Daily Calendar

One activity that I decided to start with B at the beginning of the year was a daily calendar.  It is a great way to introduce Months, Days of the Week, Holidays, Weather, Numbers & Counting.  He is really learning to recognize the numbers quickly.  

Here is what the calendar looked like initially.  B asks every day, "can we do calendar?".  He loves to go look out back and see what the weather is for the day.  But, eventually the pieces started to get bent & sticky, because I didn't think to laminate them until it was too late.  

So eventually I had new pieces laminated and put everything up on a bulletin board.  I also decided to include the seasons & changed how to track the days of the week.  

Tot Trays: St. Patrick's Day

Because St. Patrick's Day fell on a Monday, I decided to have the tot trays ready for the week before.    We used a few of the trays over the course of two weeks.  The matching card game is actually still out and B wants to play it occasionally.  

Shamrock Lacing Card

I took the basic shape of a shamrock & printed it on green card stock.  Then I laminated it to make it nice and sturdy, and then punched a bunch of holes around the outside.  I used a piece of green yarn for the lacing.  

B had a hard time with this at first, so we worked together on it.  He would pass the yarn through a hole to me and then I would pass it back through.  

Later in the week he did much better with it independently.  

Puzzles

Again, I found a tot pack, which included a 9 piece puzzle for B to try.  Here is the St. Patrick's Day themed tot pack.  There are plenty of other great ideas to use.  He needed more help the first time he completed it and a little bit of guidance each time after that.  

Coloring Sheets & Writing Practice

Again in the St. Patrick's Day tot pack there are plenty of tracing pages to help with learning to write.  I also printed a few pages just for coloring.  There was one page in particular that went along with the story There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover, which we borrowed from the library.  

Sensory Bin

For this week I pulled out the rainbow rice from our busy bag and hid a few laminated gold coins inside.  I had B search for the gold coins.  He liked looking for them the first time, but when I tried to put them back in to play again he did not like it.  He would much rather just play with the rice.  Something similar to the idea found below:

Matching Game

We have played this matching/memory card game over and over.  The cards can be found here.  There are also some other great tot tray ideas found on the blog Moms Have Questions Too.

Tot Trays: Dr. Seuss

Early March means celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday.  B and I made a trip to the library, but of course most of the books were already checked out.  We managed to get Cat in the Hat, which is one of B's new favorites.  I also mentioned this to a friend and she had extra copies of 4-5 Dr. Seuss books so she let us keep them.  So of course Green Eggs and Ham has become a frequent read in this house as well!  

I found so many different activities through Pinterest.

Cutting Practice
I purchased scissors specifically designed to help teach little ones how to cut/use them properly.  They are not safety scissors however, so B can only use them when I am with him and helping.  For this activity he cut white & red strips.  Then worked on gluing them in place to create the Cat in the Hat.

Puzzle Time

I used popsicle sticks to create a puzzle using the cover photo from Green Eggs and Ham.  B needed some help the first time, but after that he did really well matching the pieces together.

Letter Recognition

B is doing really well with recognizing capital letters, so I decided to create a little Green Eggs & Ham matching game based on this blog.  I printed 26 fried green eggs and 26 green ham pieces.  On the back of all of the eggs I wrote all capital letters and on the ham I did lower case.  Then I put the upper & lower case letters on paper plates.  B would choose an egg, state what it was and then go run to the correct paper plate and place it.  We only did the egg version of the game a few times and did not get around to trying lower case letters, so I am not sure how he would do with them.  

Tracing/Writing practice

Again I had a tracing activity for B to practice holding a pen/marker and writing the letter S for Seuss.  I also brought out the letter S magnetic board and the Ss book.  

Again he loved using the dry erase crayons

There were a few activities that we did not get to during the week.  One was a Cat in the Hat play dough mat.  I did not get around to coloring & laminating it, so that B could use play dough to match the colors.  I also found an opposites activity based on The Foot Book. 

Finally there was a pattern activity sheet.  The patterns were given and then individual card pieces were cut out.  The idea is for the child to recreate the correct pattern using the individual cards.