Bunny week/Easter 2014

Bunny week followed Easter Week and ended up with a lot of hopping, counting bunny stuffed animals, and dressing up as bunnies. We did have a pile of bunny-themed trays, but I only managed a picture of a few of them.

 Bunny tongs to tweeze sparkly eggs.

Sorting Bunnies by size.

Baking Bread with Daddy!

I'm still on my Montessori kick, and baking bread is a big thing in that curriculum. There are so many awesome components to bread-making- measuring, spooning, reading recipes, following steps, mixing, kneading, watching it transform from dough to bread, and then finally, cutting and eating it!

That said, Bill and Kenna bake bread together all the time. Since she was very little, he's dragged her pink table into the kitchen and put her to work. Unfortunately for our precise bread recipes, Kenna is not the most precise pouring, measuring or mixing gal. They usually turn out edible, though.

Here's Kenna, scooping flour VEEERRRY carefully. (You should see my floors after these sessions!) Daddy told her to fill to the "2" and she is doing a great job.
Reading the recipe together.

I love that Bill spends this time with Kenna. I love that we have homemade bread every week. (No, I don't bake bread.) And I love that it is educational and fits the Montessori model, even though we didn't know it!

Butterflies and Beans

Our texture tub this week goes with our letter of the week, B.  Butterflies that we dyed together (details in THIS post) and some white beans.  I think Kenna could have played with this tub forever. She loved butterfly pasta, she loved sorting by color, and she really loved trying to scoop out the white beans from the pasta. 
All I gave her, tool-wise, was a small ladle and a muffin tin. /

She didn't get bored of this tub, and I almost hated putting it away!  I have a feeling our butterfly pasta will be making an appearance again soon!

lowercase b

BLUE starts with b!!!

Lowercase "b" is for blue!!! We painted with blue paint, and talked about our favorite b words. (kenna's are bunny, book, butterfly, and her friend Brenna.) Daddy and Kenna had already "read" her new mail cards and colored on them a bit first thing this morning, so she was excited about more B words when it was time to sit down at the table.

While the blue paint dried, I drew a cute butterfly and let kenna cut it out (Scissors are the highlight of her day!!) Then I pulled out the watercolors and she went to town. She was quite through with blue, though, and this butterfly ended up mostly red.

On to our Tot Trays. Capital Letter matching (worksheet from coah- here's her whole B unit) and our letter tiles. We also did lowercase matching, but those are MUCH harder for Kenna(read: super-frustrating. Therefore, no time for pics- I was busy coaxing her to try and match, instead of throwing the tiles on the floor.)

Tot Tray 2 was sorting B for Buttons. We did this after lunch and before nap. I provided our little sorting tray, cards that spelled out the colors (and were also colored) plus one button on each side. B for Blue and a nice contrasting yellow are the only button choices in her jar. (maybe later in the year I'll have three colors in the jar, but ask that only two colors be sorted... oh the challenge!) I also provided tongs, but she chose not to use them. She diligently sorted the buttons by color, and also found a lot of joy in lining the buttons up around the perimeter of the tray. (Then she wanted to sort by shape like we did yesterday, and I pulled out her muffin tin. I love when she asks for more "learning"!)

Tot tray 3 was sequencing butterflies numbered 1-10. We had a blast with this, and I forgot to grab pictures. We just laid them out in a huge line across the floor. I had planned to let her clip mini-clothespins to each butterfly to represent each number, but just finding the numbers and lining them up was joyful and fun. Isn't it wonderful to be flexible!?

The Letter B

B is for butterflies and beans! This week is our second week of summer, and we're working our way through the alphabet. I wanted to share some of the highlights of our crafts and activities.

Toddler learning is so much fun! Our capital letter B Collage craft was a hit! First we stamped the letter B all over the place on the outline of a B that I drew, and then we got to work gluing.

I gave Kenna a foam brush and some watery glue and let her get to work. The end result was a bit messier than I anticipated, since the ink from the stamp pad sort of ran all over the place, and the dye from the butterflies we made ran everywhere, and the beans were too small for her to "paint" with glue so she ended up painting her entire hand. Lots of mommy lessons learned today. :) Also, about half-way through she decided "sprinkling" (her word) the beans over the paper was a good idea, but there was no glue on the paper so they wouldn't stick... seriously infuriating my toddler.

Beading and Bracelets!

Amusingly, at 2 years old my child LOVES to string bracelets! We use pipe cleaners and little pony beads. We actually did blue and brown beads today on a blue pipe cleaner, with the color words spelled out on cards for her to look at. (That pic was blurry, so use your imagination!)

Buttons!

Buttons start with B! I gave Kenna buttons to sort by shape(2 of each shape). She used a mini-muffin tin to do her sorting. She loves to sort, she loves to pile up her I buttons, and she loves to dump them back out. I presented this activity on the floor on a small hand towel, to keep her in a defined area. I also chose to only provide a few buttons, as opposed to our whole stash. Can you guess what may or may not have happened last time we tried this? LOL!