Tot School-Bedtime

So it's been a long time since we've been serious about tot school.  Josh's parents were visiting, the holidays were on us and I was about to have a baby.  So you can see we were a bit busy.  Now with Madeline here and Josh's parents back in the states, I feel like we can really dive back into our schooling with vigor.

This week our theme was Bedtime.  I chose this theme because lately Mara has been having a lot of issue with Bedtime and sleep.  Her schedule is stressful at night and in the morning.  Although she sleeps through the night, both Josh and I would love to see some progress on the two ends.  I thought that some focus on the subject this week may help a little.

Monday we started with a nighttime play dough invitation to play.  Mara loves play dough so I pulled out the dark blue dough, some star buttons and shiny beads.  I let her go to town "designing" the sky.  She loved it!  Her first try had all the stars in the play dough.  She quickly pulled them all out and then put in the beads.  I love her organization and need to just have one type of thing in the play dough at a time.

After nap we did our craft for the day.  I like to focus on a bible verse each week as well so this week I chose Psalms 3:5 I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the LORD sustained me.  I wrote this on a black piece of black construction paper.  We talked about the verse and then used star cookie cutters to make the night sky.  She dipped different size cutters into yellow paint and then onto the paper.  We also used some star stampers that we had laying around.

On Tuesday we started the day with a nighttime sensory bin.  I used the star shapes from the play dough, cotton balls, colored pom poms and her sleep sheep.  Mara is usually hit or miss with sensory bins.  This one was a definite miss.  She wasn't interested in it at all.  It basically sat around the whole day until the afternoon where she dumped it all out and got in the bin.

The activity she liked the most this day was making our own prayer jar.  We have tried to be more intentional about praying with Mara before she goes to sleep at night.  I saw this idea and instantly thought it would one serve as a reminder for us to do it and two be a fun way to pray with her.  We decorated popcycle sticks with markers and then I asked her what things she wanted to pray for.  I was shocked when her answers were pretty reasonable. lol  We wrote out things like: Mommy, Daddy, Madeline, Nana, Papa, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Mary, Buddy, Friends, etc.  We used it that night and she liked picking a stick from the jar!

Wednesday started with a fun craft.  I grabbed two coffee filters and her do a dot markers.  Then I let her go to town on decorating them.  The final step was to take water and brush it all over the filters.  This gave the whole project a water color look.  While Mara did this I read her A Peek inside Nighttime.  We talked about nighttime animals, especially bats as that is what we are going to create from the filters!  She really loved this activity especially painting with the water.  I was surprised how engaged she was the entire time.

Right before nap we decided to do some pretend play.  We went to our bedroom and tucked each other in for bed.  This activity was great for this sleepy mommy.  I managed to catch some quick cat naps while Mara was content in the bed.  She loved tucking us both in and we played like this for close to an hour!

In the afternoon we finished our bats by coloring clothespins black and adding the filters.  We also trimmed the sides so that they looked more bat like.

Thursday was a slow morning but we managed to fit in a bedtime craft.  Since making the bats yesterday Mara had been requesting an owl.  I hadn't planned on making an owl but was impressed with her concept of bedtime animals so we rolled with it.  I quickly grabbed some toilet paper rolls and construction paper.  I then cut out shapes out of the paper to make the owl.  Mara helped me by gluing the pieces on the roll and then decorating the final project.

On Friday we had a slow start.  Mara had a rougher night and we didn't drag ourselves out of bed till nearly nine.   Despite this I threw together an activity centered around the book, "Goodnight Moon".  I made some simple shapes that fit the story and created a storyboard so to speak.  While we read the book Mara placed the objects into our picture to recreate the story.  Although my storyboard was really homemade, she loved it!  We have tried to include books in all our weekly themes but this activity has thus far been the most successful.  Hopefully in the future I'll be able to continue this!

This week we didn't get done all the activities I had planned but I'm pretty proud of what we did.  It was a great week back and I am looking forward to next week where we will be focusing on LOVE.  I figured since Valentine's Day is upon us it's only fitting.  We'll do a ton of crafts and hopefully fit a few activities in there too!