Tot School - Pp

Tot School - Letter Pp is for Pirates and Penguins!

Owen and Eli: 42 months old

Whew! What a busy week! There are so many great letter P words that it was hard to focus, but in the end I let the boys choose (from my Pinterest board) what activities they wanted to do each day and it all sorted itself out. 

PIRATES

Pirates were our biggest focus and our library had some great books that I would recommend. We used many of the pirate printables from Homeschool Share including a color-by-letter page, a fill in the number page, a beginning sound page and a pre-writing practice page. There were lots of other great pages to print but we ran out of time. I saw the idea for the Pirate paper plate here, but added the parrot on my own. Afterall, what'a pirate without a parrot?! : )

PENGUINS

I found some great printables for penguins from 2 Teaching Mommies and a really cute Roll-a-Penguin game from here. Anything that involves dice and competition is a big hit these days! 2 Teaching Mommies has a PowerPoint of polar animals and a dice and graph game that we used over and over this week. The penguin footprint idea is from here, but I'm unhappy with the black 'washable' paint that I bought.[Sidenote: I couldn't find black Crayola washable paint anywhere, so I settled for an off-brand and really regret it. All three of the boys look like they left the police department after getting their fingerprints taken and the black paint bleeds through when you add glue to it. Does anyone have a suggestion on a new brand for black washable paint, or know where to find Crayola?] I made glittery peppermint play-doh to simulate snow for penguins and that was a pretty big hit this week too.

 

EXTRAS:
We made pizzas this week for lunch and pancakes after reading If You Give a Pig a Pancake. The pig sticker page is from our Alex Ready, Set, School pack and the Pig writing practice page is from here.

  

The biggest hit of the whole week was this game, using do-a-dots, two dice (one with numbers 1-6 and the other with all six colors on it) and a piece of plain paper. It's a GENIUS idea - this game teaches taking turns, number recognition, color recognition, 1:1 correspondence and it's FREE (once you have the do-a-dots, obviously!) They played it almost every day. I wish I could take credit for this simple game concept, but alas, it's from here : )

Letter Q is next week - I'm not crazy about Queens or Quails... anyone have any other ideas?! To see how others did this week during Tot School, click here!

Tot School - Pp

Owen & Eli: 33 months old

Pp is for Pirates, Policemen, Pizza and Peter Pan! I pulled these activities from Homeschool Creations and Mama's Monkeys.

Coloring the chef's hats to match the color word and matching alphabet magnets to the letter pizzas. We also traced lines to get the chef to the oven (not pictured)...

My boys are in love with Peter Pan these days. The tot pack was a little too old for them (it included a lot of reading and writing) but I pulled out the activities that were age appropriate for them. A coloring page with Pp is for Peter, tracing a line from Captain Hook to the crocodile and rolling a cube with the characters to practice graphing. Eli loved that one, Owen just wanted to eat the Cheerios : ) Of course we watched Peter Pan and ate popcorn this week too!

Melissa and Doug pirate stickers on the outlines of Pp...

The Policeman tot pack from Homeschool Creations was very toddler friendly. They traced the letter Pp, drew lines to connect the policeman to the robber, colored the police hats to match the color word and we made stop lights out of toilet paper rolls. They saw 'Green means Go' every time we're at a stop light now. I've had a lot of trouble in the past with color matching/coloring activities, but this time I colored over the word with the corresponding color, then the boys matched the crayon to the right paper, then I gave them a set to color (right crayon with right paper). It went much smoother and we didn't end up with every color on every page.

That's all for Pp - onto Qq! To see what other Tot Schoolers did this week, click over to 1+1+1=1.