Tot School- on the farm (30 Months)

Jonathan is 30 Months

This week we've been learning about farms and farm animals. Grace has been enjoying looking at pictures of animals, so this was a theme both children could enjoy. We had a lot of fun! 

Bible 

This week we covered Isaac and Jacob during our Bible story time. We used some resources from Hubbard's Cupboard as well as some resources I personally own. Look for an upcoming post to cover what we did for Jacob. 

Stories, Nursery Rhymes & Read Alouds 

We read lots of books about farms and farm animals this week. I selected some that would appeal to Gracie as well as some longer ones that would be for Jonathan. Some favorites (click on the title to see our reviews, as well as additional books we enjoyed). 

• The Complete Book of Farmyard Tales by Heather Amery
• Baby Danced the Polka by Karen Beaumont
• Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton
• Does a Cow Say Boo? by Judy Hindley
• Poke-A-Dot- Old MacDonald's Farm (Jonathan's favorite!)

Language Arts 

We continued trying to do some worksheets about beginning sounds.We tried to do some our Explode the Code primers and also tried some from School Sparks.  (Have you seen the School Sparks blog yet? It's a great resource for phonics worksheets.) 

While Jonathan can easily tell you that F says "fffffff", he at least hasn't been successful at pointing out pictures of words that start with the "fffff" sound. He also hasn't been patient enough to sit through a worksheet. He just wants to color everything. So, that's okay. We'll save it for another time. 

We did some Montessori nomenclature cards that Carisa over at 1+1+1=1 designed. The purpose was for Jonathan to match up the farm animals with the words for the animals. We also used her Memory & Match Up cards. Both of these sets were used throughout the week. 

The biggest use was matching our farm toob animals with the pictures. Jonathan had fun doing this over and over again. 

We also continued to work on name recognition. He's gotten pretty proficient at finding his name on the morning message board. 

Math 

Jonathan loved the book Poke-A-Dot Old MacDonald's farm. It is a great counting book, counting down from ten cows to one rooster. The clever and kid-appealing part of the book is their "Pop-a-tronic" technology-- each page has clear, clickable buttons for children to push, one for each number. It helps to reinforce counting and teach one-to-one number correspondence. Jonathan loved popping the buttons and wanted to read this book over, and over, and over again. Sometimes he was so excited about the buttons that he'd forget to count. This was a huge hit!

Sensory Play


We had a sensory bin this week. I used unpopped popcorn and gave Jonathan some cups and spoons to practice spooning, pouring and transferring. We also stuck his farm toob animals in the corn and he just spent lots of time with this this week.

Practicing spooning

Picking up spills

Transferring 

Playing with animals

Pretend Play

We played with his farm animals a lot as well as his Little People barn. He had fun building fences for his animals:

Art 

We made some farm animals this week. Jonathan finger painted a "dirty pig" and we also made a sheep:

I got the ideas from Usborne Farm Fun, part of their Preschool Activities series.

Music & Movies


We sang Old MacDonald a lot this week. We also watched Signing Time: Leah's Farm and reviewed our signs for different animals.

Games 


We looked through our 1001 Things to Spot on the Farm book and tried to find the different animals. We also did several of our farm puzzles and played with our See & Say.

Field Trip 


Finally, we attempted to go on a field trip to a local farm that had a petting zoo. Unfortunately, the petting zoo wasn't open. But we did come home with some good fresh produce! The state fair is in a couple weeks, so we'll get our petting zoo fix there.

Thanks for visiting! To see what other families have done, be sure to visit Carisa's blog at 1+1+1=1. Have a great week!