Tot School - “The Little Rabbit”

- Adam is 33 months old -

This week for Tot School we read “The Little Rabbit” and used Before Five in a Row and http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ for activities to go along with the story.
We reviewed the ASL signs for carrot and baby (Buttercup the rabbit has babies) and learned the signs for rabbit, turtle, and butterfly (Buttercup encounters a turtle and a butterfly).

Above our dining room table we have a montage of my husband and my engagement pictures. One day during lunch, Adam looked up and said, “You’re signing turtle Mommy!” It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about…

The sign for turtle is to cover one fist with the other to make the shell and then wiggle the bottom thumb to make the turtle’s head. So I guess the picture of my hands does kind of look like I’m signing turtle! It’s so fun and rewarding to know that things I’m teaching him are actually sticking!

Here’s Adam signing turtle

Everyday we did a finger play and little song that we hopped around to like rabbits. Adam LOVED doing these each day! I definitely want to incorporate songs or finger plays into my plans now.

Adam hopping to “Did You Ever See a Rabbit”

Adam correctly colored Buttercup white (even the pink inside her ears that the book points out) and colored the wild rabbit brown. Again, it’s so fun to know that when we read a book he’s remembering and comprehending specifics of the story.

On Tuesday we went with some friends to a farm where I was hoping we could see some rabbits and to our surprise, not only were there rabbits but there was a white one just like Buttercup and a brown one like the wild rabbit. The brown one even had some babies!

We talked about animal babies and Adam glued pictures into a little book.

The illustrations in “The Little Rabbit” are real photographs so we talked about the different “views” of the rabbits and Adam copied those views with his alligator. We learned front view, side view, and back view

We worked on counting and number recognition by using a Carrot Math Mat that I laminated.

And for a snack, we had carrots and ranch. Yum!

Other Tot School activities included painting with Do-a-Dot markers. He spent about 2 minutes actually using the markers and the next 30 minutes lining up the bottles and then moving them to the other side of his art tray…

…then unscrewing caps and screwing them back onto other bottles. I actually didn’t know he knew how to unscrew them on his own!
Every morning I put milk into one color of cup, and then mix and match the lid and the straw. He always says something like, “A blue cup with a green lid and a yellow straw? That don’t matches!” (in a very funny tone of voice). So when I saw him putting different colored lids on different colored bottles, I just had to say, “A red lid on a yellow bottle? That don’t matches!” and ON and ON for about 20 minutes straight! He giggled and laughed as he unscrewed and screwed caps onto the bottles and I pointed out that they didn’t match. What a fun memory!

Drawing with Crayola watercolor markers

One afternoon we had fun in Adam’s room playing with the balls that go with his magnet set. It began with us tossing balls into a bin and making “baskets”… …then he pretended to be a dragon in a cave… …then he pretended the bin was a garbage truck that was dumping the garbage out. It is so fun to see his imagination grow!

We went to story time at the library and Adam was fascinated by the sign language interpreter that was there.

He played with beads and transferred them back and forth and then pretended he was making lunch and baking things in the oven. The “oven”
To enjoy the last remained days of summer, we went out for a walk and Adam rode his Strider Bike. He loves his bike!
On our walk he discovered a fire hydrant and was fascinated with it. With him being my first child, I am always surprised by how interested in EVERYTHING he is! It’s like the entire world is a new discovery and I am LOVING discovering along with him.