In honor of Valentine’s day we studied the letter H for the past two weeks.  We did lots of heart activities and Mikayla can now proudly write the letter H!  She draws it everywhere – in coloring books, in the dirt, in the air, on her chalkboard…everything includes an H.  Too bad it isn’t in her name because she can’t write any of those letters yet!  We are taking a week or two break from school because we are traveling with Ben to meetings and then hanging with him before he leaves on March 5 to head to the states.  We will pick back up with a Dr. Seuss theme for a couple of weeks when we return to Toddler School.  If anyone has fun ideas, we would love to hear them!  Here are some of our H activities.

H is for hearts – used heart shape stickers to stick all over the H.

She found the matching letter stamp and stamped the correct letter.  Turns out this kid LOVES stamps!  She wanted to use them everyday.

Heart color sorting.  We also used these hearts and sorted big and small and rolled the dice to count out that many hearts.

Torn paper name.  She had a blast gluing the small pieces of paper onto her letters.  She even did a great job of tracing the written letter with the glue.

H is for hands.  We also made a special craft with some of her hands to send to some family members in the states (didn’t take a picture though because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise).

Here are some more heart activities from top to bottom – Heart man, heart collage with leftover hearts from other activities, and heart name.

Our food activity for the week was making heart shaped cookies to pass out to staff members on Valentine’s day.  As usual, she had a blast rolling out the dough and cutting out the cookies!

We have spent the last two weeks doing activities about the Letter P.  Mostly penguin and polar bear stuff.  Unfortunately I did not snap very many pictures, but here is what I got. 

We made a letter P penguin and then of course she had to take the scraps and make her own version of a penguin!

I drew out a penguin and then had her choose a magnetic number and feed him that many fish.  We also played this with a polar bear that I drew out.

We made a paper plate penguin.

We also read Polar Bear, Polar Bear several times and then I made out the animal cards for her to retell with.  We spent a lot of time playing games from our Letter W unit too, so not much new this week.  I haven’t decided yet what letter we will move onto next week.  I am thinking probably Letter H for hearts since Valentine’s Day is coming up!  I keep you posted.

Have you been missing my Toddler School updates?  Well, so have we!  We have actually not had "school" in several weeks and I have been itching to jump back into it.  Since it is winter back in the states and I want Mikayla to be aware of different seasons (besides just hot, hotter and hottest) I decided to do a mini winter unit and focus on the letter W.  Looking back on it I probably should have just done the Letter S for snow since most of our activities were snow related, but oh well!  Like most weeks I had too much planned, meetings came up or Mikayla lost interest, so we will continue with some of our winter activities next week when we begin our letter P study (penguins and polar bears).  Here are some of the fun winter things we did this past week.

We first took snowballs and practiced spelling her name…

…then we took those same snowballs and made a really large name snowman!

Thanks to the Cate’s for their wonderful shape button donation I made this game for Mikayla.  At the top of each pipe cleaner (or ski poles as Mikayla called them) I attached a picture of a different shape. She then "laced" the buttons onto the correct one.  She worked really hard at this game.

When she was finished she took the "ski poles" and went skiing…just like Grandma and Grandpa Kickert!

To make this game I took empty toilet paper rolls and wrapped construction paper around them. Then labeled with a number and a corresponding number of stickers.  For this game she would look at the numbers (or count the stickers) and place that many snowballs inside (pom poms).  I know snowballs are traditionally white, but I didn’t have enough so we went with colored snow…who doesn’t love that?!

This game is not winter related at all, but I have had it in my head for a long time now…I just needed enough empty match boxes to make it.  I wrapped empty match boxes in construction paper and then labeled the outside with capital letters.  The inside is filled with lowercase letters.  Her job was to match the two and complete the match box.  You could also use magnetic letters for the inside (matching capital to capital as well).  Eventually I would like to make a number set and as she gets older a spelling game with the whole word on the outside and letters on inside to form the word…but that is way in the future!

Button snowman game.  She rolled a dice and placed that many buttons on the snowman.

We went on a white scavenger hunt around the house and found white items to make a collage with.

On this particular day she wanted to color, so I quickly drew a family of snowmen for her to color.

Shape snowman – I gave her direction on where to put certain shapes to complete a snowman.

Thanks to JDR and Brittany we had some winter gummies I was able to use this week.  She sorted the shapes and then of course ate a few!

W is for winter – she made a winter scene using her finger and paint as snowflakes.

A very odd looking footprint snowman.  She picked out the colors and items for his accessories!

I have a special winter activity planned for the whole family that I think will take place on Sunday. I will be sure to blog about it next week!