Latticed Learning - School/Toys/Playing

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!



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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 school theme with this week's books. We also included the topics of toys and playing, since school and learning should include plenty of fun!

Here were just a few of our favorites:


Timothy Goes to School



Am I the only one who can relate to this book?  There would be some new trend at school, and by the time I got whatever it was from someplace cheap like the flea market or my mom made me that shirt in the latest style, everyone had moved on to something else.

The Blue Balloon




It's fun to see what this blue balloon will do on each page, but we especially love the unusual fold-outs it has - they're really unique!

Splat the Cat

 

We love Russell the Sheep, so it makes sense that we'd love this other book by Rob Scotton.  There are so many neat details for an observant mom or dad to pick up on in the illustrations and Splat learns that not only can school be fun, but he has much to learn about being a cat.

Knuffle Bunny



I don't know what I love most about this book - the cool way the illustrations incorporate both photographs and drawings, or the hilarity of what can happen when embarking on a simple errand with a small child.  I can tell you that my favorite part of the book is when Trixie goes "boneless," because some days it seems I live with the Jello-bone kid.  Since I have a dear friend who lives in The Netherlands, I feel like I'm getting a hug from her every time we read this book (Knuffel means "hug" in Dutch), although I have to admit that I usually pronounce the word "nuffle" instead of what I know is the correct way of "Ka-Nuffle."  

Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten



As a former elementary school teacher, I love how this book shows all the craziness surrounding the first day of school from the teacher's perspective - I can't think of a single one of us who wasn't as frazzled as Miss Bindergarten is, leading up to those first few days!

Other Great Books We Read

Froggy Goes to School

Clifford's Class Trip


David Goes to School


If You Take a Mouse to School


Tiptoe into Kindergarten


Corduroy


Mrs. Toggle and the Dinosaur


Franklin Goes to School



Brand-new Pencils, Brand-new Books

Sing Some Songs

The topics of school, toys and playing are pretty broad, so it was easy to find plenty of music for this week. Here are just a couple ideas to get you started:





Eraser from the album I talked about here

I Want My Diploma from this album


The Bean Bag Song from this post


Where Do They Make Balloons? from this group's No! album


Play Day by this beautiful-voiced artist

And so many more, but I'll let you search through your own music collection to see what types of songs you can add to a playlist.

Watch Some Videos


We love The Berenstain Bears, both the books and the show. There were two episodes that were especially pertinent to this week: The Berenstain Bears Go to School and Trouble at School.

Gv also loves Daniel Tiger, so we watched Daniel Visits School, Daniel Goes to School, and Daniel Doesn't Want to Stop Playing.

Play and Create

We did a few activities to correspond to our week's topic:

We played with bubbles:



We went on a school supply search. (This wasn't anything fancy - I just let Gv explore all our supply boxes and then she'd ask, "What's that?" if she couldn't name the item.  This was followed by experimenting with new tools such as hole punchers and brads, which of course was loads of fun.)


She found the ruler!


We did these activities to go along with Miss Bindergarten.


Can Craft

Getting Ready for Kindergarten Craftivity


We made these backpacks to go along with our Froggy book.




We read Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse and then did some activities I'd had from my classroom (random worksheets I'd collected.) We also made a purple plastic purse and some movie star sunglasses (find a great template for these here.)


Cut 2 pieces of purple construction paper to fit inside a plastic bag and then either use purple yarn or a pipe cleaner to make the purse strap.



And finally, we played catch with a ball.





Whew!  It was a busy week, but one full of fun!

Looking for all the great posts associated with this concept in one place?  Check out my Latticed Learning page here!

What's your favorite thing that we did this week?  I'd love to hear!  Either leave a comment below or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.

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