Celosia School: Weekly Review

Raccoon is 36 months

This is a very long post, sorry! I didn't think we did much for Tot School until I started looking through my pictures. We did something a little different this week. I didn't have a particular theme, but Raccoon watched several videos on YouTube and then wanted to do activities based on them.

When he watched Be My Valentine from the Richard Scarry's Busytown series (very late at night I confess) he jumped off the couch and told me he wanted to make a valentine for Hilda the hippo so that she wouldn't be sad. I had to support such noble intentions and we got out his "arting stuff" as he calls it.

The moose stood in for Hilda since we don't have a stuffed hippopotamus. Satisfied that his valentine and cutouts made her feel better, Raccoon headed off to bed.

Another day we watched We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, and went on our own bear hunt in the park, properly armed of course. Raccoon had no intentions of running away from the bear since he wants to be a hunter like his grandfather.

After watching Curious George's Mulch Ado About Nothing (in Spanish), Raccoon decided he wanted to make some compost too. We put in a banana peel, onion skins, grape stems, and an apple core in his bucket, then Raccoon decided that he wanted to add some water and dirt too. He was disappointed that it didn't smell bad right away like Curious George's compost. I left it outside and he checks on it daily to see if it's decomposed (and stinky!).

We also did a few organized activities, continuing with our spooky theme from last week. You have to check out how one of my favorite sensory blogs turned this pumpkin face page into a magnetic matching activity, brilliant! I used the same idea for the shadow matching activity from this Pre-K Pack. I especially like her recommendation of cutting up advertising magnets, since I can't get plain magnetic strips where I live.

After we did the haunted house, for the first time my son asked if I had more games like this one, so I let my son play with the pumpkin cutouts and matching sheet before I did the magnets. After matching everything correctly, he made up his own game using both sets. Later when he saw that I’d glued the magnets onto the pumpkins, he told me, “We already did that, Mama!” Ah, my son, the king of no-repetition.

Another big event this week (for me, silly mama) is that Raccoon did his first maze. He's done them on his iPad before, but never really seemed to get the concept on paper. I thought he might like the bat and haunted house on this maze so I printed off one. To my complete surprise, he not only got the idea but wanted to do it several times, so I printed off a new one to put in a protector sheet.

Although we're still have printer problems (sigh), I finally did do some of the landform activities I'd planned a few weeks ago. This is him jumping on our couch in excitement, holding his new "map" and a pillow. It's a great landform poster, and the pdf includes the landform mini-books (pictured below) that I used as well. I bought it during one of Scholastic's pdf dollar deals. Sorry, my iPad camera has no idea how to focus on my bundle of energy.

Next he decided that we needed to go on an expedition, and these were the provisions that he wanted to take along - his battle axe, his current best friend "Cheetah," the map, his laptop, and Melissa & Doug's Noah's ark.

Then we made him a boat (a plastic toy box with a rope tied around it for me to pull) for the expedition. Thank goodness we have tile floors. Captain Raccoon would consult his map and tell me where to go. Our couches were plateaus, the floor was the ocean/river, one corner of the room was a cave, etc. And as with all Raccoon activities, the faster he arrived the better!

Later in the week (when I finally finished putting together all of the mini-books), he pretended to be a teacher and "read" or showed each of them to his class of plastic animals.

But mostly this week we just played with toys we have around the house. One of his recent favorites is this set of magnets. I bought them at a yard sale awhile ago and he likes to "go fishing' with them. He builds himself a pole and I put together some shapes (2D and 3D) for him to "catch." Or we make an aquarium with starfish (below), a zoo with centipedes, or whatever. We usually end by trying to use all of them to make one big cage.

We got out his marble run this week as well, which I finally managed to assemble so that it didn't constantly fall apart. This is fun, but sometimes we both get frustrated with it coming apart before we actually get to use it. It's a great lesson in patience (for both of us!) and in "being gentle." This day we were quite successful though and played with it for maybe a half an hour or so.

His favorite toys are actually his plastic animal/bug collection. We have a large basket full of dinosaurs, zoo animals, marine animals, insects, spiders, etc. and he plays with them again and again. I could write a special post just on all of the uses we've found for his plastic animals (habitats, sorting, classifying, carnivores/herbivores, predators/prey/food chains, classmates, spectators, good/bad guys, etc.). These are some of his newest additions, a birthday present from me to him.