Tot School - Be Peacemakers ~ Learn Play Imagine

*JM is currently 37 months old*

Our themes for the week were Letter B and PEACE.

I will talk more about the theme in JZ's weekly wrap up post.

Here is a glance at JM's Tot Trays for the week.

The first time he played with the Unifix Cubes he used them like blocks to make towers and letters.

He put the tray up for awhile then brought it back down later and asked for help. Together we put the numbers 1-10 in numerical order. (He told me which came next, pointed to the correct butterfly, then asked me to put it in line.)

He chose which number to do, and we didn't work in order. We counted the correct number of cubes and attached them before putting next to the corresponding butterfly.

The butterflies are from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I printed them out and laminated them before cutting, so I can use them over and over in the years to come.

After all the counting was done he flew the butterflies around for a good ten minutes. :)

The Tall Stacker Pegs Building Set got played with every single day this week by all four kids (mainly as chew toys by the younger two). My mom bought it for JM for his birthday, and to say it was a great purchase is an understatement.

I had several ideas for these trays including sorting the pegs by color, sorting the mats by shape, counting, patterning, etc., but JM really just wanted to build with them. He is three years old, and playing trumps everything, in my opinion.

JM colors more days than not, but I can't remember the last time I gave him a color sheet instead of a blank piece of paper. He was pretty excited to color his butterfly. The printout is from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

If you've been following my Tot School posts you know that pretty much each week JM makes the letter of the week using letter builders. To change it up and add a little challenge, this week I put three cards on his tray with all of the pieces needed to build each letter. He was tickled when he saw three cards on his tray.

After building each letter (and yes, he did it in the order pictured) he said the letter and sound.

His final tray was the favorite for the week, as you can imagine. I sliced a few pool noodles into smaller pieces for our Pool Noodle Backyard Obstacle Course. With some of the leftover pieces I thought it would be fun to paint!

Goofs.

Not pictured: He and JZ played with their geoboards

one morning while I was nursing. They couldn't wait for school time!

To read about sensory bins and why they are included in our play every single week (even when I don't blog about the specifics), be sure and check out the first post in my new series, Child's Play 101.