Lion Cupcakes

I was looking for a sweet treat to go along with our theme of Zoo animals which we are doing for the next few weeks. When I saw these at Family Fun, I knew both kids would love them.


They were very simple to make. First, I just made regular cupcakes and frosted them with lemon-yellow frosting. Then I used chocolate chips for the eyes and nose and sliced gum drops for the manes and mouths.

Both kids devoured them before I could take a picture of them with their cupcakes!

Tot School: Happy Valentine's Day

This week in Tot School we focused on Valentine's Day and hearts.

Math
We started the week doing candy math. We used foam heart numbers and sweet hearts candies to count and sort. You can read the post here for all the details on what we did. M enjoyed this so much we did candy math every day.


We did the Roll A Valentine activity from Confessions of a Homeschooler. This is the first dice-type game we have done, and M loved it! She had no problem counting the number of dots on the dice and figuring out which number it was on the sheet.


Letters
I drew hearts on a piece of paper and labeled them with capital letters. Then I found small red heart stickers and wrote the lower case letters on them. I gave M the stickers in random order and she had to name the letter, the sound the letter makes, and match it to the upper case letter. She loved doing this (that's her excited face in the picture) and completed all the hearts.



Crafts
M made a heart wreath using foam stickers from a kit Grandma sent her. She had a great time gluing the hearts all on.


She also made a tissue paper collage heart.


We also made some homemade pink playdough and played with our heart cookie cutters.


This week we had some unexpected snow (10 inches total - a record for us) and M and J played outside a LOT for the two days it remained.


We also celebrated Daddy's 38th birthday on Saturday. M helped him blow out his candles and enjoyed the chocolate frosting on his cake.


That was our week in Tot School. You can check out what other's have done in Tot School at Carisa's blog. I hope you all have a great Valentine's Day with your little ones.

Snow Day

Over a foot of snow fell yesterday. It's certainly less than many areas of the country have gotten, but it's the all time largest snowfall for us. The kids were very excited to see it snowing yesterday, and I sent them out to play early on before it got too deep (and too cold). M had a much better experience with this, her second ever snow.

Candy Math

M is feeling somewhat better today and was in the mood to do some activities, so we did candy math. These are all activities we have done before, but for some reason doing them with the Sweet Hearts really captured M's attention.

First I labeled some foam hearts with the numbers 1-10 and then I counted out 55 hearts into a bowl.
M had to put the hearts into order, and then count the proper number of candies onto each heart. Since there was the exact number of candies needed, this helped with control of error.



Next, she sorted the hearts by color.

Then we lined them up and she counted how many of each color she had. Since there were 16 orange hearts, this helped her do some one-to-one correspondence counting greater than our usual 10.

Finally, I let her count out five hearts to eat as a treat!

Weekly Wrap-Up

We didn't do any planned Tot School activities this week. M had two playdates with friends and then came down with a nasty cold. We spent most of the week just snuggling in our pajamas and reading books.

M has developed a habit of using her toys as make-shift chairs. She does have chairs her own size, and plenty of adult-sized furniture as well, but for some reason it's more fun to make up your own chairs.

Of course, she still spend most days dressed as a fairy princess, as well!


We have a bunch of fun Valentine's activities planned for this week, and hopefully she will be feeling well enough to do some of them.

Tot School: Fish

I am behind getting this posted, as we had a busy weekend. M and I spent the last two weeks in Tot School working with fish. Usually we only spend one week on a theme, but she was having so much fun I extended it.

Alphabet/Pre-Reading

Confessions of a Homeschooler has wonderful downloadables she has designed herself for her letter of the week themes. We used several of her F is for Fish items this week, and loved them. Here, M is matching letters for "Fish". We matched upper and lowercase to each other and worked on the sounds each letter makes. This was pretty easy for her, but she had fun and wanted to do it several times.

We also played alphabet bingo. I bought this at the Dollar Store a while back, and finally got it out to play. We'd call out the letter, and M had to find it on her card and cover it with a marker and also tell us what sound each letter makes (we are only doing the short vowel sounds for now).


Math

M enjoyed doing her tangrams last week, so this time I printed out some pattern blocks from the Pre-Kinders site. I cute the shapes out of foam so they'd hold up. She loved doing this, and I was amazed she had the patience to get all 23 shapes on in one sitting.


Art

We made lots of art projects these last two weeks. You'll notice I usually let M do art first thing in the morning while she's still in her pajamas. That way if she gets too messy I can just put her in the bath before dressing her.

M made a paper plate and tissue paper collage fish. She loved painting the glue onto the plate.



Next she used her dot markers to make scales on a fish cut-out.


This is partly an art project, but is also great for those fine motor skills we are working on for writing. I gave M a piece of construction paper and some fish stickers. She spent all week going back and adding a few stickers each time until she had the paper covered with a full ocean scene. Since there are very small bubble and star stickers on the sheets, she had to use her pincher grasps to get them onto the paper.


M made a fishbowl using construction paper and some puffy goldfish stickers her Grandma got her for Christmas.

For a stART project we made a Corduroy bear.


With all these planned art projects, we always make time for free-art. M's favorite remains painting of any kind.



Dramatic Play

M was very into her dress-up clothes this week. She loves pretending to be a princess, and she has several dresses to choose from. She loves it so much, I think we'll spend some time this next week doing some princess projects.


That was our last two weeks in Tot School. Be sure to visit Carisa's blog at 1+1+1=1 to see what everyone else did this week.