Tot Trays
Tot trays are activities that I set out for Norah (usually after breakfast) that I know she can do without my help. They tend to focus on fine motor skills. They give me a little time to get things done in the morning, and help delay her constant asking for “school time” until Ivan goes down for a nap.
Transferring mini chicks into an egg carton using tweezers.
Transferring styrofoam eggs into a paint tray using bunny tongs.
Egg-shaped coin drop.
Favorite Book
When I plan a themed week, I’ll go onto our local library’s website and request any children’s books they have that relate to our theme. I place them all in a basket and let Norah explore them during the week. Here was our favorite this week:
This is a super cute book about different animal eggs. At the end, it shows a picture of what the inside of a duckling’s egg might look like as it grows. After I explained it to Norah, she went, “Ohhhh.” So cute.
Letter E Activities
I’ve often thought about how silly it is that we teach children the letter names and capital letters first. If you think about it, it’s the letter sounds that we really need to know how to read, and 90% of what we read is in lowercase letters! Instead of teaching one at a time though, I’ve incorporated all three. I really try to emphasize the letter sound with Norah, and expose her to the “baby” letters just as much as the “Mommy” letters.
To introduce our new letter, I gathered any letter Ee’s that I could find from puzzles, magnets, etc and also a few small objects that begin with the letter Ee. I tossed them all into her rice tub and let her explore. She played with this every day this week.
She put together an Ee collage (I cut, she pasted) that we hang on our refrigerator.
This letter Ee sheet is supposed to be used with our Do-A-Dot markers (we used a 50% off coupon at Michaels to get them cheaper), but I thought I’d try something different by trying to get her to use her finger to paint the dots. She insisted on using the paintbrush and that’s was fine. I thought it was because she didn’t want to get dirty but I was wrong…
`She worked on this simple pre-writing activity. These and several other printables we used this week were found here. I put it in a sheet protector and let her use a dry-erase marker so that it could be reused (which is what I do with 90% of the things I print). I was really impressed with how well she did with this and especially how she held the marker.
Then she traced the letter Ee.
This was probably her favorite of the whole week. I hid some eggs in the toy room, she would run and find one, bring it to the egg carton and match the “mis-matched” egg to the corresponding eggs I colored in the tray.
For this activity, she picked an egg out of the basket, looked at the number on the egg and put that number of beads into the egg. She then matched the number to the same number in the egg carton.
She graphed jellybeans.
And then shared them with George.
She used her oval shape viewer to find something that was an oval – her face!
She colored her egg coloring sheet also from here.
We made a contact paper egg.
It turned out pretty!
She and brother watched the letter E show on Starfall (probably my favorite website!)
She stamped her letter E.
And then thought it was fun to stamp her thumb.
…And then her hand 
This sheet was supposed to be a hunt for the letter E, but she wanted to dot all the letters, which is fine. We just named them as she dotted.
I had no idea what a huge hit this jumbo finger pointer would be. She used it to point to her letter Ee “vocabulary words” and then ran around the house naming everything in sight.
She had soo much fun!
She sorted Ee eggs and "other letters.”
We had an egg and spoon “race.”
For this game she had to match the colored eggs to the baskets. She definitely didn’t enjoy this as much as the plastic egg games!
Wow, we did A LOT this week!
