backyard play ~ truck wash

Yesterday while we were playing in our backyard Lucas was upset because his favourite truck – he calls it Mack from the Disney movie Cars – was dirty.

So I grabbed him a big bowl full of warm soapy water and a sponge and he spent close to an hour cleaning his truck.

  notice the backwards hat? Yep. That's the only way he will wear it.

Once he was finished using the sponge I got him the hose so he could rinse off the truck and the deck.

 

some good clean backyard fun ; )

tot school ~ 5.24.2011

Since Lucas has stopped taking his afternoon naps it has been really difficult to find time to get online! Let alone upload hundreds of pictures and write a whole post!! Oh well.. Better late then never : )  Here is a look at our past week.

Learning through art and crafting

Lucas did painting/printing with some left over bubble paper packaging. I have seen this on several different blogs, it is also an activity that I  had bookmarked from our First Art book.

Lucas has been really interested in using scissors over the past two weeks.  He has been helping himself to the scissors and paper and he has gotten really good at using them. This week I will be setting up some more structured scissor activities for him.

We used our new paint rollers to create some BIG messy art!

We also participated in stART this week @ A Mommy’s Adventures. We made the crab from the book My Heart is Like a Zoo.

Lucas has really enjoyed the new materials in our sensory table for playing, and also some large scale sorting.

Learning through creative play

Lucas is really into role playing right now. In the picture above we used our waffle blocks to build a house and then he set up the table with the mommy, the daddy, the big brother and the baby.

Here is look at Lucas during play. I helped Lucas to set up his blocks and then he arranged the trees, street lights & signs, and people around the town. Then he drove his vehicles around to the different locations. He pretended one of the blocks was toys r us – his favourite store : )

Lucas has always loved our marble run but now that he can independently set up a track, he plays with it nonstop!

Another very popular toy this week was our train table. For the past 2 months the tracks had been packed away, once they were set up again there was lots of renewed interest!

Other Fun Stuff

From May to October we spend the majority of our weekends at our trailer up north, this past weekend was our first time up there this year.  While we are there we spent 90% of our time outside playing  so Lucas had a blast– except for at night when he cried to go home : (

 

In the picture above the trailer that you see across the road, belongs to my in-laws.

On the roof of their shed a robin made a nest and had some babies

 

aren’t they beautiful? Lucas wasn’t really interested in them… but I think I took nearly 100 photos of them!

 

That’s it for this week! Visit 1plus1plus1equals1 to see what other tots are learning.

stART ~ My heart is like a zoo

 

While we were at the library last week I stumbled upon the book “my heart is like a zoo” and thought it was perfect for using in a story + art activity. 

 

Lucas loved this book for the bright colourful pictures, and rhyming text. And Dominic liked this book for its variety of animals and there were just over 300 hearts for him to count throughout the book!  I liked this book because it was a great way for me to begin talking to Lucas about his feelings. The book covers a range of feelings covering happy and sad all the way to feeling crafty and peaceful.

a look inside the book 

Lucas chose the snappy as a crab… not because he is snappy or crabby : ) but because he loves our hermit and emerald crabs that we have in our fish tank.

Lucas started out with some glue and cornmeal for sand

and then with help from mama we cut and assembled the hearts to match the one in the book.

 

See other great stART projects by visiting A Mommy's Adventures!

In our sensory table right now…

It has been awhile since I last shared our sensory table here on the blog! I still rotate our materials in the table about once a month, depending on popularity. This month we have pasta - in various shapes, pompoms, marbles, marker lids, and plastic eggs.

This sensory tub has been really great, we have been able to do so many different activities from it. So far we have sorted the items by objects, by colour, and by sound.

Above are the eggs set up with the different materials inside, and Lucas shaking them to hear the sound. Below is Lucas working on sorting out the materials by colour – this is an activity that I didn't think would interest him, but he has worked on it several times over the past few weeks!

in the messy room ~ bubble paper prints

We have a room in our basement, just off the playroom that has been designated as the “messy room” a room for all things messy. Everything from play dough to art projects, to crafting to the sensory table. A room that we can go and have tons of fun and make a mess and I don't have to clean it up right away – I just have to shut the door and pretend its not there.. which is sometimes nice : )

Last week in the messy room Lucas did some painting and printing with bubble paper.