tot school - noah's ark & animal sounds

Noah is 16 months old.

We have had SUCH a fun week! Noah has been quite partial to his animal sounds books lately, so I made that one focus this week. Our other focus was Noah's Ark. Obviously this went well with the animal sounds, and my Noah loves his Noah's Ark things because they share names:) Finally, in hopes of doing more with numbers, we worked a lot with the number two since it also went well with the Noah's Ark theme.

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Growing up, my mom was very in to Noah's Ark and kind of made that her theme in her living room. Her tastes have very much changed since then, so she let Noah have this old wooden Noah's Ark set she used to have as decoration. I remember playing with this as a kid too, so it was fun to see Noah enjoying it as well:)

Noah made several Noah's Ark art projects this week. First, he made a handprint rainbow. I was so proud of Noah too...he chose the order and glued all the prints down by himself! He doesn't tend to do well with gluing paper to paper, so this was an accomplishment:)

He had fun playing with his rainbow all week, especially when we read..

Noah also made a handprint dove. My hubby was very skeptical of this art project, but I think it turned out pretty cute! Noah did especially well gluing the wiggly eyes..

He also enjoyed helping me "pat down" the beak and olive leaves since they were too small for him to glue on his own.

The last artsy thing we did was made a pipe cleaner rainbow. I will definitely admit this looked better in my head! I painted an old pepper container blue, hoping that would represent the sky, then Noah was to put the different colored pipe cleaners into the holes.

He liked putting them in and out of the holes, but no one got that it was supposed to be a rainbow. Plus, the paint kept chipping off the metal container. So this was a bust...but oh well, that happens!

We played ALL of Noah's many toy animals this week, going over their sounds and unique characteristics. Here he is waving an elephant nose:) These are some of his favorite animals to play with...they're from Playmobil 123.

This activity evolved out of another. I had initially meant to make a sound wheel like on Chasing Marcus (found here), but I didn't have a brad to connect the two pieces. So I made the animal page into an animal sounds bingo kind of game.

Here is a close up....I used the egg pieces as markers because I had them out already.

The animals covered up are a sheep, a horse, and a chicken. Unfortunately, Noah was more interested in fitting the egg pieces back together. At least that was good for matching and find motor skills:)

Noah had lots of favorite books this week. Many of them I've shared before, but they fit for our themes. His favorite animal sounds books included:

Moo, Baa, La La La by Sandra Boyton

Biscuit Visits the Petting Zoo by Alyssa Satin Capucilli

Polar Bear, Polar Bear by Bill Martin, Jr. & Eric Carle

Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton (not totally animal sounds, but it has some)

His favorite Noah's Ark books included:

The Day the Rain Came by Allia Zobel-Nolan

Noah's Ark by Lucy Cousins

Inside Noah's Ark by Charles Reasoner

I made two number pages this week focusing on the number two. Nothing special...Noah was just supposed to find matching objects and count them into the circles.

Same concept here, just with small objects...

Noah did really well with the small set! Not so much with the big set...he just wanted to play with those pieces. But, he had a blast using this shovel to transfer the pieces.

Actually, spooning ended up being a BIG thing this week. Noah has done fairly well in feeding himself with a spoon for a while now, but he hasn't shown interest in spooning objects for tot school. That definitely changed this week! Though I only have pictures of him using the shovel, he has used lots of different utensils, spooned lots of different objects, and used lots of different containers for the transferring.

This has most certainly been a favorite of the week!

Noah's other favorite activity has been all the SNOW! We've basically been snowed in all weekend; it started Friday around 5PM, snowed all night, and continued off and on all day Saturday. All total we have nearly a foot of snow on the ground, which is a LOT for our area of NC!

Noah has been a little sickly this week with a cold, so I haven't let him go out in it, but I did bring two big bowls full inside at my mom's.

Noah literally played with these for TWO HOURS STRAIGHT! That is unheard of for him!

We did a ton of stuff in those two hours though: transferred, scooped, made different shapes and snowmen, tasted it, talked about how it was cold & wet, watched it melt...it was a GREAT two hours of fun playing and learning!

I just wished we would have been doing our snow activities this week!

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That wraps up our week! See what others are doing for Tot School and share your own ideas at 1+1+1=1!