BIG Tot School: Rainbows

We are still roughly following the themes of the Fruit of the Spirit Curriculum, but honestly, I am only doing a few of the activities.  The curriculum is fabulous, and I highly recommend it, but I wish I had started it with Sophie a bit earlier.  She's just ready for more! We'll finish out with a couple more of the themes I think she will enjoy and then we will move on.  I'll share more about our plans for the fall soon!

This week was all about Rainbows and God's Faithfulness.  Our story was Noah's Ark, and we basically just read it and talked about God's faithfulness to Noah and how the rainbow showed us his promise.

Memory Work
- Fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5:22-23.  She has this one nailed and gets excited to say it each morning during our morning board time!
- Ps. 56:3 (portion) was our new verse for the week.  "...in God I trust; I shall not be afraid..."
- Colors of the Rainbow (ROYGBIV) - I found this great video and song to help teach the colors.  We've been singing it all night! (She even requests it as her bedtime song).

Literacy Activities

Watercolor Letters and Circles. I made a page with her name in rainbow bubble letters for her to paint as well as a page with circles in rainbow colors to match.  She loves tracing letters especially, so this was a hit.

Print Awareness Activity. I don't have any pictures of this great activity from This Reading Mama's Rainy Day PreK Pack, but it was really good (and simple!).  Basically, she painted a rainbow (pretty much her favorite thing ever) and cut apart the words "I see a beautiful rainbow".  Then I mixed them up and as I read them to her, she rearranged them back into the right sentence and glued it down as a caption for her picture.  This was a really great listening exercise for her, as well as starting to see how words go together to make sentences.

Rainbow Rice Name Hunt.  I shared about this great activity on Activity Mom.  This was one Sophie pulled out every single day! 

Syllable Count and Clip.  Also from the Rainy Day PreK Pack, this was Sophie's first attempt at breaking words into syllables.  I didn't know what to expect, but after a few examples she was doing well.  It is definitely a skill we need to keep working on in the future, but she seemed to enjoy clapping to count the syllables in each word and then meticulously placing the clip perfectly on top of the correct number.  This poor perfectionist comes by it honestly...

Initial Sound Matching. From the Rainy Day PreK Pack.

We also did several other printables from the Rainy Day PreK Pack, including rhyming, "spelling" words with do-a-dots, and pre-writing tracing sheets.  Sophie really loves her activities, and so do I! (Not paid to say that or anything...just seriously like them!)

Math Activities

Rainbow Pom Pom Sorting/Fine Motor.  Using a set of tweezers, she sorted the pom poms into the correct cup.  The tweezers were just the right challenge for her!

Graphing with Skittles. Even though she really had no concept of graphing, she enjoyed this sorting and counting activity mostly because she got to eat the Skittles at the end! Get the printable here from Mom on the Move.

How Many Raindrops? This counting activity was from the Rainy Day PreK Pack.  Sophie would choose a card and then place that many glass beads ("rain drops") onto the mat.  Then, she would trace the number with a dry erase marker.  She really enjoyed this one and wanted to play for a long time.

Other Activities

Fizzy Rainbows.  This was, without a doubt, the star of the show this week.  I gave her a pan of baking soda and cups with colored vinegar and she used an eye dropper to drop the vinegar on the baking soda, causing a fizzy reaction.  She sat for almost 45 minutes doing this!  This will definitely be a repeat activity! (And a great one to keep her occupied if I need to do something like make dinner!)

Rainbow Do-a-Dot. From Gift of Curiosity. 

Sophie is wanting to do Tot School all day long at this point.  This week, she worked through all of the activities I had for the week by Wednesday morning.  I'm going to have to figure out a system that gives her plenty to do, but also doesn't require me to plan 800 things for the course of a week!  I'm trying out something new this next week, so we'll see how it works!

Linking up at 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place and Teaching Mama's Everything Early Childhood.