Tot School: Creepy Crawlies

For Tot School, we have been working on a shape a week, as well as doing other themed activities. The most recent theme was Creepy Crawlies (bugs)

Matching Insects and Bugs Vocabulary cards and our Toob insects. She insisted on doing it while holding a toy shot, despite that making it much harder.

Butterfly light table page with  magnetic bingo chips 

Bug Jar Counting. We used a  six sided die and some bug erasers.

More counting with these sticker sheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler

Bug playdough tray with cookie cutters, beads, buttons and backyard bug rollers.

"Fishing" for bugs with this puzzle. She loved to pull them out, but wasn't great at putting them back in yet.

Wooden insect puzzles from this set. Some she can do more easily than others.

Bug matching game. I have her two boards and the corresponding cards. She had a fun time matching them up. When she's older we can try to play bingo with them.

Butterfly puzzle. This one she likes a lot and can pretty much do independently.

Sensory bin with Toob insects.

Bee dot page. I use pom pom magnets and had her match the colors. (printable here)

Bee line tracing. She liked trying, but couldn't actually do this well, yet.

Which is different bee page. She's a little too young for this, so we mostly just talked about it.

Toddler Bug Books:

You're My Little Cuddle Bug (one of her all time faves)

Peek Inside Bug Homes

The Very Busy Spider

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

 

Tot School: Diamonds

 We have been working on a shape a week, as well as doing other themed activities. This week was Diamonds and Creepy Crawlies. 

These are the shape related activities. Juniper was about 22 months.

This was her little area on our play room wall. The poster is from The Learning Effect. The rest is her completed work for the week.

She's been really into painting lately, so she just painted the diamond.

Practicing tracing in her dry erase center. She still needs a lot of help, but she enjoys it. (Printable found here)

Play dough included some fondant cutters and  a stamp. 

Coloring some diamonds. She can read all the colors and knew what she needed to do, but had some fun coloring the some diamonds the wrong colors. She's 1, no big deal. (Printable found here).

She seems to like using stickers on her dot pages the best, so she did that.

Australia and New Zealand (Coral Reef Biome) Unit

 This week in our Around the World Homeschool Curriculum we focused on Australia and New Zealand. We did this concurrently with studying the Coral Reef Biome. Since we did them together, I decided to make just one post with all the resources.

Books:

As always, we read many great spines on these countries, but here are some extra picture books we read:

Diary of a Wombat

Once Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree

Living in Australia

Australia Page from A World of Gratitude

Poetry about Australian animals in Around the World on 80 Legs

We also looked through the Australian pages in our various atlases (you can see which ones we use here). This spread is from the Lift-The-Flap Picture Atlas

Coral Reef

The World of Coral Reefs

The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World's Coral Reefs: The Story of Ken Nedimyer and the Coral Restoration Foundation

Peek Inside a Coral Reef

Coral Reefs

One of the Great Barrier Reef pages in The Wonder Garden

Coral Pages in Life Cycles

Activities:

Flag from Little Passports

Great Barrier Reef page in Adventures Around the Globe Activity Book

Oceania pages in the Barefoot Books World Atlas Sticker Book.

Australia page from page from Beginning Geography

Page in his Flag Sticker Atlas

We played Koala Capers. He had fun looking at the pictures to guess which country each outfit was from.

Coral Reef vocabulary cards and Toob figurines.

Sydney page from Seek and Find Around the World

Maze from Around the World Mazes

Recipe:

We made both Anzac biscuits (New Zealand) and Sausage Rolls (Australia) from Global Feast cookbook.

Read Aloud:

For read aloud, I read him Race the Wild Great Reef Games. I had previously read him Greetings from Somewhere the Mystery of the Coral Reef. He also read Rainbow the Koala, which is a graphic novel, so not really a picture book but not really a read aloud.

Art:

For art, we learned about Australia aboriginal dot art through this video. Then Archer made a kangaroo.

Videos:

Bug Jar Counting Game

 

Despite my efforts to avoid it, my toddler really likes counting. However, she isn't great at understanding what those numbers mean. Now I'm making an effort to help her link the symbol, name and quantity of numbers. 

As part of that, I made this quick little bug jar counting game. I gave her a die and some little bug erasers, with the idea of her rolling the die and putting that number of erasers in. When she gets older, I will likely do these activities with dice with more numbers. For now 1-6 is fine.

Print the Bug Jar Counting sheet HERE