Tot School-Pond Life Week 3

In our third week of learning about Pond Life, we focused
on amphibians, similarities and differences between amphibians
and reptiles, talked a little more on enemies/predators and how animals
stay safe from them, estimation and perimeters.


We started off the week by singing "5 Little Speckled Frogs."
Singing and music is a favorite of the girls, so this was a song
that was heard over and over in our home.



For Celie (22 months) this week, we focused on the color green and playing
with playdoh. That's playing, not eating. I put random green
objects around the perimeter of our rug, and she picked up the
objects while labeling them, "green block" etc. When she got
to the green frog puppet, she decided to sit down and cuddle
with it for a bit. She kept saying, "Oh my gosh. He is sooooo cute."


We added a few more worksheets this week. Tracing,
finding the first sound of each picture, dot-to-dot up to 30.
These are from kidssoup.com and prekinders blog.


Our buddy Liam came over, and we made a life cycle frog book,
(kidssoup.com), turtle tangram puzzle (prekinders blog) and
a lily pad (kidssoup.com).


Hattie putting together this letter puzzle and then spelled
out the word "frog" without the puzzle.


Hattie loves playing with tangrams. She was so excited to see
that this set had a turtle and ducks.


We practiced some more of our estimation skills. We used
an older book from McGraw-Hill Publishing and it teaches
children to estimate length, perimeter, area and weight with
a frog-theme. Can't find the link. It is from 2000. After using
many pages in the book, Hattie wanted to use her unifix cubes
to estimate. She wanted the brown ones "because they look
like a log." While we were counting out frogs, I overheard Celie
counting (in Spanish!??!!). I looked over and she was putting
frogs on her unifix cubes too. :)


Our science experiment for the week was from this book.
We made two different turtles (one was brown because we
ran out of green). We discussed why turtles have shells; it's
their home, and it protects them from their enemies. What
would happen if the turtle did not have a shell? We added
a glass cup over one of them, while the other one did not have
protection. She was to press her hand down on both turtles to
see which turtle was protected.


While Hattie and I were working on some task one day, I
heard Celie saying things such as, "Ouchie." 'That hurts."
"Don't eat me alligator." I looked over to see one of our
plastic alligators eating a plastic frog. Hattie thought that
was so funny that she decided to join in.

Books we read:
Amphibians
Amphibians: Animal Babies

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