Tot School Time!

Our actual tot tray use this week was a little light because we were very busy with Halloween crafts and baking. But, we still got in some fun new activities that kept Maddie happy!

I saw this on one of my favorite blogs, Izzie, Mac & Me and knew we had to try it out. I only had an 18 spot egg carton, but it still worked out. I wrote numbers one through six in it and then put a "magic pebble" inside. She would close the lid, shake it three times (we'd count out loud), open it up and see what number the pebble landed on.
Then, using a template from Spinner's End Nursery (she has a couple versions; I printed, matted and laminated all of them and have USED all of them, too!). She would cover up the number that she landed on. She used the pumpkin erasers and I used the bats. :)
I don't know if it was the novelty of the "shaker box" or just practicing numbers, but she lasted with this activity a loooooooong time.

I'm bummed I didn't get a better picture of this, but it was another number activity. Using the same shaker box, we changed it up a little bit. Nicole did this with her son and I was excited to try it with Maddie. I printed out a grid that she provided (this time with blank boxes) and put out her little stamps (dollar spot at Target; she now has quite the collection of them!). She would stamp out whatever number she landed on. This was a GREAT activity for teaching/reinforcing one-to-one correspondence and counting. She loved it. I think we went through six grids!

Daddy got in on the fun too, which always makes Maddie super happy!

When we stayed at the hotel last weekend, they gave us this really cool art set. Maddie has loved sitting and coloring, painting and using all the different markers. Thank you Heather!

But, the highlight of the week was when we read the story of Noah's ark in our toddler Bible. It was raining and I thought it was the perfect day for this. After reading the story and talking about it, we set out to make our own ark, using a shoe box and lots of glue!

We glued on windows, sails and water. She colored the floor of the boat and decorated it to "make Noah happy." Then, we went through all her little figures and found two of every animal that we could (and surprisingly, there were a lot!). I cut a door in the boat and seriously, every day since, she has marched those animals in and out of the boat.

Here's what I hear when she plays:

"Hurry hippopotamus! Where's my partner? Get in the boat! The flood is comin'!"
Now, repeat that with about 20 different animals.

When I saw this on Shannon's blog, I couldn't wait to introduce it to Maddie. She's been so interested in cutting but still really struggles with enough strength to actually cut. So for this, I rolled out a bunch of Play-Doh snakes.

She cut those snakes into millions of tiny parts! I think she worked on this for about 45 minutes, deep in concentration. Thank you Shannon for posting such great detail about this activity!

And finally, I had to throw in a shot of some of our cookies. We bought some sparkly black icing and piped in the details. Maddie loved this!

Check out what other tots have been busy with by clicking over to Carisa's blog!