Tot School

 Hunter is 13.5 months old

It was a slow week at Tot School this week.  It just seemed like I was so busy there wasn’t much time to do a whole lot of activities.  We are considering homeschooling Hailey next year for 2nd grade and I have to admit I spent a lot of time online researching curriculum as well as looking for homeschooling groups in our area.  There were also a few appointments last week and it just seemed like we had places to be every day.  We did find time to do a few Tot School activities though.  Our “theme” was the color red and Valentine’s Day.

We made a Valentine’s Day discovery bottle which Hunter had fun with.  I used pink shampoo and some purple plastic hearts.  Hunter liked watching the shampoo slowly run from one end to the other.

Hunter made a heart using contact paper and red tissue paper.  He loved feeling the sticky contact paper.  You can see the full post here.

Hunter also did some mess free painting.  I put red paint and paper in a ziploc bag and taped it to the table.  He loved it!  And there was no mess at all, which I loved!

Hunter enjoyed playing with some red playdough and using a heart to press heart shapes into it.

Hopefully we’ll get a bit more done this week!  Stop by 1+1+1=1 to see what the other tots have been up to this last week.

Fun With Playdough

This week Hunter played with playdough for the first time.  He is learning the color red, so I let him check out some red playdough.

He definitely thought it was interesting.  He loved touching it and squeezing it.

I used a cookie cutter and cut out a heart shape… Hunter tried to put the heart back.

He loved seeing the results of pressing the cookie cutter into the playdough.

Of course he had to taste it.

And play peek-a-boo with it.

He loved playing with playdough and it kept him occupied for quite a while!

(A note of caution- when I worked in a daycare center there was a little girl who stuffed playdough into her mouth and it got stuck on the roof of her mouth.  It had to scraped off and was pretty hard to get out.  So, keep a close eye on your toddlers when they are playing with playdough.)

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Hailey loves “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” song so I thought I would do an easy project with her to make our own fun spider.

Here’s what you’ll need: Playdough and pipe cleaners.  We used pink because that is Haileys favorite color.  And also to keep our spider looking fun instead of scary.

Cut up the pipe cleaner into eight pieces to be used as legs.

We made our spider and then sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”  This is Hailey doing the hand motions for the “down came the rain” line.

And then Hailey decided she didn’t like the spider anymore, so she pulled all of the legs off.

Just in case you need the lyrics here they are:

The itsy bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy spider
Climbed up the spout again.

And if you need the tune- check that out here.

The Farm

We decided to make a little farm to go along with our farm theme this week.

I took several containers of playdough and spread them out on a tray.  The one green doesn’t quite match the others… so let’s just pretend the grass on the farm isn’t quite perfect.  And Hailey decided the farm needed a little pond- so we added some blue.

We made a fence using little popsicle sticks and stuck them together using playdough.  Then we added some farm animals.

Hailey played with this for a looooong time!