Xander is 22 months old.
This week we were working with monsters and the color green. Our theme was built around the book Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley.
This is a GREAT book! Xander just loves it, and it was just what I was looking for to reinforce the names of the parts of the face. After reading the book we colored monster faces printed out from the author's website.
I cut out the faces and then glued them onto lunch bags to make puppets. We've played with them throughout the week. One is now missing the hair since Xander decided to tear it all off while saying "broke" each time-- yippee a new word!
To learn about the color green and just to have fun we participated in Muffin Tin Monday and had a green lunch.
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| Xander loves GRAPES! |
Monday evening Xander helped me make some short-cut pumpkin cookies. If this were a decade ago I would call these "muffin top" cookies, because they were soft and tasted like a yummy muffin, but that term has a whole different unappetizing meaning nowadays. They were very easy to make, and called for ingredients you can keep in your pantry, and tasted very yummy but they did get a sticky texture the next day so I recommend making them when you have enough people to go through them quickly. Xander really liked these cookies and he's a VERY picky eater so that's really saying something.
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| Eating while totally fascinated watching Mickey and the Beanstalk on YouTube. |
I printed out and laminated (yep, FINALLY used my laminator!) the Happy Monsters Tot Pack from 1+1+1=1. There is a puzzle, pattern matching, size sequencing, shape recognition, and counting cards (I think I listed everything). Most of the cards can be used in several different ways. Xander is really not ready for most of this stuff, which meant that a lot of it wasn't used this week but that this Tot Pack will be useful for a long time to come.
The puzzle interested him but it was a little to difficult for him at this point. He does NOT like it when I try to show him how things match. He did enjoy talking about the shapes and counting the monsters eyes but his favorite thing was the size sequencing monsters (which I strangely have NO photos of!). This was really the first time we talked about size this way and at first he didn't seem to understand but by the end of the week he did seem to be figuring it out. What he really loved was playing with these monsters! I printed out a book using text from Learning and Teaching with Preschoolers and a web ap to print out a stapleless book. In the space under the text I used colored pens to write the number (matching the colors to the colors of the size sequencing monsters -- if I'd done this on purpose I'd have done the largest monsters color first and then gone down in size but it was purely coincidental that the colors matched). He loved it when I read our book of the Five Little Monsters and acted out the parts with the laminated monsters. We did this over and over.
He also really loved the Shape Monster book that I made him. I saw it on Motherhood Moments. Xander really loves it when I said, "munch, munch, munch". For some reason he found that really funny.
But the best part of this entire weeks theme has been the velcro Big Green Monster face I made for him. I printed out the face and laminated it, then cut it all up and used self adhesive velcro (that my Mom stopped and got for me since I kept FORGETTING it!-- thank you Mom!) to attach the different parts of the monsters face. It was Xander's first experience with velcro but once he got the hang of it he loved playing with this face.
We were going to finish up our Green Monster week with green soup and monster cupcakes. The yummy (but very healthy tasting) vegetable soup was made and the cupcakes made but never decorated because Xander fell asleep before dinner last night and was out for the whole evening. 2 vaccinations in 2 days had just worn the poor guy out. He has since eaten cupcakes but I never did get around to making them into monsters, sort of ran out of oomph.
This week we also got out our Thanksgiving Kit from Time for Tots. And by "got out" I mean EVERYTHING! Xander didn't just do some of the activities, he opened every single bag and played with everything all over my office. I spent a long time this morning collecting everything and getting it packed back together. He had a lot of fun. We also made our Thanksgiving cards for the grandparents and great grandparents using a printout from Color with Leo.
We had a lot of fun this week, thanks for stopping by! To see what other tots are doing stop by Tot School.
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