Tot School-Food

This week we're doing food.  Despite this theme being pretty obvious, I've found that coming up with specific activities to be a little difficult.  We don't have a ton of food toys.  Mara has some wooden fruit but that's it.  We also don't have any books that specifically deal with food.  I've just been trying to be creative and hit on a lot of food groups for Mara.

On Monday we played with play dough.  Mara always wants to pull it out.  I didn't have a project in mind this time but we decided to have a "picnic".  We grabbed her plates and made pretend food out of the play dough.  She loved the blue berries and the strawberries I made.

Tuesday we caught up a little and started the day with a coloring page.  The page was filled with vegetables and we got to talk about what colors they were.

In the afternoon I put together a fruit sensory bin.  This was the first time I used oats as my sensory bin filler.  I was nervous that it would be a mess and it was.  It wasn't as bad as I thought but it still took a bit more clean up than I'm used to.  In the end it wasn't anything a quick vacuum couldn't fix.  Mara loved this though.  She scooped the oats into the pots and cut the fruit.

Wednesday started with a do a dot worksheet.  I originally laid this out the day before but she was completely uninterested.  This morning though she was into it.  It was an ice cream cone and we talked about how yummy ice cream was and what our favorite flavors were.

We don't own the book, "If you give a pig a pancake" so I pulled up a you tube video on it and then we pretended her piggy bank coins were pancakes.  We fed her pig a lot of pancakes!  She seemed to like this story although she was kind of dissatisfied with the you tube video.  I think this is mainly because we have been using you tube a lot lately for children's songs and she just wanted to listen to music!

After nap we did one last project.  In the morning I cut out a pineapple shape and tore up some yellow paper.  I knew pineapple was one fruit she hasn't seen a lot so I wanted to introduce it to her.  We used a glue stick to adhere the paper to the pineapple.  She really liked this activity and stayed pretty much engaged throughout the whole thing despite eating her snack at the same time!

Thursday she again was more interested in playing than doing any activities.  We did fit in a "paint the toast" worksheet in the afternoon.  I had printed out a page that was a picture of a piece of toast and gave her some purple crayons.  I let her put the jelly on it!

Friday we decided to forgo the usual activities and just baked some cookies!  This was a project we both could get behind.  Mara happily ate the cookie dough while I scooped the remaining dough on to cookie sheets.  We've been enjoying fresh chocolate chip cookies ever since!

Next week we're doing a construction theme.  Again I don't feel like I have enough interesting activities planned but we'll just do the things we do have and go from there!