Tot School- The Farm

Lil’man is 33 months. 
 

This week we focused on learning all about the farm.   Here are just some of the things we did. You can see other activities from this unit by visiting Amber at The Belly of The Whale.

 

Language Arts: Lil’man worked on spelling farm words this week by matching letter tiles to the letters in the various words.  

            

 

Here are some of the books we read this week.

Math Concepts: We worked on number concepts with two different activities this week.  The first activity that we did was "How Many Spots?".  Lil’man would flip over a number card and add that many pom poms to the cow.  This was way to easy for him, so to make it more of a challenge I added tweezers.  He wasn’t very excited about that at all. 

  

He also played Roll a Barn, which we found on Play To Learn Printables.  I really like these Roll & Build activities.  I may have to create some of my own.

 

 

Science/Social Studies Concepts: We learned all about the farm and even touched on what products we get from certain animals, such as milk from a cow and eggs from chickens.  We did the Farm Tot Pack that Carisa and I created last year.  Lil’man was definitely more into it this year than last.

    

He also enjoyed a couple of Sesame Street playlists.   His favorite was the Toddler: Old Macdonald game.

Extras: Here are a few farm activities that we did last year.  Roll over the image to get more details. Click  on the image to take you to the directions or product.

 

   

For Fun: My favorite shot from the week was him on his John Deer tractor.  I like it because it reminds me of how much fun he was having playing the farmer.

So, there you go, that was our week.  Don’t forget, you can download all the printables  (not all seen here) for FREE  at 2 Teaching Mommies.

Next Week we will be focusing on Community Helpers- Mailman, Garbage Man and Grocer! I hope you stop by to check it out!

Most importantly, don’t miss out on what others are doing at 1+1+1=1!

Family Fun- The Farm

Due to all the craziness last month, I didn't get a chance to blog about our outing to a local farm.  We did this one Saturday morning last month, when we were studying the farm.  We had a lot of fun.  Lil'man was so excited to see all the animals, even the animal statues.  We went on a wagon ride to feed the goats, sheep and pigs.  Unfortunately, the only hungry animals at the time were the goats.  They saw the tractor that was pulling us and quickly headed for the fence.  Lil'man didn't care, he just kept pointing and wildly repeating the names of the animals, "Goat!  Baa baa!" until we confirmed his observations   After we had finished dumping our feed, squeals of excitement began.  From the center of the field you could see the pigs running in hopes of finding some grub.  They used their big round bodies to push through to the feeding trough at the fence line.  They snorted and snuffed, but to no avail...the goats had finished it off.

After hanging out in the barnyard, we caught another wagon ride that took us out to the apple fields.  I have personally never picked apples straight from the tree and neither had my husband.  We had fun though plucking Fuji apples with a pop from their branches.  Unfortunately, I think some of the apples we picked needed a little more time to ripen.  Oh, well.  The most important thing is that we enjoyed spending time together on our farm adventure.

stART- The Very Busy Spider

I recently came across stART (Story + Art = A Great stART) on A Mommy's Adventures.  As a former elementary school teacher I love it.  My son and I check out books from the library all the time, and they are always related to what he is interested in or what is happening in our lives.  So, I love being able to take the story and use it to come up with an art activity for Lil'man to do.

This week one of our library books was The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle.  This story is about a spider who is busy spinning her web.  Lots of farm animals try to get her to do something with them, but she is just too busy.  My son really loved the different farm animals, but he also loved the fact that he could feel the web the spider was spinning.

For our art project we recreated the spiders web.

Now there was some prep work on my part, but it was well worth it.  To prep for this you will need blue finger paint, a black crayon and...

Create a spider web using the glue gun on the finger painting paper.  Set aside to cool and dry.  While you wait have your child color the brown construction paper with a black crayon.  It adds texture to your fence posts. (I cut mine first and it was harder for him to color it.)

Then bring the spider web over and add a glob of blue finger paint.  Let you child spread the blue paint around, while feeling the bumpy spider web. While they are doing this, cut 4 strips from the brown construction paper for the fence posts.

Once the painting drys, have your child glue on the fence post and pom poms for the spiders head and body.  Using the permnant marker, add two eyes and 8 legs. (Now the perfectionist mother that I am, I cut off all the extra paper that didn't have any blue covering it and straightened his fence post.  I know shame on me.)  Have fun.

If you like what you have seen here, then go check out what others have done at A Mommy's Adventure.

Have fun.

Tot School- Week of Sept 14

Lil'man is 21 months.

After a week off from Tot School, we are easing back into the swing of things.  I have to re-work our schedule, my bible study has thrown us off a bit, but it won't take long to get back into the flow.  As for this past week, we continued with our Farm Theme.  We focused on one farm animal, the sheep, and the colors black and white.

Resources
*Wild and Woolly Sheep from Kids Crafts Weekly
*Barnyard Colors (Part of Farm Tot-Book)
*Hand Print Lamb from First-School

Next week we will focus in on pigs, the color pink and since we are unintentionally doing a "P" theme we will be doing a letter P activity as well.

If you would like to see what other tots have been up to this week, visit Carisa's blog.

Family Night- Farm

Well, we had our second family "theme" night. Lil'man has been into farm animals lately. So, we decided to focus on things that happen on a farm for our family night. While, daddy was at work, Lil'man and I prepped for the evenings festivities. We even got dressed in our farm attire. We had several activities planned that tied into farm animals, but they had to wait until after dinner. Mr. P  picked up some good 'ole country cooking for dinner...KFC.

Lil'man really loved the farm activities. His favorite was gathering eggs. We were also impressed with how he kept the cowboy hat on the whole evening.

Here is what I used to create our Family Farm Night:

• Rainbow Shape Animals- I colored them in Photoshop Elements before I printed them on card stock because I plan to use them for Tot School.  However, you children can help you get ready for the festivities by coloring in the animals.
• Bucking Bronco-  As you can tell from our pictures, our bronco didn't look like the horse on the farm, but since my husband is a fan of Denver Broncos, it worked out great for us. An alternative that you could try is a horse on a stick.  If you don't own one, then make your own.  On the last page of this PDF is a horse head that you can print and attach to a yard stick or long wrapping paper tube.
• Cow Branding- You will need pictures of cattle, finger paint or paint of any color, and a cookie cutter of the letter you want to brand onto your cattle.
• Egg Gathering- I just used white card stock and cut out ovals for the eggs, but if you have plastic eggs then those would work great.  You will also need a basket of some sort to put your eggs into.
• Dinner- You can make this as simple or as complicated as you would like...just make/buy your favorite country dish.
• Library Books: