an ocean animal on the magna doodle and they would have to attempt to draw the same one. We used a jellyfish, crab, fish, seaweed and ocean waves. For the second game we drew Owen! They took turns following the directions on the page, then I gave a few more instructions like 'color the shoes orange' or 'draw two balloons in each hand.'  

Art projects for the week included making Sea Anemones out of play-doh and toothpicks, painting four different ocean animals (crab, tropical fish, turtle and jellyfish) with paper plates and used all the 'ocean themed' coloring puppets from here. We used the dolphin, jellyfish, octopus, x-ray fish, walrus and seal. Owen is sponge painting the shell of his turtle, which I think turned out much better than trying to control the paint brush to make it shell-like.

Themed lunch! Octo-dogs, seashell noodles, an orange and cheese sailboat and pretzel goldfish crackers, then rice krispie treats tinted with blue food coloring to make starfish!

Cloud sand (recipe/idea from here) was the perfect entertainment on a 75 degree day in February! It is 8 cups of flour to 1 cup of baby oil and is so soft to the touch. I hid all sorts of fun items in the 'sand' and gave them shovels, spoons, colanders, and cups to manipulate with also. They played with it for hours! 

Our Ocean Themed week was so fun! To see what others did this week in Tot School, click here.

Tot School - Oo

Owen & Eli: 32 months old

Since the letter Oo is so easy to identify, we just had a lot of fun this week with artsy activities! We used large and small glass beads to identify the upper and lowercase O's (which I think I'm going to do going forward: big beads for uppercase, little beads for lowercase). The glass beads were a big hit.

I found this activity and thought it was really cute. She has adorable flamingo and peacock handprint crafts too. We watched several YouTube videos of ostriches running and racing too, which the boys thought was hilarious. I was actually surprised that they knew what an ostrich was before I even told them.

We did some octopus crafts too, and incorporated some ocean activities as well. The do-a-dot page was used to count the legs, stamp the circles and put cheerios on each circle. Gotta love multi-purpose printouts! I made up a hand print activity to make an octopus using their fingers as the legs and the letter O for the body. They glued lots of little octopuses to create more of an ocean scene too. I'm looking for recommendations on scissors for little kids - have any? I tried out my first 'I Spy Jar' this week too and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I colored sea salt brown (green, red and yellow food coloring) and filled it with beads, ocean stickers and tiny wooden items you'd find at the ocean. Oh yeah! And you can't have an O theme without having 'octodogs' for dinner! : )

The last O that we worked with was Owls. We listened to Owl Babies on YouTube and then made owls using the lowercase o for the owl's belly. They loved using glitter glue to make the stars!

We'll be doing the letter Pp for two weeks because I'm so excited about the themes! Pirates, Pizza, Policemen and Peter Pan!

Hope y'all had a great week!