P Week- Postcards and Packages

As a special treat for P week, I asked a few family members to send Trip a postcard. He was so thrilled to go to the mailbox and find something just for him! He got two postcards from Grandpa Noni in Oregon with P things from their house, a pelican from Gram and PawPaw in Florida, and a pretty picture from Missouri from Uncle G, Aunt T, and Cooper.

 

 

Trip's cousin Cooper is doing a letter of the week too, and they just happened to be doing P the same week as us, so we had a great time exchanging packages for the boys.

Trip got a package with pictures, a plate with pumpkins on it,

colored pencils, and paints.

The pencils had to be dumped on the floor right away,

and then tried on the plate, the packaging paper,

and the pictures.

Then, we had to try out the paints, of course. Thanks, Aunt T for the great package. Trip was thrilled to get it and has been enjoying everything you sent!

I had lots of fun putting together Cooper's package. We sent a placemat, magnetic pompoms, paint with water pages, pictures, pool and farm I spy, pictures, a pumpkin book, a tiny puzzle, a pencil, a pen, and some foam letters.

P Week- Hide and Seek Bowl

After a week off from a hide and seek bowl for I week, Trip was excited to get back to the "towel game," as he calls it (because we always put a towel on the floor to contain the pasta and objects that come out of the bowl).

This week I included:

• a penguin
• a panda
• a pink pencil
• a purple pencil
• a potato
• a paper punch
• a pumpkin
• pencil paper
• a puzzle with palm trees
• a pig
• prince and princess finger puppets
• a pen
• foam, pipe cleaner, and magnetic Ps

all covered in our alphabet pasta.

P Week- Magnetic Pompoms

When I saw the idea of magnetic pompoms on Fun & Engaging Activities for Toddlers, I put pompoms on my shopping list right away. All you need to make them are pompoms, magnets, and glue. I used some magnets I had received to promote a new product and just cut them up to be small enough to fit on the back of the pompoms. Since the pompoms are light, the magnets don't have to be super strong, so you can use magnets you get for free from promotions and businesses (just make sure they're not too flimsy). I used hot glue, but a tacky craft glue or super glue would work too.

Trip loves to play with these simple toys. I printed out some letters for him to put pompoms on, knowing that at 25 months, he wouldn't be ready to just put them on the letter yet. He liked rolling the pompoms on the cookie sheet and watching them stick to it.

Then, he had lots of fun dumping everything on the floor and doing it all over again.

Eventually, he will get to the point where he can put a pompom on each circle to form the letters. I found the letters we used from Making Learning Fun. This could be a fun activity to do in the car and the printables could also be covered with stickers, bingo markers, or circular magnets.

When we first got these out, Trip saw the large yellow pompom and said, "Big Bird!" The red one was Elmo, the blue one Cookie, and the green one Oscar. Another yellow was Zoe and a blue was Super Grover. The white one was a snowball. I love to see him make these great connections!

P Week- Pasta-covered P

This week Trip was actually excited to participate in decorating the letter for his bedroom door. I got out several kinds of pasta (including our rainbow salad macaroni from R week) and some glue. I applied the glue to a section of the P and he got right to work adding the pasta.

For the next section, he wanted to help with the glue. Fortunately he wasn't able to get too much out, so we didn't end up with a huge puddle.

After applying some more pasta, Trip decided it was time to taste some (much to my dismay).

Before the mess got out of control and too much uncooked pasta was ingested, I said we were done. That didn't make Trip too happy, but I was able to distract him with something else, and quickly whisked away his artwork to dry in a safe spot. I drizzled some more glue over the whole thing to help insure that the pasta would stay put on the paper. 

That worked nicely, and a couple of hours later, our P was ready to join the other letters on Trip's door. It's fun to see his name completed. He loves to touch the pasta when we're coming in and out of his room and usually asks me to cook it.

P Week- Food

P Week was a great one for food. There was a plethora of possibilities. We enjoyed pasta, pepperoni, plums, peas, peppers, popcorn, popsicles, pretzels, peanut butter, and more.

We had some stick pretzels, which turned into a fun letter-making activity and a good review of the four letters that we have practiced so far. 

Trip actually really liked me making letters out of pretzels and we had some great laughs with our pretzels and peanut butter.

A search on Google Images yielded the idea to make penguins out of Oreos. Mine turned out a little funny looking with its uneven wings and large eyes (I didn't have mini M&Ms for the eyes or candy corn for the beak and feet), but Trip didn't care at all. He was just excited to get a special treat and enjoyed the penguin shape.

I had hoped to have a picnic at the park and make olive penguins for the occasion, but our week got busy and it didn't happen, so we'll save it for another time.

P Week- Potato Prints

I had made potato prints in the past, but had never done them with Trip, so I figured that P week was a good opportunity to give it a try. I got the potato stamps ready while he was napping so that he could paint when he got up.

Potato stamps are super easy to make. Just take a potato (in this case one that was on its way out and had grown some eyes),

cut it in half (or just cut off one end if the potato is not very big- you want enough for a little one to hold on to easily),

then carve out the image that you want. Now, don't make the mistake that I first made by carving the P the right way. I got this far and realized that I was making a stamp, which meant that I needed to carve the P backwards! Oops! So after cutting off that part,

I carved it properly and made the P backwards.

I cut the other end of the potato in half and made a heart and a star. Fortunately you don't have to worry about carving shapes backwards.

When Trip woke up, the table was all covered in newspaper and the paints were ready. We squirted some blue paint onto a lid from a yogurt container, and he got to work. I made a couple of prints for him and then he wanted to do it himself.

The only problem was that he thought the paint should go on his face.

(Um, what is that on my nose?)

He mostly used the potato as a paintbrush, but that's okay.

Then he used the paintbrush to paint the potato.

Although he didn't make the prints as I had hoped, we still had lots of fun, which is what counts. I bent a pipe cleaner in the shape of a P and used that to make some prints as well. I would make a print of a P and Trip would paint over it with his paintbrush. Together we made some nice artwork to hang on the fridge and had many opportunities to practice the letter P.

P Week- Parade!

I wish I could say that I planned it this way, but it just so happened that our town's Labor Day parade fell at the beginning of P week. How perfect! It's always fun to have something memorable and out of the ordinary to help cement the learning our little ones are doing.

We arrived just before 10 am when the parade was supposed to start, but must have been far enough down the route (which couldn't be that long in our tiny town) that it took about 45 minutes of waiting before the parade actually reached us. That meant there was lots of distracting that needed to be done to keep our tired boy busy.

We looked at pictures on Mommy's phone,

played on the sidewalk,

and chatted with friends.

One of Trip's friends gave him a paper bag to collect candy. He decided that it would make a good hat.

The parade finally arrived and one of Trip's favorite friends was walking next to the police car so he had lots of fun waving at her.

We saw the pretty rodeo queen on her pretty horse,

the rodeo princesses,

some pickup trucks,

a purple car,

a pink ATV,

and much more!

Thank you to Auntie Rachel for taking the pictures for us so that we could watch out for Trip!

P Week- The List

P is another letter that has lots of possibilities, so making a list of P words was much easier than last week's I list. The list of foods alone could have taken up most of the page!

This week, be looking for posts about:

• our Labor Day parade
• potato and pipe cleaner prints
• Oreo penguins
• pretzel letters
• pasta-covered P
• magnetic pompoms
• P hide and seek bowl
• postcards and packages