Sunday, August 2, 2009

Tot School - Garden/Farm Theme

Since we are still fairly new to "Tot School" I will introduce ourselves again, my boys are 28 and 51 months (special education, PDD-NOS) and my goals for participating in Tot School is to learn new ideas from others and to track my boy's achievements in meeting their goals. Our biggest goal right now is getting my 51 month old ready for kindergarten (one more year to go) and hopefully into a mainstream class.

I started this week with these awesome assessment sheets from Making Learning Fun to measure where my big guy is at now. I was very excited that they matched our theme - even Mrs. Wishy-Washy!

The big guy got to mark each circle that he knew correctly with a bingo marker. As you can see, we have a long way to go with the Alphabet.



The little guy worked on his colors this week with this file folder game that I printed from my membership to Kid Soup.



We worked on the letter "C"...


I printed this "card game" from Kid Soup and it was supposed to be used for a sorting game, "farm animals" from "zoo animals" but neither boy had any interest. I just worked with the little guy and his animal identification.



The big guy worked this week on a chicken and baby chick matching game that I printed from my membership at Kid Soup. I see improvements in his counting every week - I am very proud of him!




I printed a "Cow Roll and Color" page from Making Learning Fun, which the big guy loved!


After reading "Growing Vegetable Soup" we made big soup bowl pictures with construction paper, macaroni, foam letters and vegetable pictures that the boys colored.










After reading "Oh Say Can You Seed" the boys and I did a quick art project showing some of the things that make plants and flowers grow. Occasionally, I like to do art projects along side them so they can take a look at mine as they go along to get ideas.

Here is mine...



Here is my big guys...he was so proud that he grew tomatoes (the big red circles at the end), he had also "planted" red and purple seeds for tomatoes and eggplants. Pretty good imagination emerging!



The little guy didn't pay to much attention to this project and just drew "dirt" but he did keep it fairly within the different columns. He proudly professed that he drew "big, huge rocket ships".




We worked in our garden this week and even sampled some of the carrots that we planted (although they are not fully grown yet).






These are the books that we read together this week...



Since I planned way to many Farm/Garden themed items for us to complete this week we will be extending our theme to next week also so don't forget to check back.
If you are interested in what others have been doing with their tot's be sure to stop by 1+1+1=1 to see the links.

4 comments:

Shannon said...

Ooh, I love it!

I think we are doing nursery rhymes/fairy tales this week. Not for any reason except that is what we did today, so we may as well continue. I think we'll make a book of our art projects if I keep them all on the same size/shape paper.

Have you read "The Carrot Seed" by Ruth Krauss? It's a cute gardening theme one. There is an audio recording here: http://www.kiddierecords.com/2005/index.htm (week 30 in July) that my kids like too.

James Lambert said...

I love your file folder games and the vegetable soup picture/craft!

I've often thought of joining Kids' Soup--thanks for sharing their activities--now I know it will be worth it.

Exactly what url/page did you find the assessment sheets on Making Learning Fun? I'd love to have the direct page links to do this with Joe.

You guys had a great week--thanks for so many creative/resourceful ideas!!

I got your email--the days fly by for me too and before I know it the whole week is over:-).

Susana said...

I just realized I was signed in under my husband's google account with the above comment about Kids' Soup and assessment sheets and so forth....sorry about that!!

This comment is just so you can actually "know" who left the above comment--sorry about the confusion, hope this makes sense:-)!

Nicole {tired, need sleep} said...

Great creative activities! We love Mrs. Wishy Washy too!