Geography and Nature Nook

Her geography nook is two upturned boxes covered with a cloth next to our dining table. On these "tables" are her volcano and a little volcano booklet we printed from the Crayola website, her continent map and poems, and two of the Montessori landforms (island and lake).

In her room is her nature table. On it are the jars of dead bugs we have collected, a turquoise eggshell and a feather we found, a magnifying glass, dried leaves and flowers pressed between contact paper, her rock and gravel collection, some bark, and various seeds she has collected. Her five senses tray is on this table as well right now. I would like to have nice polished rocks and gems, as well as seashells for this table. These body puzzles are also on my wishlist

She has a shelf of science and animal books in our library/office, and also a small shelf in her room. The shelf of science books in the library are a bit over her head, but she likes to look at the pictures.

To see other science corners check out Growing and Learning in Leaps and Bounds.

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Spill-proof paint cups

I've seen the Melissa and Doug version and decided I could do it myself.
So simple.
So frugal.
Especially when there's a lot of yogurt being eaten at our house!
It's almost too simple to explain.
Collect as many yogurt containers (with lids) as you want.
Cut circular hole in lid to fit the paintbrush.
Add paint.

When you are done painting, switch the lid with the hole for a full lid and your paint stays dry until you paint again.

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Alphabet Boxes

Preschool in a box and alphabet in a box inspired me to whip this up this morning.
I printed out the lower case alphabet, cut it apart and had Bear help me tape the letters to the drawers. The we took the parts of this great game her aunt gave her and I took out all the ones that started with /b/, /c/, and /d/. We named them and Bear sorted them in the three drawers that I had pulled out.

After that, I decided that her fridge magnet alphabet should live in those drawers, so we started to match the letters to the drawers and put them to "bed."

We're still not finished our Great Sort.
It will probably be ongoing work all week.

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Open Ended Art - Eggshell Collage

This week at Open Ended Art, we were to use eggshells for our collage. Bear crumbled the eggshells and we mixed the dye (vinegar, water, and food coloring) and added our eggshells.

My directions for the project were simple - cover the paper with as many eggshells as you can.

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Geometric Solids

I would love to own the Montessori geometric solids. They are just so appealing to the touch and sight. But, I am frugal and so, I found my own way for Bear to experience the geometric solids. Play dough. Not perfect, but it gives her a three dimensional idea nonetheless.

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Colour Match Express - A Review

As soon as I saw Colour Match Express by Orchard Toys, I knew Bear would love it. She adores puzzles and that's exactly what this game is. It is a fun color matching game, great for teaching turn-taking and reinforcing color names and matching skills. Each player assembles a color train and rolls the die to collect the bears to ride on that train. Even though my mom gave us this game two months ago, we only opened it yesterday. We played it last night before she went to bed and she woke up this morning asking for it. She has asked to play it on three separate occasions already today.

It's a very simple game, perfect for a 25 month old. The box says ages 3 to 6. I think a better age category would be 2 to 5. The instructions do offer a more challenging way to play, by collecting the bears in the same color order as the cars in the train.

We even found our own extension for the game. Memory. We flipped the bears upside down and looked for matches. So we now have two games in one.


I am delighted to add this to our board game collection.

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A Painting Project

Totally taken from here! (Except I only used two colors.) Bear liked peeling the backing from our totally defunct contact paper. I bought replacement contact paper, and it won't stick permanently - it peels away from all surfaces after a few hours. Grrr! But at least I can still use it for cool projects.

The contact paper actually let some of the paint through, but I like the fuzzy edges so I didn't mind.

Bear did a second one of these, she enjoyed the project so much.

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Doctor's Kit

Bear is always playing Doctor. She says “Daddy sick” and goes to find him to “cure” him. We don’t have a doctor’s kit and I also have been on the lookout for something other than cheap plastic. Bear uses a mini flashlight to look in our ears, a popsicle stick to check our tonsils, and a pen to take our temperature. (And she has never taken the lid off that pen to write anything because to her it is a thermometer.) We also have a picture book that has a page with a doctor kit on it – each part is labeled – and she will pretend to take an instrument from the page and then use it on one of us. I don’t know where she got the idea to do that.

