Spiders and other Halloween fun

 Whenever I get free time, I always find myself at Target or Walmart. Because really those two stores are best tackled alone! Anyhow, I escaped babyland over the weekend and grabbed a couple of necessities at Walmart... ahem...

 What?! These were necessary!!! Cool spider rings and cool color-coordinated bracelets!!

 Right. So when I got home, I was bombarded by babies, my husband, and, when she spotted the spiders, an especially delighted toddler!

 I have big plans for these two "Learning Manipulatives".(heheh, my husband didn't buy it, either...)
 Our first tot tray was a cookie sheet filled with the bracelets, lined up in ABAB pattern.  I asked Kenna to fill each circle with a matching colored spider. Delighted toddler complied. Yay!

 I also found some awesome "learning stamps" :).  I wrote out numbers 0-10, and Kenna chose a stamp and counted as she pressed. She was engrossed. She loves stampers. She loves the caps that snap on, she loves the pictures, and she loves to smooosh them hard on the paper.

 Hilariously, the stamp that was her favorite was the one that said "I heart vampires".  Um, yeah, if only she knew what a vampire was!!

Back to the spiders- they also made their way into the playdoh tot tray- I set out murky purple playdoh (murky thanks to some great color mixing), some ghost cookie cutters, and a few spiders. Kenna made a big rock for them to climb. This is the only time of year that I refrain from screaming when I see a spider in the house- I just assume it's a fake.  Sometimes my assumption is wrong, though... AACCK!!

I may not get a chance to update this post, but here are my other tot tray ideas for the spiders and bracelets:
make an ABAB pattern with the bracelets, across the floor, or on her baby doll's arm.

Thread spiders onto a pole:

Use our Rainbow Sorter base to thread the spider rings onto.  (You could also use a dowel, or a stick from outside.) Encourage threading the spiders in a pattern, or all of one color, or draw a number card to decide how many spiders to put on the stick.

Sort by color into a divided tray.  (Posted HERE)

Make impressions of the spiders in playdoh.

Can you think of more fun things to do with $4 worth of party favors? :) I'll keep a set for myself, and give the rest out with candy on Halloween night. (mostly so I don't have to store it all...)

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Ocean week!!

Our family spent a week at the beach! I know it is a little late in the season, but eventually you'll be looking for ocean activities, so here they are. Here are some of the fun things we did on our awesome family vacation. I packed a HUGE tub of activities for Kenna and her cousins, since I figured a few rainy days or long afternoons would need some indoor fun. I wanted to mainly focus our work on ocean animals, but brought a few off-theme items as well. I actually brought a lot more stuff than we completed (cause the beach and the private pool took up most of our time!), so I think I'll sort the rest of the activities back into our letter of the week files i.e. stuff on whales can go in W, and pull them out as we go.


Painting- the girls and I went and sat on the beach and observed the sunset.  It was fabulous!  Then we came in to paint our own sunsets. The whole concept of using colors from the sunset to replicate what they saw may have been a bit over their heads, but they really got into it! Watercolors were our medium of choice, but I forgot watercolor paper so we just used plain paper. The art came out great.


Shell Matching- we went on a nature walk along the shore and picked up some unique shells. The girls loved walking and chasing the waves. They liked finding really big shells. Kenna decided she only liked white shells, and rejected every colored shell I offered her.

When we got back to the beach house, Aunt Kristen helped by tracing 6 of the shells onto index cards. Instant matching game! (since the girls are young, I made sure the shells were really different. If they were older, I would have tried to trick them with more similar shaped shells.)

Kenna got the chance to practice taking turns with someone besides me. She had a great time with this game, and we brought it out several times during the week.

I'm a South Floridian at heart, so finding these clam/mussel/oyster? shells was really exciting! We don't have these on our beach! :)

 It's a clam.  Go with it.
We made blue playdoh to do some ocean activities. It's my favorite recipe. I'll post about it later. On this day, I gave them googly eyes and told them to make some ocean animals.  As we got started, Aunt Kristen found some skewers in a drawer and we added them to the fun. (we chopped off the really sharp points first.)

The skewers, the googly eyes and the blue playdoh was very inspiring. They got to work right away making all kinds of interesting creatures!

 It's a narwhale.  Go with it!

A school of fish!

After I finish unpacking, I'll post some more of our ocean week activities. I'm exhausted!

I is for I do it!!

We finally moved onto I week activities. (We got stuck on H, learning about Hippos, then talking about hearts and being happy, and then we got on a huge horse kick.  I love it when we are so engaged!)  I is for Icecream at our house! This activity turned out to be very interesting. I gave Kenna some playdoh to form into the letter I. That didn't even hold her interest long enough to take the playdoh out of the bag. Instead- she went for some buttons.

I sat back and watched as she lined up the buttons and carefully chose which ones she wanted to place on the lowercase i.  She picked out a square button for the "dot" on the i, since it was a square shape.  After she did this, she and I made an uppercase I with buttons.  I hadn't pulled out the butons in a while- I'm so glad she thought of it!

The next day, the playdoh tray enticed her, and she rolled out a lower case i with playdoh, but she used the buttons as dots. It was really fun and not what I had planned at all!

Are you strict about your trays? I am starting to feel torn- I want her to do the work I've laid out, but I would have been so sad to stifle this creativty today.  Ah, Montessori, I always need to read and learn more.