Life with a toddler: Tot School- Z is for Zoo

I can't believe it! We have made it through the entire alphabet in our Tot School! It has been so fun! For our last week, we learned about Z is for Zoo. Little Guy is 37 months old.

The first activity was completing the Z. First, Little Guy painted it white. After letting it dry for a few days, we then glued on pieces of black pipe cleaners (trying to make it look like a zebra). He did not seem to mind painting this week. When he was laying out the pipe cleaners, he was really meticulous at first, but by the end he seemed to just want them done!

The next activity was a printable from Confessions of a Homeschooler. This week, instead of using dot markers, Little Guy placed a colored counter on each circle (recently dug out from one of my school boxes).

For cutting practice, I printed out some strips of animals from the Zoo Pack at 3 Dinosaurs. The first task was to cut apart the animals. Then Little Guy and I worked together to create a pattern. It was a simple AB pattern, but Little Guy seemed to understand patterning better! Our pattern read monkey, lion, monkey, lion, monkey, lion.

To practice counting, I printed another activity from Confessions of a Homeschooler. There were 6 zebras with a number printed next to each one. Little Guy had to clip that many clothespins onto the card. (I omitted the number 6, as I am trying to work more on numbers to 4 and 5.) After he finished clipping, we then sequenced the numbers. In this one activity, we worked on fine motor skills, number recognition, counting, and sequencing numbers! I love getting so much bang out of one activity!

The next activity was two different printables. The first was from the Zoo Pack at 3 Dinosaurs. I gave Little Guy some small zebra stickers, and he had to put one on each Z. This was pretty easy. The second sheet was from Teaching Mama. There were many animal pictures on the page. Little Guy had to decide if the animal could be found in the zoo. One tricky part of this is there are some "zoo" animals that are not found at our zoo, such as an elephant. However, it provided a good discussion for us!

We revisited a fun playdough activity- finding letters in playdough. We made a new batch of playdough (scented with lemon lime kool-aid) especially for this activity. Little Guy had to pull out the letters and place them on the cookie sheet. This was a great review of the letters, and an easy way for me to see which letters he knows and which he still struggles with. Look for this to re-appear next week (partly because the letters were put back in the playdough and I don't want to get them out!).

The last activity was using three part cards with some zoo animals from the Zoo Pack at 3 Dinosaurs. This was the first time I have used three part cards with him, and I am not sure that I did it correctly. We laid out the complete card, then Little Guy matched the picture and then the word. This was hard, as we have only focused on capital letters and the words on these cards were all in lower case letters. However, it was a learning experience for me and so I have some ideas about how I can use them in the future.

We finished our Z week with a trip to the zoo! Two of Little Guy's friends came with us, along with Grandma and Granddaddy A. We had a snack of ABC cookies (each baggie spelling out the owners name) and a scavenger hunt from 123 Homeschool 4 Me. We completed the pictorial scavenger hunt, putting a sticker in the box when we saw the item. We were at the zoo for over two hours, which is much longer than our normal zoo trips! The scavenger hunt was a lot of fun!