"E" Activity Trays

Tweet

Pin It

Whew - we finally got to an easygoing letter! And my name starts with it! Here are the "E" activity trays that worked for this 26-month-old during "E" school...

Sensory Tub. Since I really liked the popcorn tub, Mommy brought it back out and put plastic eggs in it! I made egg shakers for music practice and had lots of fun pouring the popcorn in and out of the eggs.

Eggs. There are lots of other things you can do with plastic eggs, too! Like make egg eyes...

Color-sorting Eggs. Throw in an egg tray and a bunch of colorful eggs and you get color sorting fun. Like when Mommy puts in a row of six colored eggs and I have to put matching eggs in the other row. Though my idea of color matching was to take apart all the eggs and make sure they all had different-colored tops and bottoms.

What Comes Out of Eggs? For more of a challenge, fill the eggs with animal finger puppets. As you "hatch" the eggs, you have to tell Mommy if those animals actually come out of eggs or not.

Silly Putty Eggs. My favorite thing to come out of eggs, of course, is silly putty! First is the challenge of getting it out of the egg.

Then you get to stretch it, and break it into pieces, and make snakes, and balls, and then bounce the balls. You can make bears and then pinch the parts off the bears. You can wrap it around your fingers, cut it with scissors, make impressions on it, or tracks through it with dinosaurs. You can even put it on your nose to make a nose impression!

And of course it picks up newsprint pictures and erases pencil writing, too.

Sequence Envelopes. Inspired by First the Egg (by Laura Vaccaro Seeger), Mommy made some sequence envelopes for me. The envelope has a clipart picture of what came first - egg, tadpole, seed, caterpillar, etc.

Then the card in the envelope has a picture of what came next - chicken, frog, flower, butterfly. So I am supposed to tell Mommy what is inside before I open the envelope. Then I take the notecard out and show her I'm right. Then I put the card back in the envelope.

I am still trying to figure out envelopes, though. It's tough to get the card back in the envelope...

Feed the Elephants. Mommy printed out four elephants on cardstock. Each of the elephants had a number (from 1 to 4) that shows how many peanuts each one gets. And I am learning to recognize my numbers! (Though you can use dots rather than numbers to make it easier.)

I take my bowl of styrofoam peanuts and feed the right number to each elephant.

But sometimes I feel sorry for the one with only one peanut and try to distribute the peanuts more evenly...

Erasers. This was my favorite tray - it had lots of mini erasers in the shape of flowers. I got to sort them out by color. My favorite thing to do was pick out all the pink ones and spread them out throughout the house...

Earth. Mommy hasn't found a big globe on sale for me yet, so I just played with this little globe keychain. We talked about how the earth spins, and where we live on the globe.

Monogram. Since my name starts with "E", we got some "E" post-its for me to write on and leave around the house on anything that is MINE!

Magnets. We looked for "E" things in magazines to put in our photo frame magnets. We found lot of EYES! I love drawing eyes, too... I also have some letter magnets and an elephant magnet, plus "8" starts with "E", too!

Coloring. Here's my "E" crayon mug for all my coloring pages...

Rubber Stamps. We didn't have too many rubber stamps to play with this week - just a couple of elephants, an egg, and the letter "E". But we did have two new ink pads, a pink one and a green one, so I still had lots of fun!

Play Doh. I did play with play doh a little, though not as much since I had Silly Putty to play with! I had a bunch of egg cookie cutters to use - thanks to Easter!

Foam Letters. I didn't mention these before, but I've got a big jar of foam bathtub letters I play with in the bath. Mommy always makes sure I've got the letters of the week to play with, and here I've got all the letters to my name!

So that's what worked for me! Next week we'll share our "E" adventures...
----------------
If you have a post or link related to "E" Activities for toddlers, link up here!