Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Tot School: Bunnies at School

Tot School

As part of our Itty-Bitty Bookworm curriculum, we spent some MORE time with Knuffle Bunny!  I love Knuffle Bunny already, because I LOVE animals.  And watching it on the Scholastic DVD is even better than reading it!

Anyway, our official book for the week was Knuffle Bunny Too:  A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems.  Definitely a thumbs up!  So we did some bunny stuff, and some stuffed animal stuff, and some school stuff, and some stuffy stuff...

Other books we read were:
Let's move on to that bunny stuff...
Here is an edible bunny (cheese quesadilla) Mommy made.  Bunnies LIKE carrots...  This one had pink ears, so it was Sonya's Knuffle Bunny.


Mommy was going to help me make a paper-plate bunny, but I wanted to use tiny stuff instead, so we made a bunny from pom poms.


Mommy colored two identical bunnies a little differently, and then I had to tell her what all the differences are.  Like pink ears versus blue ears.  I know stuff like that, cuz I could tell Trixie right away she had the wrong bunny!


I had to pick my own favorite stuffed animal and fill out a questionnaire about her.  I picked Winter, my dolphin without a tail.  She is gray, so I wrote my answers and colored a picture of her in gray.


We played a schoolhouse game - where I had to match the clipart in the schoolhouse to the right letter of the alphabet.  For instance, the grapes went with the letter "G".  I am really pretty good at this.  Mommy only gave me 5 cards at a time, but I could've done more. 


We practiced rhyming, too.  Mommy put together a gasket of school items, and then she would ask for an item using a rhyming word, and I would give her the right item.  Like if she asked for "flu," I'd give her glue.  I got the hang of it pretty quick...  That's why I called this a gasket.

I colored some of my school friends on these paper dolls...  Mommy helped a little.


We played school a lot using my chalkboard.  The game we're playing here:  see those word/picture cards on the table?  Mommy would write a word on the board, and I would find the matching card and tell her what the word was.  School/scissors were kind of tricky, because they both start with the same two letters.  Other than that, this was easy!  Mommy says I need to practice looking at the whole word and not just the first letter.


We practiced illustrations!  Mo Willems, the Knuffle Bunny author, does his by taking a photo and drawing the characters in front of it.  So we did that too.  Here is a photo of our neighbor's pony.  I drew of picture of Daddy to put in front of it.


On to science stuff.  We didn't quite get the time of day right on this, but we tried to make sun prints on "cheap" construction paper by putting shapes on the paper and putting it in the sun.  Tip:  do this at HIGH noon!


Now this next science experiment was tasty!  First, we cut pictures out of magazines.  Go, scissors!  (They've been out of reach since I cut up my dress, so I only get them on special occasions.)


Then I did some measuring.  One spoon of each into its own bowl:  Powdered milk, flour, and salt.


Mommy put some water in each of the bowls, and I mixed the water/powder up to make "glue."  I got a bit of a lecture on not mixing up the stuff between bowls...  Controlled science experiments and all


Then we took those magazine pictures and "pasted" them to paper with our "glue" and a paintbrush - each piece of paper marked by the type of "glue" we were using.  Mommy had to help a lot, or I would've just stuck with the MILK glue.


Yeah, I had to taste all the "glues."  How else could I form a hypothesis about which "glue" would be stickiest once it dried?  My professional assessment - the milk was by far the tastiest, so it would glue the best.

 

I was a little bit off.  The FLOUR was the stickiest.  The salt didn't stick at all.  Now you know...

With weather getting nicer, we spent a lot of time outside, picking dandelions...


...riding bicycles...


...taking walks...


...looking for signs of spring...


...sliding down our slide...


...creating cedar-shaving snowstorms...


...and feeding grass to ponies.


Even though Valentine's Day was long over, we were still on the heart shape and the color pink.  So I made a red/pink tissue paper suncatcher with heart-shaped contact paper.


And I practiced counting with heart playdough mats.  One ball of playdough on the "1" mat, two balls on the "2" mat, and so on.



I asked Mommy if I could go spelunking again, so we made up another cave.  If only I could convince her to leave it up ALL the time!



I was supposed to be painting, but I dumped a huge pile of craft sand into my paint, so it didn't paint really well.  But it made cool sand castles.


And Daddy helped me do some cool paintings while Mommy worked one day.



Did you know I really want to be a cat?  That really talks?  I spent lots of time walking like a cat, and meowing, and purring, and I asked Mommy for some milk to drink from a bowl on the floor.  But I had a hard time lapping it up.  A straw works much better.  I'll have to teach Flamey that trick.

2 comments:

Christie O. said...

I LOVE your craft posts, LOVE them! They're always so inspiring!! By the way, we're going to see Winter this weekend, my son's having his birthday party at the aquarium where Winter lives!!! :)

Ktietje85 said...

Cute stuff!! I'll have to remember that in the fall when my daughter is a little older (she was 2 in Jan.). Looks like a really fun time and I love the bunny stuff!