Tot School- Christmas Activities Week 1

Hello!  I hope that you are starting to get in the Christmas spirit!  We sure are around here!  Last week's tot school had several Christmas themed activities.  I hope you enjoy them!  Little Guy is 29 months old. 

The first activity was an elf and reindeer sort from the reindeer pack at 3 Dinosaurs.  Little Guy had to cut the pictures apart, then sort them.  He has really been enjoying glue lately, so of course he had to use it on this activity!  Luckily, he hasn't (yet) gotten glue all over!

Hmmm. where does this one go?

Ever have an idea that you think they will love, and turns out they don't?  This was one of those ideas for us.  I have been saving bottle lids (mainly from milk).  For this activity, Little Guy needed to sort the lids into the same colored bowl.  I thought this would be easy for him and also fun.  He really did not like this activity, and only completed it once during the week, on the last day.  Who knew?

Here's another blue lid.

The Christmas tree decorating activity was lots of fun, especially since it involved mini M&M's!  This was  from the Christmas pack at Gift of Curiosity.  Little Guy had to place one M&M on each star on the tree.  This was great one-to-one correspondence practice.  He really enjoyed eating a few M&M's at the end.

I can't wait to be done with this!

Beading was the first activity he chose, but he never came back to it!  I pulled out all our red, green, and white beads from our bead collection, along with 3 pipe cleaners.  This was pretty simple, in that he just needed to put the beads on the pipe cleaner.  When he gets older, we can repeat this activity with the addition of making patterns.  For now, it is great fine motor practice.

Concentrating hard on those beads.

This next activity was one he kept returning to over and over, but it was also one I had to modify a few times.  We used sparkly pom-poms in four sizes and a 4 compartment tray (I picked it up at Target the day after Halloween for only about a buck).  He had to sort the pom-poms according to their sizes.  The first time he did the activity, I had too many pom-poms out, so he got frustrated.  For the next time, I limited it to 5 pom-poms of each size.  Then it was almost too easy for him to sort.  So then I added the tongs.  This seemed to be just right!  I made it a little harder to use the tongs, especially on the small puffs, without being too hard.

Its hard to work to squeeze the little pom-poms.

The last tray was lacing snowflakes.  This is a great activity that he enjoys, and is easy to switch up seasonally or thematically.

In addition to the tot trays, he had some printables in his binder to work on.  From the reindeer pack at 3 Dinosaurs, the pages were the Rudolph color by size and prewriting practice. Instead of Little Guy coloring the different sizes of Rudolph, I asked him to circle all the big reindeer, or small reindeer.  We also used pages from the Reindeer pack at Royal Baloo.  These were the matching page (seen below) and the ABC mat with capital letters.  The ABC mat was great for pointing to as we sang the ABC song.

The line goes here.

What Christmas themed activities have you been up to?

We linked up to Tot School Gathering Place at 1+1+1=1 (we were featured last week)!