Keeping Bigger Bit Busy: Tot School Thanksgiving Take-Along Bag

Here's Bigger Bit's Thanksgiving Take-Along bag!

Dover Little First Thanksgiving Sticker Activity Book.

 Bead Stringing.  The cord is just taped to a piece of cardstock to hold it in place.

Color matching with beads and pieces of construction paper.

 One-to-one correspondence.  9 squares of white paper and 9 rocks, one rock for each square.

 Rock color matching game.

Keeping Bigger Bit Busy: Tot School Workboxes

Here's what's going on in bigger bit's "workboxes" today.  (Bigger bit is 31 months old).


Thanksgiving tracing, from our Thanksgiving Extension Set #2.

One-to-One correspondence with the sequence balls from our Thanksgiving Sensory Bin!

A selection of our favorite autumn-themed books.

Thanksgiving shadow matching, from our Thanksgiving Extension Set #2.

Size-sorting turkey, from our Thanksgiving Extension Set #2.

Pumpkin numerals with fake "pumpkin seed" counters.  (As a note, these would be so fun with real pumpkin seeds!  Bigger Bit still puts things in her mouth, so I've avoided that thus far.)

Sorting leaves by color.  My preschool-aged kiddos sorted these leaves by type, but that was too advanced for bigger bit, so she sorted them by color!

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Keeping Bigger Bit Busy: Tot School Workboxes

Bigger Bit is 30 months, and here's some of what has been keeping her busy this week!

Hat sorting by size (small, medium, and large)

Matching colors of gourds.

Lining up pom-poms by size.  She insisted on calling the biggest ones "daddy pom-pom", the medium ones "mommy pom-pom" and the smallest were "baby pom-pom", which I found adorable!

Pumpkin numerals and pompom counters.  

Matching scents game. 

Keeping Bigger Bit Busy: Tot School Workboxes

Here's what has been keeping Bigger Bit busy this week!

I picked up this set of three little animal puzzles at WalMart over the weekend.  Bigger Bit likes animals, and likes puzzles, so this has been a good "fit" for her.  She does all three at once, which is an added challenge.  Plus, she has learned the names of all the animals in the puzzle through asking questions.

Sorting pumpkins by size, from biggest to smallest.  She got pretty confused after this point, so I took every other size out the next day, to give more distinction between the sizes and help her develop that visual discrimination. 

Leapfrog Fridge Phonics game.  I generally avoid toys that make noise, but she likes this a lot.  It can be used to make three letter words, but she just uses the setting where it reads the letter and gives the sound as she puts the letters into the slots.  

 Sorting blocks by color.  She likes these little blocks (I grabbed them in the Target dollar section a few months ago), and sorts them by color.

One-to-One correspondence.  She has nine slots in the box, and nine of these cute, sequenced Thanksgiving-ish balls.  One ball in each slot helps develop that one-to-one correspondence that is so crucial. 

Numerals and feather counters!  Numerals 1-5, and feather counters.  She loves this one!

 Sorting pom-poms by color.  She likes pom-poms, so this will hold her attention for quite a while!

Keeping Bigger Bit Busy: Tot School Workboxes!

Here's what's in bigger bit's tot school workboxes this week!

Sound matching, from my Montessori-inspired DIY sound matching game.  She's starting with two, and we'll add more in through the weeks.

Color sorting pompoms.  

Numerals 1-6 and bean counters.  She knows 1-3 pretty well, and we're working on 4-6 this week.  

Paper, glue stick, and colored pasta.  We did an activity like this today, when I helped her make an apple shape from colored pasta and a glue stick, and she enjoyed it.  So, I put this in her workbox to see what creativity she comes up with! 

Letter "E" work.  The letter E coloring page is from Super Coloring.  The tactile letter E is from the DIY Montessori-inspired tactile letters I made a few weeks ago. 

One-to-one correspondence with glass acorns.  Nine glass acorns, and a box with nine spots.  She puts one acorn in each spot and none is left over.  

Silly pasta sorting.  A divided tray with a handful of the pasta that we dyed earlier in the week.  There are long green pastas, red circles, yellow circles, and green bows.  She sorts each of the types into different containers.  

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Busy Bigger Bit: More Tot School Workboxes

Here's a few of the things that have been in Bigger Bit's "workboxes" this week.  If she doesn't enjoy an activity and use it, we just take it out and introduce it again later.. at her age, we give her "workboxes" and "school work" more because she wants to be included in what we're doing...
She's loved this letter D coloring page from Super Coloring.  She's colored the same page 3 times in the last week, in fact, because she has enjoyed it so much!  She tries to color all the polka dots a different color, which makes her laugh.

Since she liked the letter D coloring page so much, I introduced an activity to fill in the outline of the letter D with pompoms.  She always user her pincer grasp to pick up the pompoms and get them in the right spot, so it's good fine motor skills development while reinforcing the letter shape.

She's also been working with (mostly tracing with her finger) the uppercase D from the Montessori-Inspired DIY tactile letter cards I made recently.

I picked up a set of acorn-shaped acrylic gems at the craft store, and introduced her to a sort-by-color activity with two of the colors in the set.  The whole time she worked with them, she kept saying how pretty they are...



I used another set of the same Acorns to introduce a "numeral and counter" type activity (we only went up to 3).

She's been working on size sorting with the printable set from my Autumn Apples Extension Set #1

I put the book A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson in her workboxes, thinking that she'd like to look at the pictures, but she's also been enjoying having it read to her (so have the other kids, actually). I'm fond of poetry, and I think these short poems are a wonderful introduction for young children.

She also has this Montessori-Inspired DIY magnetic "numeral and counter" activity in her workboxes this week.  She can't quite do it by herself yet, but Bub always helps her out.  (Just to note, they usually play on a whiteboard, but when I was taking pictures, the whiteboard was in the bedroom of a sleeping baby, so I just used the fridge to demo).

I re-introduced this shape puzzle into her workboxes, which I've had put away for a while.  She enjoyed it, and wasn't too challenged by it, so it made a nice "quiet time" activity for her while the other kids were busy.

Finally, while it's not in her workboxes and not an official part of "tot school", she's been really enjoying exploring our Autumn Apples sensory bin this week.

We're always looking for new ideas, both for "tot school" and for the other kids!  Leave us a comment here or on our Facebook page, telling us what ideas, activities, games, crafts, etc. you are exploring this week!

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