Tot school--monster week

Aric is 27 months old

This is tot school from the past few weeks.  We did a lot of different things, but we mostly did a lot of Monster stuff, and we even used the tot pack from Carissa's website 1+1+1=1 called Happy Monsters.  To see that tot pack click on the Happy Monster's words, it'll take you right there.  Little Aric loved the happy monster's tot pack, and he had a pretty good tot week.  On with the show...

Fall activities:  One of the activities from our tree was to make a candy corn craft, so here's little Aric's candy corn.  He's using a paint brush to glue on pieces of tissue paper to make the colors of a candy corn. 

Monster fun:  This is the Monster dots game.  I made into a file folder game, and he matched the pattern on each monster to the dot pattern on the folder.  I called it the monster's blanket, and told him to lay the monster on his matching colored blanket, that helped him so much and he got it!  I think this is really the first time he has really understood how to "match" something.

He wanted to play again and again, so we did!

He would clap and say yay after each time he got them all, he was very proud.

This is the happy monster's puzzle

This is the game where you put a shape on the monster's head, and I just asked him different questions.  I would also let him pick the shape he wanted to do.  "My monster has a shape on his head!"  He liked this game too.

This is our monster sensory bin.  I actually had it leftover from last year, so I didn't have to put it together again, but it has pompom balls, yarn, googly eyes, beads, and I added the Monster eyes game to it this year.  This one got very messy, but he had a lot of fun.

I showed him how he could take the things from the bin and put them on the "monster's eyes", like the googly eyes, or the pompoms, he even used the yarn!

There are big googly eyes and little googly eyes.  He liked putting the big googly eyes on the first page of the monster eyes.  We also counted all the eyes.

He loved trying to get the pieces right on the eyes.  Here he is putting the yarn on the eyes too. 

Here's a close up of the sensory bin.

I also had the shape monster's book in the sensory bin, he liked reading it over and over again.

His favorite thing was to clap and shout yay when he was done.

We played a lot of different games with the Monster eyes game.  Here we sorted the pompoms to match the color of the monster too.

And, he played hide and seek with the monsters.  This got a little messy, but he LOVED it.  He would cover the monster up with the monster mush, and uncover it and make a monsterish sound.  So fun!

Then finally we made a monster picture with all the monster mush, and glue.  He just loves to glue, and it helped clean up the mess a little.

The final monster picture.

fun:  He and his brother (and I) worked hard to put this fire truck puzzle together.  Then they drove it around the floor.  As an aside, it was fire truck week at Aaron's preschool and so we stayed to watch the firefighters dress in all their gear.

Letter of the week:  Aric made a "m" monster.  Of course to go with the monster theme.

He is very proud of his m.  The idea for this came from no time for flashcards.

s
Play dough:  This is something we get out almost weekly lately, so last week his fascination was with that car cut-out.  We made lots and lots of playdough cars.

Here's one of the cars!  He was showing me how cool his new car is.

Making more cars...

For more car fun I made this car "parking lot" on a piece of paper.  Each space is numbered or shaped.  Then he just drove around and parked in a space and we would say the number or I would tell him to park in the spot with a...then I would name a spot.  He liked this, and it was such a simple, and fun activity.  I found this idea at Serving pink lemonade.

Now here he is coloring his parking lot during General conference.

Life school:  Aric got to go roller skating for the first time, and he did pretty well.

For more tot school fun visit Carisa's blog at 1+1+1=1