Frogs

Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old

Little M&M is 5 months old

Books

We made our weekly trip to the little local library and picked up a few books about frogs. A childhood favorite of mine, Frog and Toad, is just a little too advanced for Honey Pot so I reluctantly left it behind. We did, however, discover new books that were such fun to read. My favorite of the three is Leap Back Home To Me, by Lauren Thompson. The story is so simple and so sweet as a mommy frog watches her baby leap out into the big world, and remains there for him when he returns home. Do check it out!

City Dog, Country Frog, by Mo Willems

Leap Back Home To Me, by Lauren Thompson

I Took My Frog To The Library, by Eric A. Kimmel

Snack

I first spotted this cute little snack from Pinterest, via a blog called Clean and Scentsible. So adorable! And yummy too – Honey Pot ate the entire thing. Instead of using cream cheese as “glue” though we used peanut butter. It’s an absolute favorite in this house, and sure tasted great with the apples!

Paper Bag Puppet

Our craft for the week was inspired by one I discovered from DLTK-Kids, a website I have often visited since beginning Tot School. First I offered Honey Pot the paper bag and green paint.

“I’m make a frog!” she exclaimed before getting started.

Then, after it had dried, we assembled the pieces. I let her take full control of the glue, only showing her where to put it.

Here is the final product:

Then it was time to PLAY!

She loved this little guy. We forgot to give him a name. But she had many laughs with him!

Frog Pond, Small World

This is our first “small world” sensory bin. The idea came from the blog so humorously entitled You’ll Thank Me One Day. Honey Pot enjoyed it greatly because she is a huge, huge fan of pretend play. The package of 8 frogs came from the Dollar Tree. I cut a few lily pads out of my craft foam, already in my supplies, and added some flowers from my scrapbooking stash. Oh, and a couple drops of food coloring to make the pond blue!

We talked about the lily pads and had a quick lesson on floating versus sinking. Honey Pot had a fun time trying to balance the frogs on the lily pads. And she played with them for quite a while.

We also put them all in a row and counted them up!

Here she is making her froggie leap into the water…over and over and over again. J

Dressing For The Occasion

Little M&M is still quite young for our tot school themes, but he did wear his very cute frog outfit, and play with his froggie toys. What a cutie…

Lily Pad Color Matching

I quickly created a template for Honey Pot to match the colors of the frogs to their lily pads. She had an easy time of it!

Each lily pad was numbered too; so then we tried some number recognition. “Leap to the number four!” etc.

Letter Matching

I just wanted to practice some letter recognition with Honey Pot, so I created this worksheet in Photoshop Elements. I printed it on cardstock and used a circle punch from my scrapbook supplies to cut out the letters. Honey Pot needed a bit of help matching the letters up, but we did it!

She even took the liberty of adding a green frog over the picture!

Button Art

Honey Pot received this cute toy from Santa last Christmas. We took out the image of the frog, and popped the buttons through according to color. It had been a while since she played with this, so it was nice. She has definitely improved since then!

Pirates!

Theme: Pirates

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old

Coloring Pages

I introduced this week’s theme with some pirate-themed coloring pages that I found on the Internet. Both crayons and markers were offered, but Honey Pot went right for the markers!

Book and CD

One book that has become a favorite in this house recently is called Port Side Pirates. A friend of ours hosted what is called a Barefoot Books Party, where we were able to browse tons of these beautifully illustrated and uniquely written stories, some of them with accompanying CDs such as this one. I highly, highly recommend these Barefoot Books. And actually, I have ordered more through another friend’s party just today! So as we do most every day, we listened to the catchy tune (which you can hear right here).

By the way, Honey Pot woke up from her nap with one of her pretty dresses in hand, asking to wear it. So she wore it for the remainder of the day, pretending to be a princess. Well, that didn’t interfere with our pirate activities. Just call her Princess Pirate…aarrrrrgghh!

