November TOT SCHOOL plan

I was going to post about our plan for the next few weeks, but as I was writing it, it was getting pretty boring with no pictures and not many real concrete ideas of what we were going to do, so I decided to wait a bit until we had a few activities under our belt.  November will have two themes, and the first one is TRANSPORTATION.  I really just chose this because we have a big trip across the country in a few weeks, so I thought it would be appropriate.  To start, we headed to the library...

Transportation books.
Go, Dog, Go, P.D. Eastman
That's Not My Train, Fiona Watt
That's Not My Plane, Fiona Watt
Trucks (Baby Touch and Feel) and Tough Trucks, Tony Mitton
Big Wheels, Anne Rockwell
Boats, Byron Borton
The Little Dump Truck, Margery Cuyler
Maisy Drives the Bus and How Will You Get There Maisy, Lucy Cousins
Sheep in a Jeep and Sheep on a Ship, Nancy Shaw

So far Riley prefers Go, Dog. Go! and That's Not My Train, oh and that little mini Let's Go Sesame Street book,  We have read those ones SO MANY times already.  She'll come up to me and say "Go?? Go? Go??" which means she can't find her Go, Dog. Go! book, and wants some help... and then we read it.  Over. and over. and over again.

Stories/Poem/Rhymes/Songs
Lonely Bus Driver (finger rhyme), The Little Train, Tugboat, Engine on the Track (finger rhyme), Wheels on the Bus, I'm a Little Airplane (sung to I'm a Little Teapot tune), Row Row Row your Boat, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Twinkle Twinkle Traffic Light, and whatever other ones I can think of or find!

Arts and Crafts
This has been pretty fun so far!  We did a "painting" activity with the colors of the stoplight (red, yellow, green).  This involved putting paint in large plastic bags, and taping them to the window, and letting Riley "paint".  We also painted by running cars through the paint and creating tracks with the wheels, but she preferred to use her fingers.  Best part? No clean up!

Our second craft so far involved making mini trains, cars, and boats with foam shapes.  Now you could use these shapes to identify both colors and shapes, but I chose just to talk to Riley about the shapes so as not to confuse her.  We actually got the shapes for free at a garage sale, I just bought the large foam piece and some glue, and voila!  Amazingly enough, somehow she picked out the circles with 100% accuracy.  Apparently, the girl knows her circles! 

Now, obviously Riley required a LOT of help to "make" these... this part of the activity was meant to have her help me pick out the shapes, and put the glue on, and then I put them on the brown paper.  Her creation looked more like this... :)

Activities
This was a little tricky because we don't actually own a whole lot of "transportation" items.  We have a truck shape sorter, which is still very popular, and a train puzzle, which Riley likes, but needs help completing as it's a little advanced.  We've been working on learning the colors of the stoplight, and have three different "color bowls" full of red, green, and yellow items, respectively.  They are all just random items we had around the house.  Riley didn't understand the color sorting concept at first, but she's starting to get it and is actually really interested in it, so we'll keep doing it.

I turned around for a second, and Riley had taken the colored pipe cleaners and put them on like necklaces!  And she kept them there for a quite a long time!

I also set up a transportation "treasure box" (also known as a sensory box), which she really likes!  It looked like this before she started playing with it:

There are black beans (like the road), rocks, "sand," matchbox cars, an assortment of mini trucks, wheels (which are actually yo yos), little puzzles that rattle when riley shakes them, yellow pipe cleaners (like lines of the road), spinning tops with trucks on them.  Now, this was a bit of a gamble, as I wasn't sure if Riley would (1) stuff all the little non-edibles in her mouth or (2) dump them all over the floor and make a HUGE mess.  Well, she did try to eat the black beans at first, and I let her explore having one in her mouth (mostly because I couldn't fish it out of there), and she decided she didn't like it, and was pretty easily redirected after that.  As for making a mess, she would take handfuls and put them on the floor, but then she like to pick them up and put them all back, so that was no problem.  She also liked to pick black beans off of a strip of packing tape, and putting them into the truck bed...

Outings/adventures.
We haven't done any big outings yet, but when we do go out, I make more of an effort to point out things transportation related, especially things we may have read about in some of our books.  Riley points out cars and bikes, and we went and saw the train, and we have plans to take Riley on her first train ride soon!

ABCs
I recently discovered starfall.com, and Riley LOVES it.  It has this alphabet part that Riley is really into, and she can now say the letters A-E as well as their sounds.  If she sees my computer, she runs to it and shouts "A A A A A A!!" to do the letter activity.  If you have a little one, definitely check it out.  I didn't want to do too many letters at once (or have her staring at the computer for too long), so this week we only looked at A-E.  Maybe we'll do a few more letters next week, or we might stick with A-E for another week since she really likes those ones so far!