Weekly Review - My Body & Monsters



Raccoon is 34 months

Tot school this week - Raccoon was not excited about so much seatwork (aka fine motor), so I changed some of the activities I had planned to make them more active. I didn't re-link to my sources, so please see my activity chart post if you're curious where I got the ideas and materials.

He loves to play "museum," so this often how I sneak some learning into our play. First I laid out the body part pictures, then I told him that a naughty monster had stolen all the signs and it was his job to put them back in the right places. I said the words as I passed him the slips of paper, and he matched the labels to the right body part.

Then he, the museum guard, "fell asleep" and the naughty monster came back and stole all of the exhibits (body part pictures). He did a really good job with both ways of matching.

He did such a good job protecting the museum afterwards that the naughty monster (a cow puppet we call MooMoo) decided to mess up a new exhibit, a picture of a boy.

But the "guard" helped me re-label the boy, and this time we glued them on. Ha! Foiled again evil MooMoo.

Tracing was not a hit, I'm not sure if he didn't understand the concept or just didn't see the point (not pictured but I had a page with lines after the monster one). Oh well. On the monster one, my printer didn't do a good job with the colors so the differences were hard to spot. Since I have my nifty tracing book and dry erase markers, I'm going to try again, perhaps with some homemade sheets. Sometimes I give up on something I think he's not interested in, only to have him ask me for it a few weeks later, so I'd like him to at least see the idea a couple of times before I totally put it away.

I forgot to print out the continent maps, so we did an impromptu art project instead. I did the wavy lines with a paintbrush, then he poured water on the page. Afterwards, I picked it up and let the water run off. I put rolled up towels on either side of his little work table to absorb the extra water.

The end result was a lot more colorful than I expected.

Play doh is one of our most frequent activities. I bought him a nice set of things last month, and we have used it a lot already. He likes to have me roll out a thin piece, then he makes tracks with his plastic animals. He also likes to stack different shape cutouts (we have a circle, clover, diamond, star, and tree). When we first bought the set, the scissors were his favorite.

He liked the number order puzzle. We pretended that he was a doctor putting the person back together. But about halfway through the second one, he decided that it was time for him to be the patient, so we were off to play doctor, then knight.

I mixed up the cornstarch paint, but we don't really have any sidewalks where I live, so we chose a cement wall at our neighborhood park instead. I wish I had a large paintbrush because the sock didn't work very well, it was too hard for Raccoon to manipulate. We ended up just splashing the paint on the wall instead. I also only made up three colors with 1/4 cup each, but if I did it again, I'd probably do maybe 1 cup each.

The Color Changing Milk experiment was very cool. We did it twice, then he used the milk to paint a picture with q-tips. It was so much fun that I forgot to take any pictures until he was all done. (I painted the sun, he hasn't really started to paint anything on purpose yet, he mostly just likes to scribble with the paint).