Tot School-Love

With Valentine's Day on Sunday, we decided to focus on Love this week.  I didn't have a lot of activities planned but had a ton of craft ideas.  Mara ended up coming down with something mid-week which really threw our planning out the window.  She wasn't interested in much beyond laying on the couch and Mama snuggles.

On Monday we started with our bible verse, John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I grabbed a piece of construction paper and taped a heart on it.  I asked Mara to put fingerprints all around the heart so we could remove it and still have the heart design.  She wasn't so interested and did a few prints on the heart.

Our next project for the day was some hand stamping.  Mara loves to have her hand painted to we did two crafts with this.  There wasn't a specific reason for these but I wanted to make some Valentines cards.  The first one we made love bugs for Daddy and the second was a heart for me.  We let both dry and then decorated them the next day.

Mara really needed an activity this day so I quickly printed some counting puzzles.  She wasn't really interested in them overall but I think they were good in getting her to explore her numbers.  She will only say two and I want her to try to make the other number sounds.

On Tuesday we did some do a dots.  She hasn't done any in a long time and I was super impressed by how far she has come with these.  Before she might have gotten the dot in the circle but mainly would just "color" the picture.  Now she is filling every dot and gets very upset if she misses the circle.  After finishing her first page she asked for a second and did a great job with her letters!

Wednesday started with a pretty hands on craft.  I mixed some salt dough and we used cookie cutters to make heart shapes.  From there we put our fingerprints and hand prints in the dough.  We set them to dry and will paint them on Friday!

We also tried a little letter recognition exercise.  I wrote all the letters on four hearts and gave her stickers with the letters on them.  Her task was to put the stickers where they needed to go.  She was sort of into this but I learned some valuable lessons from it.  I did too many letters.  Next time I will only do about half and two you have to get sticky stickers.  These kept falling off.

Thursday Mara was still pretty clingy so we did a simple craft with ribbons and paper. I drew a heart on a sheet of paper and she used glue to adhere different red ribbons to it.  Afterwards I laid another sheet over it with a heart cut out.  The final product was a heart valentine!

Friday went out the window as Daddy was home.  Our love week ended on Sunday painting our salt dough Valentine's from earlier in the week.  Mara did great dipping her paint brushes into the paint but was honestly more interested in cleaning her brushes than painting.  I told her that she couldn't dip them into the water unless they had paint on them so she would paint a tiny bit so she could dip in the water :)

Next week we're on to transportation.  Monday will be off as Josh is off of work for the holiday.  My goal is to prep the night before.  With both kids and my Usborne business it's too hard to do it on the fly!