Weekly Activities: Easter Theme

I have been reading a lot of tot school blogs this past week. I really found a lot of good ideas on this blog and other links on her blog. I have started to incorporate the "tot tray" idea. Instead of trays I am using colored buckets, since that is what I have. I am going to fill 4-6 new buckets each week with different activities and let the kids choose what they like to do. I had great success with some and not so much with others, but that is what learning together is all about. We were also all sick this week, so I didn't do everything I had planned.

Jaxon's absolute favorite thing to do this week was put noodles into this water bottle lid. He chose this activity almost every day. Sawyer enjoyed it too. He would put 4 or 5 noodles in at once, but Jaxon took his time and carefully put one noodle in at a time. We used spaghetti and small shells.


In another bucket I hid small toys in this Easter grass. I drew pictures of the objects and had Sawyer match the object to the picture. J had fun just digging in the grass for the toys. We did this once and only once, because the grass was a mess. I am still finding it all over my house. Next time I would just cut up green paper for the grass. They enjoyed it and I am glad we did it, but I hid it in the closet the rest of the week, because I just couldn't handle the mess it made.


Another big hit this week was play-doh. I gave the boys Easter cookie cutters, a few play-doh tools, and play-doh and they had a blast. J was concentrating so hard.

I filled another bucket with plastic Easter eggs. On each egg I wrote a capital letter and the lower case letter, so they could match the eggs by color and letter. I knew this would be too hard for Jax, but thought Sawyer would enjoy it. Well, J enjoyed throwing the eggs around and so did S. He matched a few of the eggs, but it didn't hold his attention for very long. He only chose this activity once or twice. He did have fun sorting them into colors.
S also enjoyed cutting paper this week. Another activity I had that neither boy chose was putting stickers on egg cut outs. Usually S loves playing with stickers, but he wasn't interested this week.
He did really enjoy playing with his opposite puzzle and stamping. These were unplanned activities that he asked to do.

All in all it was a good week and I look forward to changing out the buckets and trying some new activities. We also did structured crafts and activities that I posted through out the week. I enjoyed teaching Sawyer about the true meaning of Easter this week. Today he has been telling everyone, "Happy Easter, Jesus lives!" Indeed He does!