Tot School Winter Theme part 1

Luv Bug is 33 months old

We started our winter theme this week. I planned on 4 weeks but, because I found so many fun ideas, we may take longer. We had alot of fun this week so this post is going to have quite a few pictures.

 I put out 6 trays this week:

 I found these alphabet stickers in the dollar spot at Target. We used the lowercase stickers with these ABC stamping sheets that I purchased from this package at TPT. The unit was $6.00 but included 94 pages of printables. Many were too advanced for Luv Bug, so I put them away for homeschooling. We pretended the stickers were snowballs. The idea was to "'throw a snowball"  to the snowman with the matching capital letter. I put this on a tray because I figured Luv Bug would just do a few before she moved on and would take several days to complete. She LOVED this. It was the first tray she picked and she worked hard until it was finished. I forgot to take a picture of the stamping pages before, but her are a few of them in action:

 I bought this Animal Matching Game last year and Luv Bug's always enjoyed it. She's a pro at it now, so after she matched them, she found other ways to play with them.

 We just bought this pattern block set, so I thought it would be a challenge for Luv Bug. I underestimated this girls love of puzzles. She had no problem with the card I chose. Next time I'll put out one that leaves some of the lines out.

 I saw this idea for a "button snake" here. I thought it was such a cute idea and it was so simple to make. I've set this out before but Luv Bug was never really a fan. This was the first time she was able to do this herself, but after buttoning 5 or 6 she had enough and didn't return to it again.

I bought this Mind Challenge game at the Dollar Tree. I've been looking for one for awhile since I saw a similar idea here. Luv Bug saw me put this tray together last Sunday evening and, while I was putting the others together, took it down and figured out what to do. She loked it alot and asked for it throughout the week. She would put the tees in the holes, then balance a marble on each one. Since I bought this as the dollar store, the tees fit rather tightly into the holes so she has to work her muscles a little harder getting them in and out.

I finally made a set of these magnetic pompoms. I first saw them at 1+1+1=1, but I've seen them on other blogs too. At first I just set them out on their own but later added a fun sheet.

The penguin magnet page was from Making Learning Fun.

Luv Bug discoverd if she poked at the edge of a pom-pom (think Tiddlywinks), it would jump then land on the magnet. She had so much fun repeating this over and over (ok, I did too) .

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I wish I knew how to put together my own printables, but I am not very tech saavy so I'm thankful for those who are willing to share (even for a small charge) their creations:

I printed this mini book awhile ago. I know that it's from here, but I can't find it to link to the post.

 Luv Bug loves the Tot Time Notebook that Carisa over at 1+1+1=1 created.

 Another one of Carisa's printables. I don't really believe in "teaching" Luv Bug at this age. I expose her to certain things that I think may be fun and if she shows an interest or asks I'll answer her. I would have never printed this for her yet but, the other day she was looking at a potty reward chart with seven rows that were numbered 1-10. Because she has a calendar in her room, she could already count to 31, but always had the numbers to look at. Well, the other day, she started counting on the chart. I figured once she counted to 10 in the first row she start over with 1-10 in the second row. Instead she kept going until she got to 39! I was shocked because I've never counted that high with her before. She asked what came next, so I told her, "40". After a minute, she counted 41, 42, 43....by herself. She figured out that after every 10, you add the 1-9 as you count higher. She kept going only to stop and ask me the name in each 10's column. I printed off this 100' s board and figured we'd color 1 number each day and count to that number. Well, Luv Bug wanted to keep counting and has now taught herself to count to 100!

Another from 1+1+1=1,  great for visual discrimination as are the ones below

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I made Luv Bug a winter sensory bin, which she played with alot.

 Lots of blue and white pom poms, snowflakes, winter table scatter, fake mini candles, and some winter themed toys. Most everything came from either the Dollar Tree or Target's dollar spot.

I gave her these little jars and bucket along with my penguin ice cream scoop.

 She played with this alot and added other toys too. This is probably my favorite. She got out her animals from her Fisher Price Alphabet Learning Zoo. (This is a hard toy to find other than on the FP website, unless you want to spend way more) She put one of the little candles in the middle of her animals and told me that they needed to get warm by the fire. 


Another day, I set out some batting and some of the items from her bin. I added an aluminum foil skating pond.

 She played with it a bit but was unimpressed with the pond. That was tossed aside almost immedietly.
I arranged some of the batting to look like an igloo. Luv Bug added a 'fire' and as shown below a polar bear. She said he was warming up in his "dent":)

 Her favorite part of the bin was playing with the candles "fire". She carried them everywhere. Here her Toy Story Busy Book figurines were cold and needed to warm up. (We love the Busy Books. Luv Bug has several of them that she plays with daily.)

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We read several books about winter this week. Here are a few:

This book is so cute. It includes two games (memory matching and bingo)

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 Here are a few random fun pictures that I couldn't resist adding.

 I just thought this was too cute!

 Luv Bug paints at her easel often. She usually starts off like this, and then ends up like this:

 But this is a new one:

Silly girl.

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We did a few other things to, but I didn't get pictures of them. We're having fun with this winter theme. I was going to do 'snow' next, but, because we have quite a few polar bear books that will need to be returned to the library the following week, we'll be learning about polar bears. Lot's of fun things.