Having an almost 2 year old boy, who is at home with me during the day, has really brought out the teacher in me. I now have a file with activities, all with themes for us to do. We still follow our SkidZ curriculum and have adapted some of it to go with our theme for the week. His favourite song at the moment is “The Wheels of the Bus” and so, as every parent would know, we sing it over and over again.
I though to share some of what we have done with this theme. We had so much fun with it!
We started by making a poster of the song. You can do your own. We used this one which you can buy at a very reasonable price from Little1. How it works is you buy the poster design, they give you access to download and print it and then with the help of my laminator (as every teacher needs one) I made it more permanent. You can always just let someone do it for you.
We had some awesome activities to go with our theme. All free printables. We found them on besttoys4boys.
The first activity we did, has action cards. I stuck them on the wall and Ethan would then point to which action we would sing. You can also randomly draw one instead.
The second activity from the same website is size sequencing. The aim is to sort the buses according to their size. This is the start of some math skills. I used the free printables (once again made use of the laminator) and explained to him what he had to do. You of course do not need to laminate anything, I just did it so that we could reuse the activities at a later stage.
The third activity they have is a puzzle. We did this 2 ways.
One is to copy the picture, and build the bus in the same way. This is the more difficult version of the activity.
The second way is easier and more suitable for younger toddlers. Give little one the smaller pieces, such as the door, windows and wheels. Let him / her match it with the original picture by placing it on top of the relevant picture / shape.
Now came the AWESOME activity! It took a while and has a few steps to it, so we did it over 2 days. We built a cardboard bus from an old box. One we (yes even mommy) could get into and pretend to drive.
Daddy used an old box to cut the body and shapes out for us. We used the sides that close the box for this. (In case you were wondering about the size, we used a stock 6)
I spray painted the body of the bus with yellow spray paint, 2 layers. It dries really quickly too.
Then we painted the extra parts. The grill, lights and wheels. We already had a plastic steering wheel to use, but you can always make that out of the cardboard too.
Some craft glue and that was it. Our beautiful bus. We each had a turn to climb in and drive it.
Ethan later decided that pushing it around the house was lots of fun too, and so all of us had to run around, pretending to be some sort of car or bus, chasing each other.
