Weekly Review - Polar Lands

Raccoon is 35 months

Raccoon and I had a lot of fun this week visiting the Polar Lands. He really enjoyed board time, especially Amundsen's route to the South Pole. He'd peer closely at the map and say, "Tell me again, Mama!"

For a list of all the things we did and the sources, check out my activity chart.

I put the penguin poster up in our living room and Raccoon enjoyed picking out a different kind of penguin to be each day when he wore his penguin mask. On the poster, I only colored the ones that live in or around Antarctica. His favorites were the macaroni and emperor penguins. We also put up a small, black-and-white tent my dad gave him and we re-enacted Amundsen's trip to the South Pole with sled dogs.

One of Raccoon's favorite activities from this week was feeding the penguin. We used crayons as fish, counting how many the penguin ate and which colors he liked best. Then Raccoon went on a hunt through his toy box to find other objects small enough to fit in his mouth. We played this game on several different days.

Then he lined up his turtle family for the "I see" book from this week's Raising Rock Star Preschool (Tt). Right now, I'm just using the RRSP verse (on our board), the letter of the week word cards, the "I see" book, sometimes the song, and the "I can" examples if included. I've stopped any cutting or tracing activities for now due to his lack of interest. We did the Tt cards with his turtles too, each of them picking a word to be "theirs."

We did another ice sensory activity this week. Raccoon enjoyed it so much the last time we did it that I knew it would be fun to repeat. On the bottom left is a tray with colored ice cubes and some of his plastic arctic/antarctic animals frozen in ice (I used a muffin tin for them). In the center is cold water, then on the bottom right is a bowl of warm water to melt the ice around the animals. The blue in the pan above that is colored salt for snow. I drew a line in the middle and we talked about which animals lived at the North or South Poles. The little pot on top is hot water that I would carefully add when his warm water got too cold to melt the ice.

When he was done playing, I cleaned up most of the sensory stuff and we built igloos with his alphabet blocks.

The kind of activities that Raccoon likes best are ones we can turn into open-ended pretend play. He matched the penguins and where they put their eggs in our "Nesting Time" activity and looked at "What's Inside this Egg." Then we played that the penguins were looking for their families, hiding from predators, etc.

With the Race Munch Mat, I showed Raccoon how to "drive" his cars around the oval, then we lined them up to see who won first, second, third, etc.

Check out this week's Tot School link-up for more ideas.

Next week we're going to take some time off since we have doctor appointments and some extra playdates, but we'll be taking up Tot School again the week after with a landform theme.