Valentine's Day Tot School

Did you know that tomorrow is Valentine's Day?! :) Hope you have your Valentine's ready to hand out to your favorite loved ones. Well, we spent last week doing some Valentine's activities here with my favorite loved ones.

Matthew and I had some fun one-on-one time one day while John was at preschool. We started with playing with Valentine's themed window clings. He putting the clings on and off the window...over and over again! (We had just played with a new doctor kit, so he didn't want to part with the stethescope.)





I put some small erasers in plastic conversation hearts and Matthew enjoyed opening and closing the containers. Well, he enjoyed opening them all but couldn't quite get them closed again. I was surprised that this very simple activity kept him entertained for a long time!





I pulled out the formula container and heart picks from last year. Matthew did really well with this and could get the sticks in the holes without too much trouble. John also liked playing with this when he got home. It really irks him, though, that there are more holes than heart picks. He just REALLY wants everything to be nice and even!



He helped me address envelopes to send Valentine's to Nana, Grandma, and Grandpa.



I set up a little post office area, but didn't get a picture of it. I had a phone, cash register, stickers (stamps), address stamps, cards, and envelopes. We took some cards and put them in the mailbox. This was actually difficult since they cards had to be slanted to fit into the mailbox.



One of Matthew's favorite games was our 'Heart Hunt'. I 'hid' paper hearts in the living room for Matthew to find and put he them in his shopping cart. I didn't actually hide the hearts but rather placed them around the living room in plain sight. It is funny that he watched me put the hearts around the room, yet he still needed me to help him find them again! He was so cute playing this game and we played it twice that morning.



**The printables I used were from last year. I think they are from Musings of Me, but she doesn't have them posted anymore. You can check her Teachers Pay Teachers site though!**

John joined us for the rest of the activities, starting with counting kisses. I put a numbered card out and John had to count out that many kisses for the bear on the worksheet. You can see they LOVE chocolate so the worksheet is completed with chocoloate-y drool spots. :) Matthew liked helping put out the kisses too. John could do this perfectly and I was so impressed that he is even getting the hang of subtracting!


not sure why this is rotated!!



John put these boys in size order...



and sorted letters.


(He also did WONDERFUL at completing patterns using colored heart erasers. He could do every pattern I threw at him. I was so excited! But, no pictures of that one.)

Matthew put hearts on a dot page.



I got the idea of a letter matching game from a blog that I follow (and of course I can't remember which one now!). I wrote lower case letters on little heart erasers and put them in plastic conversation hearts. Then I wrote upper case letters on large paper hearts and arranged them in a heart shape on the floor. The idea was that John would match the erasers to the correct heart on the floor. He did this fine for about 3 erasers and then got frustrated that Matthew was 'messing up the heart' on the floor. So, he decided to instead practice his jumping skills and jumped over the hearts. Matthew also joined in which is so dang cute since he can't really jump yet. Every once in a while he gets about 1/2 an inch above the ground and I think it surprises him. SO CUTE!







We had some yummy heart lunches...




did some arts and crafts projects...





and played 'post office' by mailing letters to different houses (or in our case, putting the mail under the door). John did great at writing house #1 on his envelope and adding the return address sticker and 'stamp'.








All in all, we had a great time. As usual we didn't get everything done that I had planned, but that is ok. I am looking forward to hanging out tomorrow with my favorite boys while we get ready for John's preschool party. We have lots of baking to do which is one of my favorite things to do with them.

Hope you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day!
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Valentine's Tot School {week one}

Last week we started our Valentine's Day activities for John's tot school. This consisted of working with the letter H, letter V, hearts, and hippos. Hippos is pretty random, but I was using Letter of the Week curriculum and there were some hippo activities already ready to go...and we got hippo books at the library since ALL the Valentine's day books were checked out! Note to self: check out the next holiday books several weeks early before they are gone! :) We were only able to work on school stuff for three days this week, so we tried to cram in as much as we could!



John sorted upper and lower case H from LOTW. He lost interest pretty quickly though! You can also kind of see in the picture below that I took a big picture of a hippo and cut it into four pieces to see if he could put together the puzzle. He is still in his new phase of wanting me to do everything for him, so he wasn't too into the puzzle! (he also wasn't into me taking pictures of him last week, which is why he isn't in a lot of the pics!)

We spelled hippo using LOTW.

Using heart stickers from the dollar store, we did our first graphing activity. I was excited because I am a big math nerd. Another 'Mommy do' activity, but he could tell me where to put each heart and helped me count them at the end. I used the heart graphing page from Musings of Me in her Valentine's unit.

I used a heart shaped cookie cutter for a lot of his food this week. Here is his eating banana hearts (while trying to escape the camera!). It is amazing how if I cut his food into a heart, he ate every bit...even foods he hadn't been eating lately! Kids are so funny sometimes!

Brad drilled holes in an old formula container so John could use heart picks (from the dollar store) to put in the holes. This activity was the first tray he went to last week!

I found these cute little wooden heart frames from the dollar spot at Target so John painted them for Valentine's presents for Grandma, Grandpa, and Nana. They turned out cute and he was entertained with it for quite a while! He was so cute using the paint brush and he did really well since the paint container was so small. He eventually stuck his fingers in the paint and finger painted. I thought it was well worth the $3- three frames, three brushes, three sets of paint and LOTS of entertainment!

I got more pom poms at the dollar store (our last package of pom poms have mysteriously disappeared and are lost around the house somewhere!). I thought John could put a pom pom on each heart on this page from Musings of Me . As you can see from the picture, he really just wanted to dump them out and play with them. I think he did about one of them 'correctly' but at least he had fun!

I got two packs of Valentine's themed erasers and thought John could sort them in his muffin tin. Again, he wasn't interested in sorting (maybe there were too many erasers and overwhelming to sort?) but he really enjoyed putting the erasers in the tin and then back into the bowl. Between this activity and the pom poms, I think it is a huge hint that John needs a sensory bin with our next theme. I have just been too lazy recently to put one together. :(

John practiced putting number cards in order. He is getting MUCH better at this! He can count aloud from 1-10 perfectly and almost all the way to 20, but putting actual numbered items in order is still a challenge for him. I can see a big improvement though as he is getting older and as we have been practicing each week! These cards are from here. Sorry for the sideways picture. Blogger is so odd sometimes!

Other things we did last week that didn't get photographed: playing with heart shaped cookie cutters, coloring hearts page from MooMoo's & Tutus 'H is for Heart' unit, and playing with the fridge phonics.

And that wraps up last week! We had a fun Valentine's party at our house on Saturday (look for a post on that soon!) and this week we will continue to do more Valentine's-ish activities. We are again on a shortened week so hopefully we get everything done. I may have gone a little overboard on my Valentine's activity planning... :)


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