Apples, bubbles, buttons, & pretend play

Apple-covered Aa!

Our apple story & finger/felt play!

Haddy with her apple pie spiced playdoh apple (complete with pretzel stem and mint-leaf) before our pretend and real applesauce making!

Mama planted seeds inside so that Haddy could do all the same steps as she made the real applesauce!  Haddy cut the apple in half with a small butter knife and picked out all the seeds!

Then, with a little help, Haddy cut the halves into small pieces! (Love the tongue-action on all of these shots!)

She got to sprinkle in a little real cinnamon (she loved that part) while Mama added the other spices (she loved sniffing each kind as Mama put them in)!

Waiting in the kitchen, singing songs, while the applesauce cooked in the microwave!

Watching Mama smash the apples into sauce with a fork!

Button begins with Bb (gluing buttons onto our Bb)!

We've been learning about bubbles for the letter Bb, so she's stamping (toilet paper roll) bubbles onto the B!

Ooh! A bubble snake! (Made by rubber banding an old dish towel or sock over the cut-off end of a water bottle! We dipped the towel into dish detergent mixed with a few drops of water!)

Cautiously eyeing the Bubble Snake!

Chasing the Bubble Snake!

Baby Tummy Time with her Princess friends!

Giving baby a bath & dressing her

Just monkeying around with the baby gate

Apples & Funny Faces! (And so much more)!

Finishing up the paper plate apple from last week with a little bit of lacing.  It was very free-form ;)

Finger-painting the apples on our apple poem print-out - she actually did really well getting the paint inside the apples!

www.teacherspayteachers.com/Download/Apple-Poem-Finger-Paint

Printed out, colored, & then finger-painted

I cut out a bunch of eyes, noses, & mouths from magazines.  I laminated them & added magnets to the back!

Making magnet faces!

This one is my favorite!

A new discovery bottle! A Jellyfish!

 The Discovery Bottle Jellyfish

Water beads discovery bottle

Making noisemakers! 

Our noisemaker! We put popcorn and rice into toilet paper tubes & stapled & duct taped the ends shut!

Popsicle stick shape puzzles

Making an apple sun catcher!  Tissue paper pieces on contact paper!

The finished product!

Peeling stickers is great for fine motor!  I got a bunch of Disney movie stickers in some junk mail - perfect for this activity!

Red, Apples, & Circles - oh my!

The color of the month is red, so I threw a bunch of random toys into a box & had Haddy sort all of the red items out onto her red "Mem-mem."  She needed a little help, but I thought she did pretty well!

We looked through magazines together and pulled out pages with red things on them!  While she napped, I cut the pictures out & then we used a glue stick to glue them onto a page later on.  I put the page into a sheet protector so that we can make a color book over the upcoming months.

We are reading/learning about apples this month!  This was the first book that we read!

I pulled out a bunch of different circle-shaped items for her to stamp with.  We used toilet paper rolls, pill bottle lids, yogurt cups, empty masking tape rolls, etc.  to stamp red, yellow, & green "apples" on our paper.

This was supposed to be a red apple, but since we were discussing how apples could be red, green, or yellow, when she said she wanted to make a green apple, I just kind of went with it.  She's coloring her paper plate with both green crayons and markers.

Now we're adding some green paint on top for our green apple!  We'll add the stem and leaves later!

Several months ago, I tried this activity that I saw on Pinterest where toddlers are supposed to manipulate long pipe cleaners into a colander.  It didn't go so well because once she got them in, she didn't really know what to do with them!  We tried it again yesterday using tiny pieces of pipe cleaners & I was amazed at how dextrous she was with feeding them in until they disappeared & then she lifted the colander up and started the whole process over again!

Lots of Fine Motor Practice!

Sidewalk chalk on black paper

Using a small measuring spoon to scoop glass beads out of rice

Cleaning up the rice mess that inevitably ensued afterwards

Using 3 types of kitchen tongs to pick up puff balls

These salad tongs were tricky, but she was persistent!

Our work is never done!

Felt letters on a small piece of felt in a pencil box.  I love these boxes ($1 or less at Walmart) because they are stackable, but also easy for little hands to open and close!  She pulled out the C for Carlie & I finished it, but the H-A for Hadley was all on her own!

This activity was similar to yesterday's pipe cleaner ABCs, but she was a little more into this one!  Funnily enough, she kept asking me to make letters out of the pipe cleaner pieces - apparently she was paying attention yesterday!

Practicing gross motor skills by walking down "stairs" and jumping off of the stool!

Science & feelings

Discovery Bottles: water with corn syrup & glitter, bits of pipe cleaner & a magnet wand, alphabet and rice, toothpicks with rice on the bottom (sounds like rain), sand and shells from our beach trip, water with food coloring + oil

I ended up replacing the "rain" bottle above with this one because it just wasn't working.  I think my bottle is too smooth to hold the toothpicks any other direction than vertically, so once you turn it over once and try to shake the rice down through, it kind of loses its pizazz.  The blue one is a mixture of foam shaving cream dissolved in warm water & then colored with a bit of food coloring.  It gets all swirly & looks really cool!

Feelings cards (pics from magazines) in 3x5 recipe card protectors (more feelings on the flip side) - it's interesting that the ones I almost didn't make (like naughty, for example) are the ones she really remembers.  She always points to it and says "naughty, tongue, no-no, step!" which basically translates to 'he's being naughty for sticking out his tongue & that's a no-no - he should sit on the step (our time-out)!'  It's been useful for helping her express herself a little better and understand what she's feeling (since we've been having some issues with aggression, as of late!

From the past few weeks...

Moon Sand - 8 parts flour to 1 part baby oil (just don't vacuum it up, please! I learned that the hard way!)

Fine motor practice with popcorn kernels, spoons, clothespins, & water bottles/bowls

Naming colors (and foods) at Mama's Grocery Store

Sorting our shape puzzle onto painter's tape shapes on the floor!

A name train! She put the letter-cars on the glue & then added the wheels herself! (Sorry it's sideways! Darn phone!)

Tea party, anyone?

Indoor snow storm!! (confetti & a fan!)

Container painting - we did it as a color mixing lesson - this container was neat because we could see the colors mixing up.  I also used a smaller one that was easier for little hands to shake.  Hadley loved this and asked to do it 3x!  I lined my container with paper, put a couple drops of paint in the bottom, dropped in a marble, put the lid on, & let her shake away!

This is what we made with the container-painted paper - a birthday gift for MumMum!

Photo puzzles - a little too tricky for her at 21 months, but she'll enjoy them soon, I bet!

This is another one that was too difficult - I color-coded & cut pipe cleaners to match the colored letters that I drew on index cards.  She had to find the correctly colored pieces & put them together like a puzzle.  She'll enjoy this in a few months, too!

Stamping circles (with a large water bottle lid)