I’m sure Bear would love to have a real doctor's kit. Mama Smiles has a giveaway for a fabulous doctor kit from Modern Baby Furniture.

I hope I win :)

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Tot School

Bear is 25 months

We mostly do the same thing every week. You can see a lot of what we do by checking out my other tot school posts. This week I am posting Bear's favorites.

Alphabet:

I aim for an alphabet activity each day. Here are two activities she chose this week.

An alphabet matching puzzle. I only have 6 letters per basket, otherwise she gets bored. This took her less than 2 minutes.

We played an alphabet bingo. I downloaded these pages from somewhere. If I got from them from you, please let me know and I will link you.

Numbers:

I also aim for one number activity per day. Here are two from the week.

A homemade board game that we call "To Grandmother's house we go." She is now using a normal die, but needs help counting the dots.

A watermelon counting activity (I also got this idea somewhere and would link it, but I can't remember where I got it. So if it is yours, please let me know.) She chooses a number card and puts the matching number of beans on the watermelon.

Fine Motor:

Bear loves this homemade toy. Five different colored pencils poked into a styrofoam block. The pencils start shortest at the left and get progressively longer to the right. Bear puts the corresponding color beads onto the pencils. The beads go in number sequence. There are 1 blue, 2 purple, 3 orange, 4 green and 5 red. She practices counting as she plays with this.

She made a few necklaces this week as well.

Life Skills:

Bear adores cutting and spreading. She has gotten very good at slicing a banana.

We tried this for the first time at the end of the week. She asked to go back and "play clothesline" all day. She can get the clothespin open very well, but needs my help holding the sock. She didn't get the sock on in the picture below.

I left to go get Baby Boy and when I got back, she'd given up on hanging socks and was practicing putting them on :)

Gross Motor:

Lately her biggest thing is yoga. She asks for the Yoga Kids every day, but since we limit television, I don't let her watch it every day. Instead, we use our yoga cards (photos of poses). There are no photos, because I join in and do yoga too :)

Science:

We did a little unit on the five senses this week. You can see more of that in this post.

Nature:

Bear has a nature table in her room. She collects a lot of dead bugs. We found two new ones today, in fact. Here she's observing a butterfly wing.

And here she is counting her nispero seeds. Nispero is a Costa Rican fruit. It resembles a pear in shape but much smaller, is orange when ripe, and tastes a bit like a sweet and sour apricot. I'll be doing a post on Costa Rican fruits next week.

Art:

Unfortunately we do a lot less art now that baby boy is here. :(

Here she is working on a blue and yellow tissue paper collage to go with the book Little Blue and Little Yellow.

Here she is working on a painting.

That's our week. To find out what others are doing, see Carisa's blog 1+1+1=1

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The Five Senses

This week we did a bilingual unit on the Five Senses.

Here is our five senses tray (well, with four of the senses). We have sound eggs,
balloon squish and match, some color matching cards (for sight), and some baby food jars with spices (one has a cotton ball with a drop of vanilla on it). The baby food jars were meant to be a matching game, but Bear doesn't quite get the whole concept of matching the sound eggs, the smelling jars, or the texture balloons.
In addition to the Five Senses Tray, here are some other activities we did.

Hearing:
We played with musical glasses.
We played with Bear's maracas, tambourine, and bell bracelets. We made a drum out of a Nesquik container.

Sight:
We did a color swirl in milk - drops of food coloring, then add a drop of dish detergent and the milk swirls.

We played I Spy with her I Spy board.

I suppose any art we did also fits into this category.

Smell:
We made balckberry koolaid dough. This was also part of the sense of touch.
Taste:
Bear tasted salty water (salty), sugary water (sweet), lemon (sour), and vanilla (bitter). If she were older, I would have mapped this out on a map of the tongue, but I decided to leave this out this time.

Touch:
I filled yogurt containers with salt (small and granular), dried noodles (hard), flour (soft and powdery), rice (hard and grainy), and cotton balls (soft and puffy). After I introduced Bear to each container, Bear would reach inside without looking and guess what the substance was. She really enjoyed this one.

We did a fabric match of different textured fabrics as well.

