Tot School - Mm

Tot School - Mm is for Monkeys (and other Mm words)

Owen and Eli: 41 months old

The title of this post should have been 'Tot School: Foiled.' First of all, my husband and I went on a Baby Moon to Colorado for half of this week and my mother-in-law stayed with the boys. That's not the problem, obviously, but they ALL got sick while we were gone. Breathing treatment, up-all-night, go-through-a-box-of-tissues-a-day sick. Try getting school done under those circumstances! So this post is going to be full of what we got done and what we would have gotten done if the week would have gone better. Hope you can use some of these ideas even though we couldn't : )

MONKEYS

We used the handwriting pages and letter hunt pages for the letter M from Confessions of a Homeschooler and Money Saving Mom. We didn't get to the color-by-number page (here) or the popsicle stick puppet page (here). We did have a chance to paint paper plate monkeys before I left and the boys got sick, and I came up with a monkey cracker snack that they loved. Peanut butter, bananas, crackers, chocolate chips and cheerios... what's not to love!

ME

We didn't get to any of these activities except the book, but the plan was to give directions to complete the boy (draw two eyes, draw a smile, color his shirt blue, etc) like we did with the ladybug activity last week. I also had a Moods sticker page from our Alex 1-2-3 School box that I thought we could use to talk about emotions.

MICE and MOOSE

Making muffins is an obvious extension of 'If you Give a Moose a Muffin', but there was also a really cute moose handprint craft (below) that we didn't get around to.

Scavenger hunt for M items:

Some good, some bad, but we're moving on to the letter N. My goal is to finish the alphabet before the new baby comes and I have a tendency to go into labor unexpectedly. No time to waste! To see what other Tot Schoolers did this week, click here.

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.

Click HERE to enter my giveaway for a felt play food pattern! Giveaway ends May 16th!