Elephants, egg boxes and a friendly creature called Elmer has filled E week for the baby and toddler. As always, this week we worked on enriching their language, teaching new rhymes as well as improving gross and fine motor skills rather than teaching discrete phonics skills.
E week –Elmer the Elephant
We couldn’t explore E without reading Elmer and read it we did. The toddler engaged with the bright colours and enjoyed the story. We then made our own collage Elmer using an elephant outline and bright collage materials – glittery paper and pompoms. The toddler spread glue all over the elephant independently and then selected what to stick on.
Elephants at the Zoo
We loved observing the elephants at the zoo and were most excited to be able to feed them too. The toddler was a bit wary and didn’t want to feed one herself but watched closely as I fed a bit of swede into the elephant’s trunk. Once home we found our toy elephants and she enjoyed playing with them. I extended the play by teaching her some new rhymes – One Elephant Went Out to Play which also exposed her to the concept of one more and counting. I then sang the classic – Nelly the Elephant which she thought was hysterical and there was a repeat refrain of again, again each time the song ended.
There is something appealing about egg boxes! We used egg boxes as construction materials and the baby and toddler made egg box towers balancing them on top of each other and waiting with excitement to see them topple over. We then filled the egg boxes with pompoms and the baby enjoyed emptying them out. I used coloured eggs to teach pattern to the toddler. I made some simple repeated patterns and described them to the toddler seeing if she could help finish the pattern. Although this was challenging for her it was good to expose her to the concept and good practise of her colours.