Mini Sensory Tub with Dried Beans

R most favourite manipulative medium is pom poms, but is very closely followed by dried beans. I made a mini-sensory tub for him with a couple of aims. Firstly, I gave R a choice of items to hide in the beans...he chose the rockets that we used in our outer space unit. Secondly, I wanted to give R a small container for him to practice keeping the beans in the container. Thridly, he loves playing with the dried beans!

R did such a great job of keeping the beans in the container, despite it being so small!

He stayed with this activity for just under 1/2 an hour. He found all the rockets several times, then he started pushing the beans into the holes in the bottom of the rockets (they are meant to be used as pencil toppers). I didn't mind because I thought it was a great fine motor development activity, that was until I went to pack them away and spend nearly 1/2 an hour getting the beans out of the rockets! :)

Outer Space

R is 27 Months old.

R has been really interested in planets and the moon for a while now, and I really wanted to provide a fun program to continue his interests. It was a full-on week!

Craft

R painted with glitter glue on a rocket and I stuck it onto a toilet paper roll, so he could fly it around. This idea came from Printable Share. We did do the flames, but R pulled them out before I could get a photo of it.

R stamped with a star cookie cutter and then sprinkled glitter on it. 

R painted with a toothbrush on a rocket shape. I drew a simple rocket shape on a cereal box. R chose the toothbrush to paint with. He painted with some paint and glitter paint (again, his choice). When it was dry he stuck on some metallic circles for windows and lastly collaged some cotton wool under the rocket. This idea was seen on No Time For Flashcards.

Fine Motor and Sensory

I made a space themed sensory tub with stuff from our manipulatives box. Read more about it here.

I hid rockets in a small tub of beans for R to find. He loved this and spend almost 1/2 an hour repeating this activity. I filled a plastic container with beans and pushed some coloured rockets into the beans. He searched through the beans to find the rockets and put them in the container. I saw this somewhere in the blog world, but I am not sure where.

In a similar activity, I filled a tub with rice and put planets (marbles) in it. I gave R a big slotted spoon and got him to sift the rice away and transfer the marbles to another container. This was another activity that R loved, and repeated it over and over for about 20 minutes. I saw this idea on Counting Coconuts.

I printed off and laminated a space playdough mat from Sparklebox. R used a small star cookie cutter to make stars to go in between the Earth and the moon. He also really enjoyed this, and asked for it several times over the week. I also gave R silver glitter and some blue playdough. He shook the glitter into the playdough and kneaded it through the playdough.

Another idea from Counting Coconuts was spooning planets (marbles) with a melon baller from one container to another. This was another favourite from this week.

I gave R a sheet of star stickers and some metallic paper and he stuck the stars on the paper. He struggled a bit with the stars getting stuck to his fingers, but he persevered and got the hang of it.

Whilst building with our wooden blocks, I made a rocket. R copied it, with a little bit of help.

I printed out the pre-writing worksheets from Homeschool Creations space pack. R is just beginning with this type of activity.

R made a Spaceship Magnet Page from Making Learning Fun.



Colours/Shapes

I took the rockets from the sensory box and R sorted them by colour into a muffin tray.

I made the Rocket Planet Colour Match game from Printable Share. R enjoyed this one, using the rockets to 'zoom' around the table with.

I adapted the Roll A Rocket Game from Musings Of Me to be a puzzle, because R is not quite there with dice games yet. I laminated the base and pieces and R lay them on the sheet like a puzzle.  

When I printed the Roll A Rocket Game, there were 2 sets of shapes to make 2 rocket. Rather than laminate them, I gave them to R to glue together, using the picture of the rocket as a guide. He did really well at this, with only a little verbal guidance from me. 

Music and Movement/Gross Motor

We sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "3 Men In A Flying Saucer" this week.

We pretended to be an astronaut in outer space floating around, weightlessly. My husband did the Moonwalk with R. It was hilarious, watching R trying to do it too! He also spent a lot of time 'zooming' around the house like a rocket. Lastly, we pretended to be a rocket. R crouched down, I counted backwards (only from 3, because it took to long to go from 10 each time!), the R would jump up and fly around the room like a rocket.

I have a poem called "We're Going On A Space Trip" which is similar to "We're Going On A Bear Hunt" by Michael Rosen. I found it on Hummingbirded. We read the poem and acted it out as we went along. We did this a few times, because R really enjoyed it.

Cooking

We made Moon Rocks this week. This was a simple recipe, which allowed R to do a lot of the steps on his own or with little assistance.

Language/Letters

You can see the books we read this week here.

R made a "M is for Moon" craft this week. He printed with a cork in yellow paint that had glitter paint mixed into it.

Maths

A while ago, I made some number cards found on Childcareland. We used them this week for counting with rockets. R had to place a rocket in each circle on the cards, then we counted them together. When we had done the third card, R asked for more, so I took out the number 4 and 5. He really enjoyed this activity. In the picture, he is tracing the number 2 with his finger.

I made a Rocket Size Sorting from Musings Of Me. R quickly did this, then used the rockets to fly around the room.

Science

I blew up a balloon and let it go. We watched it zoom around the room. R loved this and I lost count of how many times we did his over the week. R practiced blowing up the balloons as well, and got quite good at it. He did need us to hold onto the balloon while he took a breath, to avoid all his air leaking out!

Next Program: Letter Ee and Oval

Outer Space Sensory Tub

I was so excited about this tub, because for the first time, I was adding a variety of materials into it. I made it as R watched on. He was keen to get in and play with it. R did enjoy the tub, but didn't spend anywhere near as long playing with the tub as I had expected that he would. He took the marbles out of it to roll them along the table and put them in the back of his trucks!

R usually loves sensory tubs, but I usually only add one type of medium (such as wheat, rice, beans, pasta etc) and a few other additions (such as cups, spoons, bottles, containers etc). I think this tub may have been too busy for R.

The contents of the tub are:

• Moon buggy, 2 astronauts and an alien in a moon crater
• Smooth garden rocks
• Marbles in assorted sizes
• Flat-bottomed glass pebbles
• Black pom-poms
• Star buttons
• Star and circle counters
• Shells from a aquarium set
• Plastic rockets pencil-toppers

 

We used the rockets for a few other activities throughout our space week. See the full post here.

5 A Day Books - Outer Space

Wow, I am amazed at the memory skills of my almost 27 month old after reading the 5 books a day from last week. After only 4 days of reading the books, R could answer questions about the books, remember characters from the books without seeing them, and recognising letters on the pages (mostly D which we learnt last week and R for his name). I was so thrilled by this that I have decided to continue it.

We are learning about outer space this week, so we popped into our local library to get a few more books to compliment this topic, as we only had 3 of our own books.  R loves the library. We used to go regularly, but this was the first time visiting since M was born (he's 12 weeks old already, can't believe how fast that has gone!). R can also now say Library clearly. The full Outer Space unit is posted here.

Our books are:

1. Little Tom and the Trip to the Moon by Diane and Christyan Fox.

2. A is for Astronaut. (no author)
3. My Book Of Planets by Elise See Tai.
4. Planets by Melvin and Gilda Berger
5. Can I Cuddle The Moon? by Kerry Brown.

Linking up to The Imagination Tree.