Striving For Simplicity: Return of Tot School

We finally started back Tot School last week! We've spent the last two weeks talking about Winter. We've learned about cold weather, warm clothing, animal habits, and the color white. Our activities have been centered around 3 of my favorite winter books: The Mitten, The Snowy Day, and Snowmen at Night. I found a great resources with printables for The Snowy Day. We used several of these! Here's some of the activities we did:

Table Time:

The Mitten:

1. Made bird feeder (rolled a pinecone in peanut butter then birdseed and attached a string)
2. Winter collage - Glued pics on a piece of construction paper then splattered white paint for snow
3. Painted a mitten- cut out a mitten from card stock and painted with watercolors. I had intentions of punching holes and letting them lace it later but we never got to that :)
4. re-tell with cards,
5. winter clothing sort

The Snowy Day-

Snowflake-used water colors on a coffee filter then folded into a triangle and cut out triangles
tracing activity - I printed this off and placed in a sheet protector and used dry erase markers so we could resue it. She still has a long way to go on this activity!

Snowmen at Night:

1. Snowman - Mixed equal amounts of glue and white paint to make a "puffy" paint, then decorated with felt and buttons. Then let them "draw" in some of the shaving cream

Floor Time:

Dress-up: Dressed up in our winter coats, hats, boots, gloves/mittens
Snowball Toss/Fight: We took some rolled up socks and threw them at a clothes basket then at each other!

Mitten Match-up: Gathered all the mittens/gloves in our house, mixed them up and then matched them. (This was much more difficult for "Miss Priss" than I thought it'd be!)

Snacks:

hot choc with snowman marshmallows

snowman brownies- baked brownies, attempted to cut out with snowman cookie cutter (we apparently didn't let ours cool long enough!) then sprinkled with powdered sugar
Music:

Winter Pokey (Tune of Hokey Pokey but you put your mitten in, your boot in, etc.)
The Mitten

Freeze - We played music and when I stopped the music and said "Freeze" they had to freeze. They loved this!