Tot School: E is for Elephant; H is for Hippo

Our summer officially ended two weeks ago, when Kyle went back to work, so Sora officially started tot school again. A few weeks ago, I found this amazingly detailed plan for the year on this blog. It motivated me to make my own plan (which is mostly taken directly from the list I found with a few minor changes). 

Here is Sora's tot school center for the year. 

 I added a piece of flannel for a felt board and a pocket chart from the $1 Target area. The rest is pretty similar to last year.

4 tot trays fit this space perfectly, so this week it was a peg board, colored squares for counting, simple puzzles, and her felt animal pieces. This month's theme is the zoo, so there are a bunch of zoo books from the library in addition to her zoo sensory bin.

Here is the bin:

 Mostly it is small rocks, pasta, 5 zoo animals from DollarTree, Playmobile fence, and a few troughs for food and water.

Here the little people came to visit the zoo.

Of course, we went to visit the zoo as well. We started with a tiny zoo. We have bigger zoo plans soon, but we've lived 20 minutes from this zoo for a year and have never been. It is exactly what I expected it to be and it took about an hour to explore it. Still, Sora liked it.

 For extra zoo activities, I scoured the library and came up with two zoo related puzzles and two monkey related packets. One is a felt board with fun pieces to tell Curious George stories, complete with two Curious George books and a stuffed Curious George (which Sora has been sleeping with).

Sora has been loving the library puzzles!

We also used the same E, H, and zoo related printables that were suggested by the master plan. Sora has been enjoying these and loved the pre-writing exercises and doing matching in her new pocket charts.

Another excellent resource we've been using is Totline ABC Zoo. I got it from the library, but for $4 from Amazon, that's a great deal too! It has fun songs, which Sora loved, crafts, games, and other ideas. Also, it has animal patterns which I used to make her felt animals.

Up next is M is for Monkey. I'll take more pictures of the details next week!

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