Tot School Tuesday

We had a ton of fun this week in Tot School studying spring weather and focusing on rainbows.  We delved into the story of Noah and the kids had a blast.  Here are some of our favorite learning activities from this week...

With all the talk about rainbows there was also a lot of learning/reinforcing colors.  Stone did great with our art painters and I was amazed to see how well he stayed in the lines while working on his rainbow.

For a math activity, we worked on sorting colors using M&Ms.  Honestly, what could be better reinforcement than a piece of chocolate for all of your hard work?  I used these templates for the older boys, who first sorted their colors and then placed each (or at least the ones that weren't eaten) M&M into the rainbow outline.  The little kids just sorted (and ate) their M&Ms, and had a ton of fun doing it!

For art/storytime we built an ark from the story of Noah.  While Stone was at speech therapy, Cash, Holden and Analeigh built an ark for all of Noah's animals.  It was a fun activity and gave us hours of role play fun.

While at the arboretum, we played a lot with water and talked about the science behind how water and sun gives the plants food to grow.  Splashing in water is a great sensory activity for my kids.  They find water calming and often go "all in" every time the see a puddle.  Traveling with extra clothes is a must with this crew!

More sorting and gluing came when we loaded our animal crackers onto colored ark templates, which I found here.  There are so many great resources online!  I am so amazed each time I search for something to create lesson plans.  Any of you who are even slightly interested in doing preschool at home, I suggest you do some searching and see what's out there.  It's a lot easier than you think!

We even snuck (my spell check says sneaked, really?)  in a little shape fun late in the week.  Again, another idea stolen from a mommy blogger.  Cash did a great job with shape recognition and using the popsicle sticks is teaching him the parts of the shapes (three sides to a triangle/four to a square).

Don't forget about the great give-away... you have until Friday to enter!  And just to entice you more, here's a photo of me sporting my gear!

For more of our Tot School ideas and posts, just click here.