The "School" Corner

This week focused much on practical life and sensory experiences.  Bear did a lot of painting and drawing and "writing" of lists.  We counted throughout the day as we played or read books (I try to choose something in a few of the illustrations we can count).

Practical Life

Transferring eggs from one carton to another.  Notes from the trenches: Do not ask your toddler/preschooler to help you with this if she is tired or she will test her limits when asked to please remember to transfer them gently.  Fortunately there were no broken eggs, but this work did have to be removed from her.

The next day we used the pink egg carton to spoon marbles into.  This would also fit into the math category as it teaches one-to-one correspondence.  And of course, we counted her marbles.

Transferring a mix of beans, corn, and garbanzo beans one by one with her fingers (she has the tweezers in this photo, but it was too challenging so she switched to fingers).

Sorting the beans and corn.

Spooning beads onto her glue.

Pouring beads back into original container, then deciding that this was a fun activity she continued to pour back and forth about ten times.

I had a bunch of teeny tiny pompoms Bear had yet to play with, so I presented it to her as "icecream" and she tweezed (can't that be a verb?) the pompoms into the other bowl, serving me icecream that we then scooped using a spoon to pretend to eat it.

Language

A spontaneous sound sort with our pipecleaner letters.

We read lots of stories this week (today alone I read Ira Sleeps Over 5 times!) and sang a lot of songs.

We may have done another sound sort, but this department kind of got shortchanged.

Math

Sorting buttons.  I thought she would sort by shape, but she wanted to sort by color.

This idea came from My Montessori Journey. (can't find the correct link, sorry, but the cards are from Making Learning Fun.  Then I cut out the shapes from white felt.  You're supposed to make the snowflake.)

  It didn't interest Bear for long.  But I actually enjoyed putting the snowflakes together.

After a power outage, we had lots of little candles around that I hadn't had a chance to put away.  I asked Bear if she thought they would all fit on the felt board, and she predicted that no, they would not.  She was right, only 9 of the 12 candles fit. 

Spindle Box revisited.  This time I used baby food jars (remember the 75 lids - okay so I'm at 80 something now) to hold the "spindles".  She liked this and still wanted to give some to zero, even though she understands "zero means nothing".

We also did this counting activity and we play this game daily.

Sensory

We played a "Mystery Bag" type game with these and talked about different textures.  She would close her eyes and try to feel the texture I asked for. (Shiny and smooth and sleek, stretchy and soft, soft and velvety, soft and puffy, bumpy and rough, rough and scratchy.)

Lots of playdough - one of the reasons that less "formal language" got done this week (well, the teething brother doesn't help either).  Here she put beads on toothpicks stuck in the playdough (sorry, meant candles on birthday cakes!)

Here we stuck beads right into the playdough.  We had white "snow" dough, but I made her some red dough since we are nearing Valentine's Day.  So after mixing the two Bear had her favorite color pink and we talked about darker and lighter.

Science

Bear loves these color mixing wheels.  You put them on the spinner and spin and you see the new color. 
(They are from this color game from which we took the pieces to use in her alphabet drawers.)

I also showed Bear how you can inflate a balloon if you stretch it over a bottle in which you've put baking soda and vinegar.  No picture as my hands were very busy and the Mister was busy holding the fussy baby.

This is linked at Preschool Corner and at Toddler Tuesday.