Tot School: The Mitten

We enjoyed the unit we did on the book The Mitten by Jan Brett!

Ryken helped ever animal get to the warm mitten with these Mitten letter mazes.

Baba made Nicki mittens out of snow-white wool. So we went to the craft store and touched wool.

We also compared wool to yarn. Ryken thought he would much rather have mittens made from the warm wool. 

Counting snowflakes onto mittens!

We talked about the animals in the book and who's in the book and who's not.
He does really good with these activities!

Ryken had a hard time focusing to finish this task but he was very capable of matching alphabet beans.

 "Discovery Mitten"

He put his hand in the "mitten" without looking in and we talked about what he felt.

Was it hard, soft? Little? Big? A lot of pieces or one big one? Square? round?

He thought this was fun!

This was the highlight of the unit!! We had these handy animal identification tracking cards and we made bear footprints and headed out into the snow!

Ryken strapped into his bear feet and ready to make some big bear footprints!

He loved it! Each bear foot fell off of him at least twice!! But they are easy to put back on!

We walked around a lot and looked at our footprints as well!

Ryken using his identification cards to figured out what animal tracks we came across. 

Here are some rabbit prints!

In the same field we were in, there was also some other prints from an animal or two. Not sure...but when we followed them we found a dead bird! :/

We also found some dog prints in our neighborhood!

In the book, Baba didn't want to make Nicki snow-white mittens because she thought he would loose them in the snow. So to show him how hard it would be to see snow-white mittens in the snow...

Ryken got to throw a white mitten off the deck into the snow.

We were at a park another day and there was this frozen over water retention area with fairly fresh snow on it and I saw prints...so we walked over to see them closer!

We made a "mitten" (aka fort) and we and some stuffed animals wore the animal masks and squeezed into the mitten.

Ryken loved these masks! But only the ones with big eyes...because a lot of them had really small eyes! 

We had friends over that got to play with the masks...and we built the fort again! 

Lining up the animals in the order that they go into the mitten!
 animal and mitten printables
Then he glued them onto the mitten!

Gluing yarn onto a mitten!

Ryken had a blast with this simple activity.
It was a roll and graph recording. 

Ryken loved throwing the cube up and seeing what animal would be on top!

He understood the whole graph process very well! He loved the stickers! 

We traced animal prints!

Ryken traced lines.

He improved SO much with this skill in a months time (with no practice too.) It was a good reminder that sometimes they just aren't ready/able to do certain things - and when they are, it will show.)

Preschool Mitten Printables

Ryken laced a mitten together and then he put the animals into the mitten in order that they came in the book.
 mitten and animals

Ryken making  stained glass mittens and Raya enjoying it as well! 

In the book, once all the animals are in the mitten, the big bear sneezes and all the animals fly out of the mitten and the mitten high in the sky.

So we had a white mitten filled with paper towels and he had a blast throwing it up in the air. 

We also played "Hide the Mitten".

He enjoyed this very much and kept wanting me to hide it. 

He also wanted to hide it for me, but when I would come to look it would tell me where it was or point! haha!! 

Our science experiment was pretty cool!

First we found the temperature of our house.

Then we recorded the temperature in the mitten.

(at first the temp went way down, because the mitten was down in the entry way - which is considerably cooler than the main floor of the house. But it eventually warmed up.)

Then Ryken put his hand in the mitten and we talked about how the body's heat is one of the warmest ways to keep warm. 

I was shocked at how warm it got in that mitten!