Last week we spent our days learning about L-O-V-E! And hearts – I’ll admit there were lots of those too. Here are some of the books we read to start our “lessons” each morning:
We kicked off the week on Monday by talking about how to show love to others. Then I showed Asher how to make the sign for “I love you” in sign language. I’ll admit, we are still working on this one, as the fingers are a bit tricky for him at this point, but it’s a work in progress. To help us remember what the sign is, we created the craft below. I started by giving Asher a white sheet of paper and had him sponge paint using red paint all over the page. I then let that dry and while doing so, utilized another sheet of construction paper to trace each of our hands. Once dry, I cut hearts out of the white sheet to place in our hands and glued the fingers down to represent the sign we had been practicing, along with the key language we are working on to go along with it. We practiced this then throughout the week.
Tuesday was a day filled to the brim with heart themed activities. I purchased a bag of candy hearts at the store for us to utilize for a variety of sensory experiences. First, I dumped the hearts into a bowl and Asher was able to practice scooping them into different containers. From there, he practiced matching the hearts to different color pattern strips which I snagged from Pocket of Preschool. After this, we took a few different colors of the hearts and conducted our own little science experience by mixing them into water to see what happened. I think this may have been Asher’s favorite activity from the whole week as the kid lives to stir any and everything. All day long he begged for me to get them down from the table so he could stir them again. And I’ll admit, the colors actually turned out pretty neat.
To top off our heart-filled Tuesday, I created a heart coloring book for Asher to utilize to continue practicing the basic skills of counting and color names. We went through each page together and counted the number of hearts and then picked the appropriate crayon for him to use to color the page. You can find a copy of this book for your own little one in both English and Spanish here.
On Wednesday, we actually watched “El árbol generoso” (“The Giving Tree”) being read to us on YouTube. I have the book somewhere, but just couldn’t locate it in the morning, so instead of scratching it for something else, we sprang for the digital version. Honestly, I used to do this in the classroom a lot when I couldn’t find or didn’t have the text I wanted, and it is a wonderful resource if you ever need it! After we finished watching the story, and learning about all of the ways the tree showed love to the boy, we created our own “giving tree”. We brought out our handy dandy glue sponge again and did some fine motor skill practice by gluing out heart shaped leaves to our festive tree.
On Thursday, we continued practicing our counting skills with a little heart matching activity. I tweaked this idea from an alphabet matching activity I found at Toddler Approved. To prepare, I simply grabbed a roll of wrapping paper from our stash downstairs and cut and taped hearts numbered 1-10. I cut all of the hearts in pairs so that one set could also be used for the matching portion. To make it a little more navigable for my 20 month old, I also added a color border to each heart to help him make his matches. To “play”, I simply modeled for him a few times how to pick up and match the hearts, and then it was his turn to go to town. I was actually impressed by how quickly he caught on. And as he matched, I did my part by reading the numbers aloud for him to continue to hear their names.
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