~Punkin is 34 months old.~ Theme: Rainbow Letter: R Shape: Crescent Color: All Number: 13 Sight Word: review Videos: R Song, Rainbow Colors Song, Color Song These last two weeks SERIOUSLY did this preggo mama in. We were at my parents' house for three days having a garage sale, I had a doctor's appointment, we went with my sister in law to a town wide garage sale nearby, I made a couple meals for people, and throw in odds and ends like trying to buy flowers to plant, going to our usual Mom's group on Thursdays, and a serious nesting urge to do some major spring cleaning and painting......Well, I'm exhausted! I ended up taking two weeks to do our rainbow unit, which ended up being so much fun, though I noticed that most of our activities ended up being "crafty" in nature. Punkin didn't mind one bit! :) I hope to do U is for umbrellas this next week, but we'll see how much energy I have. TOT TRAYS I made a rainbow bin for Punkin with just a random assortment of colorful items and colored cups. Boy did she love it. Of course, she started sorting items by color into the cups right away. We'll keep this one out for awhile. I got out some of these foam "blocks" that have small holes in the middle. Then, I took a sponge and cut it into sections that fit into an ice cube tray. Next, I stuck a toothpick in each sponge. She was supposed to put the blocks on the toothpicks in rainbow color order. Then, she asked for her tongs and started using her tongs to sort them in the empty sections under each stack. This was another random thrown together activity. I poked holes in a small shoe box and used a marker to color around each hole in rainbow color order. Punkin matched the fun straws with the right color hole and then used colored ponytail holders to put on the fun straws and push them around the curves. I also had colored strips for her to cut apart and sort, her table setting activity, and a color puzzle out for her to do but she focused on the above three each time we did tot trays. LEARNING ACTIVITIES Practicing making Rr's using THIS sheet from Confessions of a Homeschooler. Gluing on r pictures to her r collage page. Tracing more letter Rr's that will go in her ABC binder. I made up these sight word cards for Punkin. I put a picture representing her sight word in the left cloud and she had to find the cloud to put on the right side that had the matching sight word. Then, I had her use Scrabble tiles to spell the word on the rainbow. She used rainbow color strips to spell her name and make a rainbow in the process. Punkin used colored pom poms in rainbow color order to count using her number boxes pages from COAH. She also did some simple shape matching rainbows that I made for her last year. I drew a crescent, a trapezoid, and a semicircle on the backs of three rainbows. I had her turn over the rainbows and identify the shapes, then we mixed them up and did it a few more times. After that, I would show her where the crescent was and told her to try to watch it as I mixed the rainbows up. She then had to try and find where the crescent ended up. We started off playing a game where we took turns rolling the dice with colored dots on it and placing a magnetic pom pom on the color we rolled. The person who put on the last pom pom was supposed to be the winner. About half way through, though, Punkin decided she just wanted to put the pom poms on without playing any kind of game. ARTS / CRAFTS Punkin made a rainbow lowercase r inspired by The Ramblings and Adventures of a S.A.H.M. And she painted colorful rainbow R's using a cookie cutter and by mixing paint colors. This idea came from Delightful Learning. I wrote "rainbow" in lowercase letters at the top of the page and had Punkin use foam letters from her little foam abc puzzle to "stamp" matching capital letters on top of them in rainbow color order. (Most of the letters got smeared as she "stamped," but oh well.) Then, she used a Q-tip to dot paint the rainbow. We made this marshmallow rainbow one day during snack time. Can you guess what the snack was? I hid buttons in her rainbow rice (that I made last year when we did rainbows), and as she found them, she glued them onto this rainbow that I printed out. (She still LOVES to dig in rice and find things I hide. It's one of her favorite activities.) I had also put small dots on the rainbow to help her know where to put the buttons (so they weren't all squished together on one side of the rainbow when she was finished). Then, we added cotton ball clouds when she was done. We finally replaced our egg suncatcher with this pretty rainbow one, made out of contact paper and tissue paper. I made rainbow shaving cream for her to "paint" with. The food coloring stained her fingers, but she had a blast! OTHER FUN RAINBOW ACTIVITIES This was probably our favorite activity during this unit. I colored three little cups of water yellow, blue, and red, and had Punkin use a medicine dropper to mix the colors in the ice cube tray. She got so excited when the water turned different colors. I wasn't going to tell her what colors to do, but rather just let her explore. On her own, she decided to make a pattern in the top row (remembering which colors to mix each time which I thought was pretty good!) and to do rainbow order colors in the bottom row. (I helped her a bit on some of these colors.) Then, she had just as much fun emptying her ice cube tray and making murky colors in the three cups when she was done. Using R puzzle pieces and cookie cutters while playing with playdough. We got these colorful puzzle interlocking blocks at a garage sale last week, and Punkin had fun helping me "wash" them and find all the matching parts. RAINBOW FOOD We made rainbow pudding pops one day before naptime and had them as a special treat when she woke up. She did all the stirring herself! This yummy idea and recipe came from HERE. Our rainbow muffin tin meal one day included red pepers, orange carrots, yellow pineapple, green peas, blue blueberries, purple grapes, and a "cloud" sandwich. And I was going to make rainbow fruit pizza, but 1) my kiwi that I was going to use for the green went bad before I got around to it, and 2) I didn't end up having room on the pizza anyway. But we still enjoyed our fruit pizza even though it was missing green and purple. MISC. And Punkin spent three days doing these kinds of things and enjoying playing outside at Grandma's while we had our garage sale. She was a real trooper and had a blast being at Grandma's for three whole days soaking in lots of attention! To see the fun things other tots were up to this past week, you can visit 1+1+1=1.