Buried Treasure Activity

Someone had given me the box from a bottle of Patron, and it has since been just waiting among my craft supplies. So this week, I turned it into Honey Pot’s treasure chest! I covered it in brown and yellow paper, colored some wood grains on with a black crayon, and voila!

Then I put some rice (meant to be sand) and treasure inside. The treasure is just golden coins and necklaces from the Dollar Tree. Super cheap, but loads of fun!

I also created this template for Honey Pot to collect and count her gold.

Add a pirate hat and patch (…find the free printable here)!

And my (princess) pirate is ready to go!

Honey Pot didn’t keep the patch on very long, but she was very excited to explore her treasure chest!

She got right down to business. She dug her hands into the rice and immediately pulled out the jeweled necklaces on top.

Then she picked up her first gold coin and, without instruction, laid it upon the template.

Here are some snapshots of her digging for treasure. Note Little M&M behind her…lol. He was very well behaved during his sister’s activity.

This was also a fun sensory bin! She seemed to have fun exploring its texture.

Some of the gold coins were really hidden! I had to help her with the last three. I admit that I almost second-guessed how many were supposed to be there actually, because they were so hard to find, lol. But lo and behold we found them all. Here she is counting them up!

Telescope Prop

I had a spare paper towel roll, about to be tossed into the recycling, when I realized it would make a great telescope for our little pirate. So I quickly covered it in black and yellow paper, and added some ribbon from my scrapbooking supplies. I also added some extra black paper on one side that could extend out like a real telescope.

Here is Princess Pirate “looking far away” with her telescope!

Pretend Play

After our successful treasure activity, we put all of the treasure in a pile. I slid it all to my side of the table and said, “I stole your treasure! I’m a pirate!” to help instill just what pirates actually do. She quickly caught on and stole the treasure back. We did this a few times, all the while using fun pirate phrases such as “aarrrrrgghh” and “yo ho ho!”

Ice Cube Boats and Sunken Treasure Sensory Bin

The inspiration for our final pirate activity came from a blog called Alpha Mom. First we did a little color matching, as Honey Pot placed one straw in each bowl.

I taped the straws into the bowls, and then gave her a measuring cup to pour water into each one.

For the sails, I provided Honey Pot with a small piece of scrap paper to decorate with crayons and stickers.

When she woke up from her nap, the boats hadn’t completely frozen yet. So she stayed entertained with a sunken treasure sensory bin.

Finally the boats were frozen! I placed the coordinating sails onto each straw.

And they set sail!

Suffice to say they melted super quickly! If we were to do this again I would probably add ice to the bucket of water to help slow that down. So I just added some of her toy boats (purchased in a set of three from the good ol’ Dollar Tree) for her to play with.

We pretended they were pirate ships, searching for sunken treasure and hoarding gold!

This theme…WAS.A.BLAST.

Play Date Book Club

Theme: Press Here, by Hervé Tullet

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 3 months old

Hugely inspired by one of my very favorite blogs, Mommy and Me Book Club, I decided to include some structure to one of Honey Pot’s play dates this week. I chose one of her current favorite books, Press Here by Hervé Tullet. This is a wonderful and unique book that requires audience participation. They are asked to press, shake, tilt, clap, etc. and observe the results of their actions. It is very fun, and very cute to see the children react to the new arrangement of dots.

Originally I had created an entire tot school theme out of this, with multiple activities and even a dot-inspired snack. But because it was my first time, and I wasn’t sure how interested the children would be, I kept it quite simple.

First we read the book.

 

Then I provided the three girls with booklets (made just from two sheets of printer paper folded in half and stapled together) and dot markers. These I purchased from Amazon, and we love them! For older children, after they are done creating their dots, you can ask them to create the captions for their books.

 

For this idea and others for Press Here check out this blog post at Crayon Freckles!

And I apologize for the lack of pictures. I didn’t want to scare Honey Pot’s friends away.