Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning

Learn while playing with Latticed Learning! This week's theme has plenty of activities to go along with it - keep reading to find out more!

Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. This means if you click on a link and purchase something, I'll receive a small affiliate commission at no cost to you. Thanks so much for supporting my efforts with this blog!

Welcome back to Latticed Learning! This year, we're continuing to learn while we play - repeating many of our favorites from the past while adding in all sorts of new activities as well.

This day's post is devoted to our weekly themes - some weeks have more activities than others, but each lesson will be fun for you to explore with your little one!

Read All About It

We had fun exploring a monster theme with this week's books!

Here were our favorites:

Go Away, Big Green Monster - a good friend gifted us with this book when she was culling her retired teacher stash last summer and I'm sure a day hasn't gone by when we haven't read it! It's just so fun to flip through the pages and watch the monster appear and disappear.

Where the Wild Things Are - this classic book is a must-read for this week! Do you remember reading this as a kid, yourself?

Monster Munchies - if you love the "If You Take a..." books by Laura Numeroff, then you have to read this silly book filled with funny monsters!

Have You Seen My Monster - this clever book immediately won us over the first time we saw it and we love to re-visit it every year around this time!

Sing Some Songs

We took things a little easier this week and mainly spent our time dancing around to this one song to go with our monster theme.

Watch Some Videos

When I tired of reading the book myself for the umpteenth time, I let Gv watch this.

We naturally watched this movie, which was loads of fun.

This is a staple this time of year, so I figured we'd go ahead and check it off the list this week, while we were in our monster theme.

I considered showing Gv this movie as well, but decided that we'd watched enough for the week and so we'll save it for another time.

Play and Create

We had the most fun doing a few activities to correspond to our week's topic.

Since Halloween is looming on the horizon, I figured it wouldn't hurt to create some kooky friends to decorate the house with:

Since Gv loves Go Away, Big Green Monster so much, she cut out all the pieces needed for her to recreate her own green monster.

We actually used them to do even more than just make her own monster with -- first Gv flipped through the book and placed the pieces in the cut-out spots, just like a jigsaw puzzle.

Then, we read through the book and assembled the monster on the black paper.

Finally, when Gv had done these two activities several times, she went ahead and glued everything down to make her own monster.

You can download your own free set of monster pieces here.

The next thing we did was create a letter monster for the first letter of Gv's name:

We worked together on this project. I actually drew the shapes on the construction paper pieces after we talked about how she wanted it to look.

Gv chose the colors, googly eyes, and then cut and glued it all herself.

All this got her into the cutting spirit, because she kept asking for more things to cut out and write on. I managed to hunt down a couple of really cute printables to give her:

Pages 6, 7 and 8 of pack one here had unique prewriting paths and some cute monster pattern cards to cut out and arrange.

Page 18 of pack two here was a cutting practice page.

Page 25 of this tot pack had fun shapes to trace.

Then, when Gv was asking for still more things to cut later in the week, I gave her this set of monster cards (the monster mash activity on the download). Since they were outlined, I knew she'd be able to cut out all the little rectangles and this activity kept her quite happy for a while.

Finally, we finished up the week by creating some of our favorite Halloween decorations and doing a ton of fun things to go along with Have You Seen My Monster.