Welcome to yet another week of Tot School! This week was a pretty good week, I have to admit... even though I never did scrape together the money to actually bake the cookies I was hoping to bake with Pufferfish! Plus, it was kind of a light week again, since I was still feeling sick myself, from having a sinus infection and having run out of my narcies!
We still did plenty of learning and had plenty of fun!
We first read the book, If You Give A Pig A Pancake. I whipped together some pancake themed activities!
I cut out pancakes from tan Fun Foam (the company who makes that stuff should be sponsoring this blog, because of all the things I use it for, don't you think?) and Pufferfish played with them in her play kitchen. She served them up to everyone. I also gave her a real pancake flipper to play with, and we tried carrying the pancakes on it, and tried flipping them up in the air and catching them. (They were a little too light though and would float away from us like paper!)
Then, I cut out more pancakes from brown construction paper, and we marble painted them... in a frying pan! We pretended that the paint was butter and different flavors of syrup, and as Pufferfish wiggled the frying pan around to cook the pancakes, the marbles rolled around and made designs on the paper! They turned out very cute.
That day happened to be Free Pancakes Day At IHOP, so after school I took Pufferfish and Rafael out for pancakes. (Little Bear was sick and stayed home with Jimmy.) Pufferfish got to decorate her pancakes with actual different colors of syrup (maple, strawberry and blueberry) just like she had in our art project!
Another day, we read If You Give A Cat A Cupcake. Pufferfish made a cupcake out of Fun Foam! She used paint as frosting, but I let her glue on actual sprinkles. She also got to eat a whole lot of the sprinkles, which tickled her little sugar-addicted funny bone!
But the most learning of all took place around If You Give A Mouse A Cookie! I made a magnet board set to go with the book, which meant Pufferfish wanted to read the story about fifty million times!
Because the letter M was our letter of the week (which we've totally been slacking off on lately) we made an M mouse. This mouse is totally freaky, isn't he? He's some sort of alien mouse with tons of eyes all over his body!
We did a cookie counting activity using some small, round sticky magnets I found at Wal-Mart. I printed out a sheet with six circles on it, with a number on each circle. glued the magnet circles to pieces of brown construction paper. We put the paper on a cookie sheet, and Pufferfish's job was to count out the correct number of "chocolate chips" to put on each cookie! (She also did manage to score some real cookies, even though they weren't chocolate chip!)
Finally, I put together a letter M coloring book for Pufferfish, using clip art images that went with "M" words from the books we had read. I didn't take pictures of the book, but it had pictures of things like a mouse, milk, a mailbox, music, etc. Reading all of the "M" words helped Pufferfish get the idea that the letter M makes an "mmmmm" sound. I think I am going to print out similar coloring books for each of our letters of the week, using words from our theme of the week!
Anyway, that was our Tot School week! Stay tuned for next week... we'll be celebrating Dr. Seuss!
By the way, I scanned some pictures from Hop On Pop to make a rhyming book with Pufferfish. If you'd like to use the pics, feel free! You can download the document I made here.
I also made a sheet of pictures to make an I Will Eat It/I Will Not Eat It chart with Pufferfish, after we read Green Eggs And Ham. I included a few pictures of foods I know she likes (Mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, kim) and a few things I don't know if she'd eat (cooked carrots, green eggs and ham) as well as a few non-food items I am curious about where she'd put them (she has definitely eaten playdough before and she likes to suck on pennies for soem reason) You could easily make your owns sheet like this, but if you want to use my pics you can download it here! Just cut out the pics and paste them on paper with your munchkin!
Fun week!! Laura N is a great author!! She has such fun books!! Thanks for the Dr. Seuss stuff!! We are studying him this up coming week as well.
Posted by: Jess | February 28, 2010 at 07:57 PM
Looks like a fun week. I love the cupcake!
Posted by: Cindy | February 28, 2010 at 09:34 PM
Love your ideas! I especially like the cookie matching activity--I bet my little guy would really get into that. Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: Tarasine | February 28, 2010 at 11:52 PM
I love your activities! This post will be bookmarked so I can look back it at again when we get to Letter P week...and do a PANCAKE week! :)
The foam pancakes & spatula are a nice pretend play activity, and how convenient that it was free pancake day at IHOP! You can't go wrong with a free field trip! :)
Great week!
Posted by: Dawn | March 01, 2010 at 09:07 AM
Great blog! I've read a few posts here today, and wanted to leave at least one comment. I'll be back!
Posted by: Lynda | September 30, 2010 at 05:40 AM