Tot School-On the Farm & Thanksgiving (26 months old)

We were busy this week reading several books about thanksgiving, turkeys, and farms (since turkeys live on farms, it provided a nice tie in) plus several fun activities.

To your right, you'll find a link to several of the tot tools we used this week.

Cutting

The biggest hit were Madalyn's scissors. This is her very first pair of scissors and she loves using them. They spring back open to help her learn how to use them, and she picked up on how to use them independently quite quickly.

She got a lot of cutting practice in this week.

Spooning

Madalyn also really enjoyed spooning pom-poms into this tray.

Stickers
Stickers are always a big hit. This week, Madalyn worked on matching the foam letter stickers with the letters I wrote on a big piece of cardboard. Madalyn referred to her melissa and dough alphabet puzzle while working on this activity. She was so proud of herself when she finished this activity.

Matching

Madalyn created this activity actually by matching some farm animals I had cut out and laminated to illustrations in one of the farm books we took out at the library. In the following photo, you can see the barn which has a pocket that she enjoyed putting her animals in and taking them out. It provided opportunities to talk about positional words as well.

Arts and Crafts

We had a lot of fun painting this week.

A couple times, Madalyn used watercolors and enjoyed that quite a bit.

Another day, she made a turkey print and used some glitter glue to decorate it. We haven't quite finished this project, so stay tuned for photos.

One day, we made lots of turkey prints (Madalyn loved making these!).

And another day, she got a magnadoodle and has really enjoyed drawing on that. She's starting to draw things now and stating what she's drawn (doesn't always look like what she says it is, but that's okay!). Check out the awesome socks (um Christmas stockings, hehe). :)

And last night, I made Madalyn some neat funky brushes to use while painting.

My husband bought a dowel rod and cut it up into smaller pieces, and then I attached different things to the ends to give Madalyn different options to use while painting. Lots of interesting textures and cheap and easy to make. I used some mesh bags, foam pages, yarn, a sponge, bottle top, and tin foil. Plus hot glue and rubber bands to hold things together. My inspiration came from here.