Tot School

Bear is 26 months

Language:

• (first four pictures in grid below) Bear has started wanting to play feria every day. We set up all her play fruit and vegetables on some upturned boxes to make feria stalls. I wrote her a pictorial list (also a counting activity as she has to purchase the same amount of fruit/veggies as drawn on the list). She drives her little car to the feria and parks it and starts shopping. I am teaching her to differentiate between three coins (10 colones, 50 colones, and 100 colones while we play. If she asks for three bananas, I tell her they cost 100 colones and she has to find the correct coin. It only took her one time playing to figure it out.

Click on any photo grid to see the pictures bigger.

• We made playdough farm animals with the cookie cutters.
  
• She learned the word husk when she husked the corn.
• Bear did a pompom caterpillar for the letter C. We're not really doing ABC crafts, but we were doing this glueing activity and I thought it lent itself quite well to the letter C.
• She cut apart some rhyming pictures and then glued them in pairs on a sheet of construction paper. Bear is surprisingly good at rhymes for her age.
  
• Bear surprised me one day by going to the alphabet drawers and sorting a few more pictures.
  

Math:

• Bear matched number cards to her foam number puzzle, then practiced one to one correspondence by placing the right amount of pompoms on each of the apples on the cards. (I think the cards are from Making Learning Fun, but I can't find the link.)
  

• She traced the outlines of some shapes from her puzzles (this is also a great fine motor exercise).
• One to one correspondence and glue practice. I got the idea from here, but put the pompom caterpillar on a leaf shaped piece of construction paper.

From photo grid below:

• Counting chayotes (a vegetable that grows likea sqash, but tastes like cucumber when it is cooked. It picks up the flavors of other foods and is usually cooked with ground meat.).
• Size sequencing toilet paper rolls.
• Size sequencing allen keys.
• Color sorting popsicle sticks (much too easy at this point but she chose to do this).
• Putting the popsicle sticks into the slot on the yogurt container (not really math related).
• Tongs with pompoms (one to one correspondence)
• She didn't want to do it my way and tossed the egg carton aside and made up her own transferring activity.

• The next photo should be in the language photo grid because here she is "reading" her alphabet book.
• I tried this number race game from Activity Mom (I LOVE her blog), but
• Bear decided it made a better cutting activity then a number activity.
• We counted corn.

• (below) I gave Bear a color hue matching activity, but she turned it into a number matching activity (I had numbered the backs of the clothespins and cards so she can self-correct when she is done).

Science:

• a wave bottle : baby oil (you can use vegetable oil as well) water and a bit of food coloring. The food coloring mixes with the water, not the oil. Shake the bottle gently to make waves and mis the oil and water, then let stand and the oil separates from the water because water is denser than oil.

• sink or float - we tried her shoes, a paper boat and then counted how many marbles would make her plastic boat sink.
  

• We took Bear and Baby Boy to a butterfly farm. There she got to see a cotton plant and hold a butterfly. It was fun to see the lifecycle of a butterfly after having learned about it at home.