Tot School

Bear is 24 months

This week, Bear and I read a lot about butterflies and did some activities to go with the books.

• We made a caterpillar by stamping a water bottle lid into paint and then onto our paper. (She stamped the circles; I added eyes and antenna.) Then she made a coffee filter butterfly. We'll probably do a couple more butterfly crafts next week (handprint and footprint butterflies).
• Bear acted out the butterfly lifecycle and learned that a proboscis is similar to a curled up straw. Bear can now say proboscis :-P I love teaching her words :)
  
• Bear used her Do-A-Dot markers on The Very Hungry Caterpillar magnet pages.
• We sang a lot of butterfly songs from preschooleducation.com
  

Some other non butterfly themed things we did include:

• icecream patterning from Making Learning Fun
• watermelon counting boards
• making a rainbow fruit salad
  
• playing Hop on a color (place colored construction paper on the floor and take turns asking each other to hop or run to a certain color)
• a selfmade continent puzzle - Bear can identify all the continents
• painting
• play dough
• some of our other number activities from previous weeks
  
• puzzles (not a day goes by that we don't do at least 3 of her 25 piece puzzles)
• making and playing with a pretend campfire and roasting pretend marshmallows :) (Bear doesn't even know what a real marshmallow is, but one of her picture books shows two sisters roasting them so she wanted some marshmallows to go with her campfire.) Her campfire was inspired by a post at Filth Wizardry.
  

Two things I really wanted to do but didn't get to:

• pompom icecream count
• magic lines art

Read more...

Open Ended Art - Crayons

We did two crayon projects, one a little less open ended then the other.

The first we did last week. It is a melted crayon sun catcher. This is less open ended and required more Mom prep. Basically, the only thing Bear did was "help" grate the crayons for two seconds and sprinkle the crayon shavings on the wax paper. I then ironed the wax paper and cut it out into a butterfly, since we are learning about butterflies right now.


The second project was more open ended. She used as many colors of crayons and pressed as hard as she could, then she did a watercolor wash over the whole thing. She had done this before with oil pastels, but it worked equally well with the crayons.

Read more...

Nursery Rhymes

Bear loves to act out her favorite nursery rhymes. Her two favorite are "Jack be Nimble" ( we use a large can as the candle and she jumps over it) and "Jack and Jill" (she goes up the slide for the hill, then down the slide for the fall). It's an easy way to incorporate language and gross motor development.

Another great thing to do with nursery rhymes is to personalize them. I insert my children's names into nursery rhymes such as "Mary had a little lamb." I've come up with some creative ways to make the rhymes work. Bear loves this and I'm sure Baby Boy will love it too.

Read more...

Sidewalk Paint

Inspired by this blog, Bear and I made some sidewalk paint. We used equal parts of cornstarch and water and added a few drops of tempera paint. We first made a batch of blue and then, once she'd used that up in the blink of an eye, we made purple by mixing a drop of red and a drop of blue paint into the cornstarch and water. Bear loved watching the paint "magically" turn purple as she stirred. I poured the sidewalk paint into a squirt container and Bear had fun making trails as she walked on our patio. I had fun making faces for Bear, as you can see from the picture. Definitely a fun and quick-to-prepare activity. Bear would have kept making more paint all day, but my supply of cornstarch was limited.

Read more...

Open Ended Art - Mixed Medium

I gave Bear some glue, some yellow tissue paper and pieces of sponge and some yellow fingerpaint, along with a piece of cardboard (for her canvas). Bear then made this collage as I nursed her brother. She loves squeezing containers and seeing glue or paint come out.

Check out some other open-ended art projects here.

Read more...

Tot School

-Bear is 24 months old-

I've been too busy with the new baby to take pictures, but here is what we did in the last few weeks since the baby has arrived and a few of the pictures my mom and dad took with their camera :)

Fine Motor Development

• Bean transfer with a spoon
• lacing cards
• threading beads
• Duplo
• rice box
• playdoh
  

Gross Motor Development

• slide
• walk the plank
• climbing up and down a ramp
• kicking, rolling, throwing balls
• going for walks
• playing chase
• dancing
  

Art

• dot painters
• drawing
• collage
• cutting
  

Letters and Numbers

• reading endlessly, as usual
• alphabet bean bag match - match a picture to the correct bean bag (for example, the picture of the apple gets placed on the "a" beanbag.
• "feeding" ants the correct number of marbles
• counting rocks
• lots and lots of puzzles. Bear is already on 12 piece puzzles!

Other

Bear spent a lot of time playing pretend as well. She loves wearing hats and cooking in her kitchen. She also played with her new train set and built a lot of block towers with her Papi (my dad). She loves being a big sister, kissing her brother and petting his hair.

Read more...

Little Sal

One of Bear's favorite books is Blueberries for Sal. One day, before Baby Boy was born, Bear played at being Little Sal. I loved the way she dropped flowers into her basket and said, "Plink, plink, plunk," just like in the book.

Read more...

Zuko (aka Koolaid) Watercolors

A very quick activity I did with Bear yesterday. Koolaid painting. I've seen this on many blogs. We have Zuko here abroad, but it's pretty much the same thing. We mixed a bit of the powder, not even a whole package, with some water to make watercolor paints. I only had three different "colors" on hand, but it was fun nonetheless.

Read more...

Geoboard Revamped

My husband ordered take-out pizza the other night and came home with an empty small pizza box for us to "craft" with. He knew our geoboard was too heavy and that Bear couldn't carry it around where she wanted, so he suggested we turn the pizza box into her geoboard. Today I did just that. I pushed the pins into the box, put a bit of hot glue around the bottom of each pushpin to keep them from coming out, and then taped the box shut so Bear couldn't open it and poke herself with the sharp part of the pins. All three of us are so much more happier with this new geoboard!

Read more...

Baby Boy Photo

Bear meeting her brother for the first time a couple of hours after his birth.

Our new Baby Boy :)

Read more...

Baby Boy is Home

Finally! We have internet again. Oh the joys of living abroad in the countryside!

Our son was born August 2nd at 11:05pm after an incredibly short labor. I had a wonderful, (though extremely painful - I had an epidural with Bear so I hadn't experienced the intensity before), drug free hospital waterbirth. What an amazing experience! Baby boy was 7 lbs 6 oz (compared to Bear's 6 lbs) and 21 inches long. Pictures will come soon:)

I have been SO busy trying to give Bear the same attention as before and attending to Baby boy. I don't know how often I will be able to add to the blog especially since all my helpers (my mom and dad) will be returning home soon and my husband going back to work. But I will do my best.

Bear is adjusting well. She loves her baby brother and kisses him often on his head. She also loves to hold him on her lap and hug him. I can't believe how gentle she is being with him. We all feel very blessed that all is going well.

Read more...