Animal theme activities - week 3

We've started Gymboree art classes and also have lots of art and craft activities planned for at home. One of our art activities this week was stamping. We used some kangaroo and koala stamps. See this post on art activity trays.

I have rearranged the kitchen and made it possible for Little Bean to safely access the kitchen bench. I'm not able to buy a Learning Tower (Santa?) or to make one at the moment so I had to improvise. We still have LB's old cot sitting in the dining room area. We used to use it as a bed - play pen when he was a baby. I was going to get rid of it but realised I had a new purpose for it. A make-shift helper platform. I pushed it up against the kitchen bench and LB can stand in it. Problem solved. The existing height settings are either too high or too low, so I'll have to drill some more holes to give us some better options. More on that project another day.

 This was his first time helping me cook and he loved it. He was in charge of the mixing bowl and stirring. He also helped sift flour, pour in the liquids and added the eggs after I cracked them into a cup for him. On the first day, we made banana cake for morning tea. We also made the almond milk to use in the cake. Another day, we made bacon and vegetable egg slice. He wanted to taste everything, which was fine for cake batter, but a bit weird for raw egg slice. He also cut capsicum and carrot sticks using this awesome crinkle cutter we bought from the How We Montessori shop. It was only AU$3.95

 

Animal recognition is happening. After our art activity was packed away the other day, Little Bean went and got a rubber ducky, pointed to the picture of ducks on his table and put them together. Happy dance.

We added some new animal figurines. He is now learning African animal names and sounds too.

I made Little Bean this activity board. For more details, read the full post here.

Instead of putting the dolly pegs in the pocket of the activity board as I had planned, LB often threaded them onto the front piece of fabric. This gave me the idea for this next activity. Putting dolly pegs on a tin can.

This week I added a spooning activity for the first time. He is using an Asian soup spoon with animal counters.

LB is using tongs for the first time too. These are a small pair that I found at the supermarket for a couple of dollars. He picked it up within a few minutes and really surprised me. I didn't think that he'd be able to do it and just wanted to see how far off he was. Instead, I am now planning more tong activities for next week. I gave him animal counters to see how he went with hard objects. I think I will try something soft like pom poms next.

I have been meaning to try this next activity for a couple of weeks but never found the time. Well, this week, our shell washing activity will happen. We will do it at LB's hand washing station. This red tray is actually for drying dishes on and includes a draining rack. I got the two wooden brushes from the fruit and vegetable section of IGA supermarket in Australia. They're for scrubbing potatoes. I bought both so that I could see which shape would suit little hands best.

We haven't had a discovery basket for a while so I thought I'd make one up with the new containers I've been collecting for another opening and closing activity. It has a small gift box, pill box, lunchbox, cardboard box, plastic container and a drawstring bag.