Tot School: Snow

A1 is 30 months and A2 is 11 months



This week, we've been having fun with snow and ice.  For starters, we read several snow books.

A1 and I made some "snow dough" together (white playdough with glitter in it).  We'll continue to use this for several week.  A1 especially enjoyed shaking the "gitter" in and measuring the other ingredients.

A1 is still enjoying matching games, so we used a set of mitten matching cards that my mom found to play several different games.

We had two different file folder games to play (Snowflake Halves and a game for The Jacket I Wear In The Snow).  This were definitely too easy for A1.  She enjoys file folder games, but I need to find some that will suit her, as most of what I find is either way too easy or too hard.

I also printed off a sheet of snowflakes to match and sort from The Activity Mom.  This one was very tricky for A1. I tried to show her how to sort the snowflakes by type, but she insisted that the small snowflake and the large snowflake didn't match each other (and she's kind of right).  We'll do this activity some more next week; I may remove the medium-sized snowflakes and try to get her to sort them into piles of small and large.



Stamping on the snowmen

 We painted a snow scene early one morning.  I had explained to A1 that she should use a lot of white paint, so that it would look like snowflakes on her page.  She picked out a circular sponge instead of a brush and put white dots all over her page, explaining to me that "it's a snowball fight, like 'whoosh! pow!'"  :-)  After she finished painting her snowball fight, we used a snowman cookie cutter to put some snowmen on her page.   Her snowmen were her favorite color (green).





 

Transferring Ice



The favorites of the week were the ice activites I had planned.  A1 really enjoyed transferring icecubes from a bowl of water to an empty bowl with a slotted spoon.  She transfered them back and forth several times and enjoyed it much more than I expected (this was the first transferring activity we've done). 

A1 was begging for another transferring activity after she played with the slotted spoon and ice cubes, so I quickly got out some cotton balls and an empty ice cube tray.  We pretended that the cotton balls were snowballs.  The ice cube tray helps with one-to-one correspondance and she used a spoon to transfer, which helps improve her fine motor skills.



Playing with Ice Together

I also made several large blocks of colored ice by freezing water (with food coloring) in some gladware containers.  I put this in a tub with some water for A1 and A2 to play with.  A1 and I talked to A2 about how cold the ice was and what color and shape the large ice blocks were.

 I thought this week was a great start, since this was the first time we've done anything structured.  Next week we'll be reading about and playing with snowmen.  I've got several activities planned, some more "schoolish" than we usually do, so we'll see how it goes.

Linking up to Totschool and Read.Explore.Learn