Do A Toy Rotation With Me #25
April, 30, 2024
For some background introduction information on toy rotations see my first toy rotation blog at by clicking the link.
Last week’s toys and books:
We really enjoyed our Eric Carle theme. We got lots of reading in. I plan to continue that into this week by keeping all of his books out. Aryi mostly just tried destroying the ABC game and other cards, so I am putting them away to be used with supervision. I have some plans for the foam letters this coming week, but they are coming off the shelf. We packed up all the bags of animals for our trip. I am planning on keeping them packed away for this week.
Knowledge Crate Sensory Bin and Art Projects:
March was Eric Carle month. Because of this, the Knowledge crate we get themed their spring box after Eric Carle. This gave me the idea to do our own Eric Carle month. Since March was so busy with St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, I decided to do it in April instead. I will be using everything that came in the crate. I put out the sensory bin supplies that came in this kit in a sterilite container on the top shelf of our toy rotation for Aryi to ask for when he wants it. Since we just went on our beach trip, I am also keeping our beach sensory bin from Knowledge crate out on the shelf to be played with when asked for.
This week’s toys and books:
The theme of this entire month I plan on being mostly Eric Carle. Because of this, I went to the library and checked out a bunch of Eric Carle books and pulled the ones we have in our collection. I set up one of our shelves mostly to house these Eric Carle books. I have toys relating to some of the animals in the books. For those books, I gave them their own shelf with that toy. These include a snake, bear, caterpillar, and panda bear. I put out the art projects we made at the library last month.
We just came back from a trip to the beach, so I decided to dedicate the other shelf to beach and ocean animals. I recently ordered an Ocean Knowledge crate for activities related to ocean animals.
Ocean books – I got Aryi some new ocean books and pulled the ones he had already.
Ocean Related Stuffed Animals – I pulled all of our ocean related stuffies and put them out. Aryi loves when we make the octopus sad and happy or make the shark mad and happy.
Matching Ocean Animal Cards (Aquarium) – This has been super fun. I get Aryi to give me two of the “same” circles. We are practicing our ocean animals and the concept of the same and different.
Ocean Animal Figurines with Information Cards (Knowledge Crate) – I love the figurines that Knowledge crate sources for their crates. They are so lifelike and we can use them to learn about the different types of ocean life.
**Not pictured here I printed out some ocean animal flashcards from the Megabundle and pulled our coral ISPY from Knowledge Crate and put them in protectors. I attached hooks to our shelves and can now display them for Aryi to play with whenever he wants.
Letter Basket:
This week we are changing out our basket to a Hh basket. The videos I will be playing are The Good and The Beautiful ABCs and ABC sounds, the letter Hh song from ABC mouse, the Letter Hh from ABCmouse, How to write the Letter Hh from ABCmouse, A to Z by ABC mouse, Alphabet Surprise Turn and Learn Letter Hh, The Letter Hh Song from Miss. Molly and Harold from Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool. These are the links for those songs.
I say the letter and show it to Aryi. Then I will say the letter sound. This is a Hh and it says hhhhh. We go through words that start with the Letter Hh. I pull out the items as we go through the words. For Hh, I have hats, a hamburger, a horse, and a Hh block. I have an alphabet puzzle with letters A-H out. I will let Aryi Identify the letters from a few pieces and he can place the letters in his alphabet puzzle as we say A is for AAAA, B is for BBBB, C is for CCCC, and so on. We can read whatever related books Aryi wants to that day. I have 5 Alphabet books; ‘see, touch, feel ABC’, ‘abc’, ‘Once Upon an Alphabet’, ‘A is for Apple’ and ‘AB See”. I have books that feature Hh words; ‘Blue Hat, Green Hat’, ‘Hat’, My House‘’ and ‘Hello, Horse’. I got the Hh word books from the library. This is a great way for us to practice our Hh sound when Aryi points to the things in the book and says what they are. Then we can do a Hh related coloring page or craft. I get some of these crafts from education.com and Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool. I also just make some crafts myself.
This format has been working well for us. Aryi thought we were playing and reading books like always, but we were learning too. I plan to have this basket out for the next two weeks then move on to Ii, so come back for that. Aryi comes to me and says basket, basket like 5 times a day. He enjoys this so much. To him it is play, to me, he is learning.
Number Basket:
I am keeping this number basket pretty much the same. I put the tactile flashcards back in. I have peg boards with the numbers 1-10. I also have all of our number books in here: ”Numbers”, “How Many?”, “Counting with Barefoot Critters”, “Big and Little”, “Let’s Count”, “Baby Math”, “Poppy’s Surprise”, “Few and Many”, and “Pop-up Peekaboo Numbers”. I also threw in some wooden animals to use as manipulatives. I have 1 pig, 2 lions, and 3 bears. The bears can also be broken down, 1 is a polar bear and 2 are brown bears. Two of the animals are little and three of the animals are big. I play number videos that I find on youtube sometimes.
You can check out the related Youtube video by clicking the link below.