Tot School – The Week of the Ducks

My tot is 20.5 months old.

Monkey Girl was in heaven this week.

I focused our activities on ducks and since ducks are her absolute favourite thing, she had a ball. (I must admit… we were all happy when duck week was done though… you can only kiss yellow pieces of yellow plastic so many times before you begin to go bonkers.)

We read books about ducks. Monkey Girl particularly loved the “Are You My Mommy?” book as it had some nice textures to touch and feel.

We built a farm puzzle… with plenty of focus on the duck.

We enjoyed singing the song “5 little ducks” quite  a bit. I had set up a little tray for her to act out the song. She really enjoyed being the Momma duck.

We also played a game where I placed five plastic ducks in five easter eggs. We would put those eggs in a bucket with 7 other eggs and Monkey girl would go through the eggs, shaking each one to see if we could hear the baby duck. When it rattled, she would have me open them and we would put the ducklings in a nest with their Momma and Daddy. This was a favourite game that we played over and over again. It was nice because it gave us the opportunity to talk about sound and the colours of the eggs.

We used the paper nsxt and ducks that Hubbers and I made for her a while back. They were just as much this time, especially when we placed the baby ducks in the eggs and had them hatch. Great for counting!

We counted baby ducks and helped their Momma sing rock-a-bye baby to them.

Monkey Girl enjoyed wearing her new duck shirt – she would often stop playing just to point at the ducks and inform me “Duck DUCK!”

We made playdough ducks… who of course had to have playdough bananas to eat and Monkey Girl wandered around the house with a duck garbage bin on her head (which has never been used for garbage mind you, just storing rubber duckies in)

I took Monkey Girl on a field trip to the pond. We watched the ducks swimming around and were lucky (and excited) to see them come close to us. We counted them and I pointed out the cattails and reeds, the cold water and got to see the ducks stretch their long wings out and fly. Monkey Girl was so surprised to see them fly! She was very sad to leave the ducks, even though we were going to meet Daddy for lunch. We will definitely be doing this again soon!

We chose ducks of different sizes and Monkey Girl would kiss them as I called out “Big”, “Medium” and “Small.” She did very well with this activity.

Last but not least, we painted with a duck stamper. First I helped Monkey girl make a pond scene card for her grandparents anniversary. When I finished I gave her a yellow piece of paper, put some paint on the paper, left the duck stamper and paint brush. I then turned to clean the kitchen counters, expecting her to make a big blobby painting like she usually does. I was pleasantly surprised to see her copying my actions. She carefully covered the duck stamper with paint, turned it over on her own and stamped it down. Of course, she would then use the paintbrush and spread around the paint, but in all, a successful activity.

That is all for this week… next week? Numbers… and a bit more low key… I am all ducked out!

Please click on the link above to see what others were doing this past week!