Tray Activities

The term "Tot School" was thought of by Carisa over on the 1+1+1=1 blog. This is also where I first saw the idea for "Tot Trays." After we started doing Tot School on a regular basis, I simply couldn't resist these trays from Oriental Trading Co. We used a regular cookie sheet before, but I have found that Little Bear is much more into the tray activities if she has one of the 6 brightly colored trays behind her work ;)

For about a month, I've just been "throwing" activities on the trays randomly and without much thought of any order. This has been working for us, but it would probably drive some people CRAZY ;) I have always been more of a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of person, but I'm trying really hard to be more organized for my children's sake! So last Sunday night, I wrote down six tray ideas and got everything ready for the week--then shoved it all back into the closet until school time the following morning (the joys of having a small house with very little storage, plus a baby who would love to get her hands and teeth on anything that would get left out!).

Here are 5 tray activities Little Bear chose to do this week:

Sea Shell Rice Hunt:
Granny just got back from Florida and brought some sea shells for LB and since Little Tiny could not share them, I thought we could use them only during school time. I threw about 20 of them into the rice tub and let Little Bear "hunt" for them with different scoops. She always enjoys playing with rice, but it made it even more special that she got to find Granny's surprises :) After finding them all, she helped me count them. Yes, she's still in her jammies...one of (in my opinion) the many joys of schooling my little one at home ;)

Magnetic Letters Play:
This was one of the very first tray activities I ever did with Little Bear. We just use a metal cookie sheet and the magnetic letters stick right to it! Sometimes we'll play a game by lining up 3-4 capital letters on one side of the cookie sheet and the corresponding lower case letters on the other and she'll match up the "Mommies and babies." She's kind of over that now so I just let her come up with things to do with the letters...she mostly lines them up in neat rows, naming each letter and then tells me what they spell! It's endless fun! Yes, still in jammies ;)

Button Color Sorting:
I found these adorable little pinch bowls at Target and couldn't resist (I'm not even sure what pinch bowl are, by the way)! I am a sucker for anything that comes in primary colors ;) I didn't get out the blue ones in this sort because I thought we'd talk about Fall colors and these 4 looked perfect together! I grabbed 10 or so of each color button from an assorted bag I purchased at Hobby Lobby, put them in cup and let her go to work. She does a great job sorting...and then adds her own little twist on things, pulling out all the heart and flower shaped buttons to keep for herself ;) She always does this with anything pink and purple too, so funny! And of course we counted the buttons by color when she was finished.

Clothespin Counting Cards:
Who even knows how I ended up finding this wonderful freebie! But I'd love to share so head on over here to find it, still FREE! The cards are numbered 1-12 and include the numeral, number word and the same number of dots. LB works so hard to squeeze the clothespin on her own to cover the dots and she has certainly improved in the last month! Great for number recognition AND working those tiny little fine motor muscles! Look closely to see the red ladybug tutu in the picture...I was praising the Lord that I didn't have to fight her out of it to TAKE her to school this morning!!!

Unifex Cube Towers:
I usually just let her play with these Unifex cubes in whatever way she wishes, but I thought we'd try out something a bit different this week. I gave her the numbered paper and asked her to make towers for each number. She did pretty well on her own for the first few numbers, but needed me to model how to count and place the towers on the larger numbers. I think she got the hang of it by the end (and don't you love how she used brown with one yellow cube to make 10...she refused to use the "other blue" color of cubes so this is what she came up with!)

Of course she got to play with the "extras" however she wanted so she connected them all together to make one long cube TRAIN!

We did not get to the sixth tray activity this week, so it will be saved for next week. We tried to do 2 trays a day (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), but we were really focusing on another project (which I will post soon) this morning and we ran out of time.