***

I also found a cute five senses song on you tube and changed the words a bit. I also translated it into French and changed the third line in each stanza so it would rhyme. It is to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell.

That was our little Five Senses unit.

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Salt Tray

Warning: Do not use salt tray if you or your child have any cuts on your hands! Use cornmeal, flour, or sand instead.

So easy, so fast. So fun. For about 5 minutes. "All done," says Bear. Oh well, eventually she will enjoy writing out letters, numbers, and words on it.

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Felt Board Numbers and Another Song

I saw felt board numbers on Tired, Need Sleep and knew right away that I would make some for Bear. Mine aren't as cheerful, but they work beautifully for the Number Song we sing.

I won't type out the whole song, but you an find it at this forum. We use the song that is sung to Skip to my Lou. We sing this song to aid number recognition. Bear is nowhere close to being able to reproduce ANY of the numbers except maybe zero and one!

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The Poor Man's Mr. Potato Head

I would have liked a Mr. Potato Head for Bear to work on where the parts of the face go, for little kids really have no idea. You should see where Bear puts the mouth on her friend's potato head doll! Well, I'm over wanting one.

Here's what I did instead. And Bear loves it! She always pulls it out to play.
And even though my monkey of a girl has lots of cutout shapes of eyes, ears, noses, and mouths, she always chooses the same ones!

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Teaching the Alphabet in a Trilingual Environment

Yes, we are trilingual, but in a bilingual sort of way. My husband speaks Spanish and English and I speak French and English (although I can understand Spanish, I only speak it moderately). So what do we speak to Bear? How do we teach her all three languages? Moreover, how do we teach her the alphabet, already a daunting task when addressing only one language.

My focus is English with me at home. Why? Well, to begin with, we live in a Spanish-speaking country; Bear gets to hear Spanish anytime we leave the house and anytime we have guests over. Moreover, her Daddy speaks to her 99 percent in Spanish. She understands that language, no problem.

My dilemma is with the French. Although it was my native tongue, years of disuse as a result of living in an English world, makes it not my first choice for thinking or speaking. How to get Bear to learn French and English when there is only one of me? (Experts suggest one parent speak in one language and the other parent speak in the other language 100 percent of the time.) To make matters worse, Bear only sees her French-speaking grandparents on rare occasions as they live halfway across the continent.)

I have been focusing on English for the alphabet. If we send Bear to school here, she will learn the Spanish alphabet in kindergarten and have a bit of exposure to it before that through her dad. If we decide to home school her, then I will formally introduce the Spanish to her around kindergarten anyway. Does a 2 year old really need to know the alphabet in three languages? My opinion is no. In fact, I don't believe that a 2 year old needs to know the alphabet period! But this isn't the place to get into that debate.

We read alphabet books in French and English. But when I talk about the alphabet and beginning sounds, I do it in English. When Bear gets older, say 3,4, or 5, she will be able to transfer her understanding of beginning sounds (and all other reading skills) to her other languages. I know this for a fact because I only spoke French until I was 8 years old, but as soon as I learned the English alphabet sounds, I was off and reading in English, as fluently as in French. I also taught in French immersion schools and saw this same transfer of skills there.

Nevertheless, as with all her other learning, I do start introducing it in French at some point. This post coincides with the week that I have decided to speak only in French every other day. Prior to this, I would speak English mostly and use French throughout the day. I now feel a need to increase the amount of French that Bear hears throughout the week. This is also to ensure Baby Boy hears enough French in his early years.

You can read more about how we have raised Bear in a trilingual environment here.

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Note: If any of you do teach French to your children, I'd love to know of the resources you use. Thanks!

