Day Two...More Apples

It's the second day for our Apple Theme and something is getting me excited. We are still using Confessions of a Homeschooler's worksheets, along with the other activities I have prepared. I finally found something really useful out of those baby food pouch caps that I've been keeping all these months. Lia is not a fan of these food pouches, but she likes the ones with the yogurt blend!

Keep these things... they're great as learning tools!

For the second day, we were to read the book, "Apple Farmer Annie" by Monica Wellington. I am happier that she sat through the whole book, all because she was munching on a small bowl of frozen veggies. I regret that I wasn't reading much to her when she was little (reason why I think she's not too attentive) or maybe she is just in her active stage that she can't sit for too long. For our music and rhythm session, I was searching through Pinterest to find an apple song, and I did. It's called the Apple Crunch song that goes to the tune of Three Blind Mice. Here's the lyrics:

Apples go crunch

In my lunch

Sour or sweet

They're fun to eat

They grow and grow and made lots of trees

Colors of red, yellow and green

Apples go crunch!

It's actually a fun song, that up until four weeks after this activity, Lia still sings the lines with me. Surprising, because we only sang this around three times the first week and she was able to retain it!

 The book was about an apple farmer named Annie. She harvested lots of Apples...

...put them in baskets, and sold them at the market!

For the learning activity, we were to try sorting apple cards based on size. As expected, Lia can't do this just yet. But as a mom, I want to keep exposing her to so many things at this time where she grasps things really quick. So I told her that there are big apples, medium apples, smaller ones and so on. And then she picked out the smallest one and said, "baby apple!" I was surprised to hear that from her, so I asked if the biggest one was "daddy apple" and she said yes! So I think she gets the concept that big and small pertains to size. We are going to work on it more the next few weeks, by twos.

 Baby Apple!

Not really sorting most of them, just playing! But she's having fun...why not?

Simple arts and crafts activity: gluing apples on a tree. The glue was the fun part...yes, all the time!

Here is another fun activity (at least it was, for me!) I printed out this playdough mat and laminated it. Then we used our homemade, scented playdough to make "apples" in the form of small "balls". Lia was to fill in the white circles you see, to make them look like apples in a tree. My toddler instead chose to ask for the plastic knife, cut the playdough and squish them {she has been playing with playdough for weeks now, and she's used to slicing them}. Not a successful activity, but hey, I can try again. Rest assured, she will like this better next time!

Now the best part of it- our Apple-themed Sensory Bin! Lia was to harvest the apples {which were the baby food pouch caps} using a plastic tong, and put them in a bowl. She tried her best each time- some successfully and some not. At times she would use her other hand for support {great thinking!}. It was also a chance to identify which letter was the uppercase and lowercase Aa {I've included the small laminated apples we used in yesterday's activity}. She calls the lowercase ones, "baby a". She had a blast scooping, picking out the apples, burying them again and so on!

 For the bin, I used black beans to make them look like soil. You can also substitute with green colored rice.

Look at the other supporting hand!

Slowly, but surely...

Success! She didn't want my help. 

We had a long but fulfilling second day. Lia is loving our tot school so far, which makes me really happy. I couldn't wait what tomorrow would bring!

At the time of this writing, we are now in our fourth week of Tot School.