Tot Trays: Arctic Animals Week 1

When I first decided to try out tot trays for the new year I planned a few themes together.  So, of course I found myself with too many activities to fit in a week.  I decided to stretch "Arctic Animals" over two weeks as I did with "Snow/Winter".  

This week the activities were all about cold weather again and different types of animals that live in the arctic.  We also talked a little bit about hibernation.  

Magnetic Alphabet

We used the "H" magnetic page and the "H" booklet.  The whole alphabet can be found here.  I always use them with a cookie sheet and they work really well.  B is very good at putting all of the correct pom poms in place.  

Story Sequencing

B used to really like "Brown Bear, Brown Bear", so I pulled out the "Polar Bear, Polar Bear" version.  I used a paint stick to recreate the story, so B could listen to the story and put the characters in the correct sequence.  This was one of the more popular activities for the week.  He wanted to read the story over and over again.  I found the idea here.

Hibernation Craft

We read the story "Over and Under the Snow" all about different animals and where they live during the winter months.  Then we did a little bear hibernation craft.  B is getting really good at working with the glue.

Picture Matching Game

We learned the names of the arctic animals with picture cards.  I thought the activity was a little too advanced for B to actually match the names, so we just worked with the pictures this time. 

Size Sorting

And finally this week we worked on size sequencing using penguin pictures: small, medium and large. I found this and many other arctic related activities in the toddler pack "Polar Lands".

Again the whole reason I wanted to use the "tot tray" method was so that B could choose activities on his own and the clean-up is easy.  Here is a picture of B putting one of the activities away.

Tot Trays: Snow Week 2

As I mentioned before I had too many tot trays planned for the theme "snow", so I spread them out over two weeks.   Each week I also tried to include at least one snow related story and a craft or painting to go with it.  Here is what I included for week 2. 

Magnetic Fun.  Snowman creation - I found an outline of snowman, cut out the pieces & added magnets to the back.  And also mitten matching!

Snowman color matching - hats with buttons.

Snowflake matching - I just wish that I had printed them a little bit bigger.

Sorting hot & cold items.  B had a hard time with this one.  I think it may have helped if I had created a border with red crayon around the "hot" items and used blue for the "cold" items.  

For the story this week we read the book "The Mitten" and I had characters printed out for B to place in the mitten as we went through the story.  He loved to do this one over and over.

Tot Trays: Snow Week 1

With the start of a new year I have decided to try something a little different with B in terms of craft & learning activities.  He has some interest in the painting/constructing crafts, but it still interested in the interactive stuff.  So, I have decided to try "tot trays", which I first learned about on the blog 1+1+1=1. The idea is that the child can choose which activities they would like to participate in and the trays provide easy access, clean-up and a little more independence.  

For the first week of January I decided to go with a snow theme, and of course I planned way too different trays.  In order to fit everything in I was changing the trays every other day, and I did not feel like that was enough time to explore each tray.  I ended up spreading the theme over two weeks.

Snowman Size Sorting

B did really well with this as long as I asked him, "where is the biggest one?" once he found it I would then ask him "where is the next biggest one?" until all of the snowmen were in size order.  We worked from smallest to largest as well.

Coloring Winter Clothing

Braden putting the tray back when he was done with it.

Making a snowman - filling a water bottle with cotton balls using tweezers/tongs.

Focused on the Letter S for the week - so I put out the "S" magnetic sheet and the corresponding tracing/coloring pages.  All of the letters can be found here.

I didn't want to completely give up on art projects.  So we read the book Jack Frost and did a little water color/salt painting.