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Tot School

Bear is 25 months

Language:

• Name recognition puzzles - Carisa at 1+1+1=1 uses water bottle lids. I made mine with cardstock letter tiles printed from my computer.
• Pre-writing activity of drawing lines and circles in a salt tray - you could use flour, cornmeal, or sand. I used an old toaster oven tray.
• Part-to-whole puzzle
• Upper case and lower case matching game using bee stickers on a laminated page of honeycombs (pictured below - bottom left hand corner - click on picture to enlarge)
• reading
• story-telling
• making up rhymes and singing songs and nursery rhymes during "circle time"
  

Numbers:

• Counting everything in site!
• Playing the Cheerios game
• icecream scoop pattern activity from Making Learning Fun

Science:

• We made a volcano with plasticene and a tall baby food jar. Bear poured a bit of warm water in the bottom of the jar then added some baking soda. Then I poured some vinegar over it. We didn't measure anything. Bear really enjoyed watching it fizzle. We read a little printable book about volcanoes that I found at the Crayola site.
• We observed our bean seeds grow and watered them.

Fine Motor Skills:

• Bear threaded little bells onto a pipe cleaner and made a baby jingle bracelet for her baby brother.
• Making necklaces with her wooden beads.
• Stickers
• Painting at her easel (also a gross motor skill activity)
• using her new button frame
• tong transfer (mostly of pompoms)

And of course, there was art and practical life skills. Tuesday was independence day here in Costa Rica. We went to a parade and Bear really enjoyed that.

To see what others are doing see here.

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Dressing Frames - Buttons

Old picture frame + 18 month old sweater = buttoning practice for 2 year old.

Bear mastered unbuttoning Monday. Now, to work on buttoning.

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stART

This week we are joining in a new McLinky called stART. You can find out more about it here.

We read The Cat in the Hat.

As Bear has been practicing ABABA patterning, I decided to use this book as an extension of this. I cut red and white strips of construction paper and Bear had to follow the pattern on the cat's hat as she glued them onto a piece shaped like a hat.

A very simple project. Not really art by my definition, but a literature connection nevertheless.

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Open Ended Art - Bean Collage

Here's Bear's bean collage. She told me she was making a flower. Surprisingly enough, it kind of does look like a flower. See here for more open ended art projects.

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Camping - A glimpse into some of our pretend play

Okay, so I'm a bit of a dork and I like to sit and cut things out of paper for Bear to play with. Those are playdoh pancakes on button plates sitting on the "log" in the foreground. Mommy and Daddy are sitting on logs, holding sticks and roasting their marshmallows over the fire. Baby is not allowed marshmallows (and I quote Bear, "Baby, no no.") That's a tent in the background. Last night, Bear put her whole family to sleep in there. LOL.

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Tot School

Bear is 25 months

Tot school is very minimal these days. (Also, picture taking while holding Baby Boy is next to impossible.) We are spending time outside, doing a lot of pretend play, reading many books, talking in rhyme (me mostly, but Bear does come up with some of her own), singing lots of songs, doing puzzles, and of course doing art.

Bear's favorite part of the day is "circle time" which is just us singing songs and rhymes to learn numbers, letters, days of the weeks, colors, and science topics such as butterfly lifecycles, plant parts, etc. I found a great rhyme using a felt ladybug and dots at A Mommy's Adventure. Bear keeps asking for that one.

We are still talking about the lifecycle of butterflies. One of our songs, sung to "Up on A Housetop" reviews the lifecycle quite nicely.

First comes the butterfly and lays an egg, Out pops a caterpillar with many legs Watch how the caterpillar spins and spins a cozy chrysalis to sleep in. Oh, oh, oh, Look and see, Oh, oh, oh, Look and see, Out of the chrysalis, my oh my, comes a pretty butterfly.
We found a dead butterfly and Bear was able to touch the antenna and the proboscis (long curled up tongue), and admire all the pretty colors.

Bear's been working on all her gross motor skills - running, jumping, kicking, throwing, and also doing yoga poses! We love Yoga Kids videos! She can even do the tree pose (balancing on one leg). It's so cute to see.

She worked at her "easel" (fine motor control and strengthening of the wrist) and we started a name recognition "puzzle" game that I made with all our names. Just printed our names and glued them to construction paper, then made letter tiles to match. Bear has recognized her name in print since she was 12 months old, but with this, she is learning that she has to go in order from left to right to place the letter tiles.

We planted three bean seeds given to us by a kind man at the feria (the outdoor fruit and vegetable market). They sprouted quickly.

