PLAYhouse PreSCHOOL: Toddlers Exploring the Solar System Through Tots School

Unlike other three-year-olds who are now in preschool, my little girl goes to school at home, in our dining area. We’ve put off enrolling her since her immune system is quite weak.  Good thing there are now plenty of sites that provide ideas for toddler activities.  My toddlers and I have been using Starfall.com and Time4learning. I also prepare worksheets for them to do at home.  And, of course, we’ve got our music and movement activities and arts and crafts messy time.

However, there are days when I am unable to prepare worksheets for them especially now that school has started and I’ve put on my academic tutor hat. Thanks to Mommy Chris of The Mommy Journey, I found another site that is rich with resources for toddlers and preschoolers – 1+1+1+1 Tots School.

We’re using the Space-themed printables for this week’s Space Exploration. Today, we did the S printables which I used with the Solar System Pack.  I only print in draft to save on ink and laminating the cutouts are a bit costly so I just make do with board paper.

Here’s how our Space Exploration went last Friday and today:

I cut out the pictures of the planets and asked Jade to stick them onto the wall.  After naming the planets, we counted them, and identified the biggest and smallest planet.  Jakei counted with us and kept pointing at planet Earth.  I kinda miss Pluto though.

Lining up the Planets on our wall

Little boy proudly points to our own planet Earth

Jade was able to trace the letter S neatly and has shown improvement in coloring pictures.  Jakei still needs plenty of work on writing and coloring but he was able to name all of the pictures shown.  He even used the correct color for the star.

I printed two sets of the shapes with stars in them and gave each toddler one set.  Both of them were able to recognize and name all the shapes except for the hexagon.  We’ll be using them tomorrow for a matching game. The cards with objects found in space were used for vocabulary building and for sorting.  I asked Jade to group all those that begin with the letter S.  Two other cards, the space shuttle and space station, were also used for our counting activity. Jade is already able to recognize some color words. She read white, pink, yellow, green and blue correctly and was also able to use the correct crayons. (By this time, Jakei has lost interest in our lesson and chose to munch on some Koko Krunch.)

  

For our activity on counting, I placed a picture of a space shuttle at the foot of the wall and a picture of a space station a few feet above the space shuttle.  The S printables from Tot School came with star cut-outs with the numbers 1 to 20.  I asked Jade to help the space shuttle go to the space station by placing the stars in correct order.  She was able to do 1 to 10 without help but needed some assistance finishing the task.

All printables we used were downloaded from Tots School’s vast resources. We’re continuing our Space Exploration theme for the rest of the week. For our Thinking Tuesday tomorrow, we’ll be doing some worksheets.  I’m still thinking of a craft we can do for our Wonderful World of Wednesday.  Do share ideas if you have any.

Comments

  1. I do admire you for being a hands on Mom to your toddlers…

  2. thanks for the linky love mommy 🙂 I am so glad to have helped in any way 🙂

Trackbacks

  1. […] Toddlers exploring the Solar System through Tots School […]