Tot School – Christmas Part 2

- Adam is 36 months old -

We started some fun activities and crafts centered around Christmas this week. I don’t know what it is, but things seem to always get in the way of Tot School. We didn’t do as much as I had planned, but we have next week (and maybe the week after!) to get to it all.

Adam sorted pom-poms onto these cute colored candy canes from Confessions of a Homeschoolers’ Christmas Preschool Pack.
He was pretending that the pom-poms were families so if there was one candy cane that only had a tiny pom-pom on it, he would get the 2 big pom-poms, aka Mommy and Daddy and put them with their baby who missed them.

He played with play-doh and Christmas cookie cutters several days this week. He loved making cookies and sharing them with his baby sister and me.

From 1+1+1=1’s Nativity Preschool Pack I put together the mini book “Animals with Baby Jesus” and Adam glued the animals and people onto the “correct” card.
If you look closely, you can see that the sheep and the pig are on the people card. That is because the sheep lives with the shepherd….obviously, Mom. And the pig is friends with the sheep and lives there too.

Adam’s cousins came over one night to play and in an effort to keep them busy, we made a little Santa Claus craft with cotton balls. Too bad it lasted all of 10 minutes! :)

It snowed a little on Saturday so we bundled up and went outside to play. I built a snowman while Adam scooped, filled, and dumped the snow from his sand bucket. I guess he thinks it’s just as good as sand!

Adam got this Discovery Toys “Measure Up! Balance” for his birthday last month and we have pulled it out a couple times to play with but on this day I made sure to use words to describe the state of the cups. We talked about light vs. heavy, up vs. down, full vs. empty and equal.

We also sorted by color…
Stacked….
And put them nicely back in the container (because that’s the only way the lid will fit on)

The cool thing about this “toy” is that the pieces are correctly weighted in grams and the cups have milliliter markings. As he grows, we can learn about how many red pieces equal a blue and how many blue pieces equal a purple or yellow, how to measure liquids, how different objects around the house weigh compared to other objects, etc. I love Discovery Toys because each of their toys comes with a parent guide with ideas on how to teach different things using the same toy. I bought this at a gift show and I was so tempted by several other things but I restrained myself and will just have to wait for later!

Check out the Tot School posts on 1+1+1=1 and also the preschool pages!