The highlight of the week was going to a fabulous garden and sitting in lime trees and eating a picnic lunch. We go there almost every weekend, but it is still one of Bear's favorite things to do.

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Sifting Flour

Bear loves to sift flour. Here is how I set up this activity:

In the first bowl there are some dried black beans. In a second bowl there is some flour. Bear pours the beans into the flour and moves the now empty first bowl to the right. She mixes the beans into the flour with a spoon. Next, she takes the sieve and, resting the sieve on the edge of a third bowl, spoons a spoonful or two of bean and flour mixture into it. Shaking her wrist, she sifts the flour into this bowl and is left with the beans, which she then pours back into the first bowl.

She cried when I said we had to put it away - that's how much she loves this activity!

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Open Ended Art - Paper Collage

Open Ended Art this week was paper collage. I cut some origami paper into squares for Bear. The night before, I had laid a piece of contact paper, sticky side up, on her art table and done one row of squares as an example of what she was to do. The next morning, Bear surprised me with her fine motor skills. I really wasn't expecting her to be able to get her squares so close together and quite so well lined up. She is only 24 months after all. When she was done - this took all day because she kept running away to do other stuff - I put another piece of contact paper on top. I cute the collage into a nice rectangle and turned it into a placemat. Bear decided her fork needed a placemat as well.

I ran out of contact paper, but I would love to do this again with Bear using her paintings cut into squares.

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Painting in the Great Outdoors

Bear LOVES to paint. We'd love to get her an easel, but it's not going to happen any time soon. Meanwhile, a board against the outside wall of the house, plus some masking tape and paper does a pretty good job of acting as an easel.

Note: She hardly ever takes that hat off her head, except maybe to sleep.

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Impromptu Fun

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Apples

Today we had an impromptu theme of apples. I had a bag full of apples I needed to cut and peel to make applesauce. While I did this, I sang a couple of rhymes to Bear that mentioned apples.

Farmer Brown had five green apples hanging in his tree. Farmer Brown had five green apples hanging in his tree. He plucked one apple and ate it hungrily. Four green apples are hanging in his tree. (repeat until you get to one green apple...and change the third and fourth lines to "He plucked that apple and gave it all to me. No more apples are hanging on his tree.")


Way up high in the apple tree, Two little apples smiled at me. I shook that tree as hard as I could. Down came the apples. MMMmmm, they're good!

Then I showed Bear how if you cut an apple horizontally there is a star/flower inside where the seeds are. We then proceeded to make apple prints with the apple I cut.


She also did a painting similar to the one here. What a great blog with fabulous ideas.

I love when learning moments just happen like this, totally unplanned.

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The Cheerios Game

Of course, you could replace the word Cheerios for almost any kind of cereal. Or you could play with gummy bears, or Goldfish crackers, or whatever fits your learning theme.

What you'll need:

a die - we made a special one for Bear that only has 1, 2, and 3 dots since we are working on understanding the numbers one to three. A normal die could be used, or two dice to practice up to 12.

cereal

How you play:

We started off with 12 Cheerios each on a plate. You could choose any number.
Then one player rolls the die. The number rolled is the number of Cheerios eaten that turn. The next player plays (or just the child could play, but it is more fun to see who finishes first). Play continues until all the Cheerios are gone.

Extensions:

When Bear got down to one or two Cheerios left on her plate, I would ask her how many Cheerios were left and she would count them.

Bear asked for the die at dinner. She kept rolling the die and counting the dots and then taking that number of bites of soup. She ate a lot more soup than I imagined she would eat by playing.

I can see the die spending time in the toddler bag, along with a container of Cheerios, and playing this at a restaurant while waiting for the food to arrive.

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Shape Sorter Stamping

A very easy activity to do is to take the shapes from the shape sorter and stamp the open end into washable paint and then onto paper. We had been using the tops of water bottles, but I was getting bored of circles.

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Open Ended Art - pebble mosaics

The theme this week at Open Ended Art is Mosaic using pebbles. These florist marbles were the closest thing we had to pebbles. However, if we had had pebbles, I would have done the project the same way. Very simple. Press your pebbles into flattened playdough and voila - a mess-free mosaic for a 24 month old (under vigilant supervision of course!).

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