Creation Day 3, Plants, and Blue (25 mos)

The Objectives
Bible Theme: God Made the World Around Me
Lesson: Plants (creation day 3)
Memory verse: Genesis 1:1
Color: Blue
Shape: line
Number: 1
Letter: A-G

The Recap
Looks like Week 2 is going to turn into another 2 weeker for us.  It's more because of my issues rather than Jesse just loving the trays so much that I just HAD to extend the lessons.  Of course, I had to be all unorganized and not have ALL of the stuff ready in time for Week 2 to start, but I suppose that's okay.  I've had some high expectations for this week but I'm not sure if the tot is enjoying it as much as I'd hoped!  One of the great things about teaching my toddler is seeing him extend an activity in a way I never thought of or simply creating different uses for the trays than I'd intended.  It's so neat to see his creativity and imagination shine as he explores!

This is his art work for his Creation book.  I was racking my brains on how I could get my 2 year old to have a page to represent land and plants.  I know it's all about the process, but I really wanted him to have a page that went with the theme of the book.  So I decided to get some patterned scrapbook paper and arrange shape foam stickers to look like flowers.  My goal was to get him to paint over the entire paper with a light blue paint (for the sky) and then I was going to peel off the stickers.  I used some masking tape for stem.  

Here he is working on day 4, where God created the land and the plants.  He enjoyed using his roller brush and his old plastic baby spoon to paint!  I tried to make this a 2 day project with the hopes that he would paint more of the paper but on day 2 he tossed the paint around a bit and was done!  

Playing on the iPad.  He's loving the Montessori Numbers App and the Wee Sing & Learn ABC App!  

He was interested in this tray for a couple of days.  Soon the paper was off the tray and he was just playing with the letters but he got the idea of it right away!

I thought these bugs would go great with a plant theme.   I ended up just tossing this tray together.  I thought he'd be more interested in the bugs and try to build stuff.  Nope!  Instead he decided to pretend the blocks were food and brought me more and more food to eat!  After we put them all on the floor and I showed him how to make squares out of the triangles.  We counted shapes too, which he enjoyed.  I love how he can make things infinitely more interesting than I ever intended!

He decided to make more food (pizza) after he was done counting
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I have been wanting to do this tray for awhile now!!  I just thought he would love it!  I couldn't bring myself to buy a block of foam though!  I know it's not that expensive, but come on...you can get this stuff free in packaging!!  Well, we finally got something that had the foam block in it and I was super excited!!  Here I used red flowers as well for a bit of review.

He really wasn't too interested in this activity at first.  He gave it a few tries and was done.  But as I left the tray out, I noticed he'd run over to it from time to time and play with it more and more.  

He loves his bumble bee magnifying glass!  

Here's another one that I was really excited about!  I debated and debated on what to use as the base for this sensory bin!  We just had melt down here and there were TONs of small rocks on our block (used instead of salt to help melt the snow).  The neighbors had swept them into nice neat piles, so Jesse and I worked as the "clean up crew" to go gather the rocks.  It was kind of a pain because I wanted to rinse them out before I let him play in them.  We don't have a hose so I had to do this in our tub!  Yuck!  Thankfully, I did rinse them out though because not only were they really gross, but I found an old rusty nail in there too!  

This was a pretty neat learning experience for him.  He decided to start putting rocks inside the tupperware.  The lid has a small hole in it and he had to figure out which rocks could fit and which couldn't.  Nice opportunity to practice vocabulary words "big" and "small"!  

Here's another activity I was really excited about trying - even if it did take forever to put together!!  I've seen some "I spy" sensory bins around the interwebs and had to give it a try!!  

He has loved this activity!  He was able to match them all up and really enjoyed getting up and moving around to get the objects matched up to the pictures.  It ended up being a great open ended activity as well!  When he would get tired of matching the objects or found one he really liked, he'd stop matching and then use his imagination to play with the objects!  The Ronald Mc Donald toy was a favorite - he likes pretending that one is a phone and will push "buttons" while naming the "numbers" he's dialing!  The toy truck was also a favorite!  I plan on doing this for his next color too!