Twenty weeks of Tot School has come to a close, and we started off shapes with Grace’s current favorite – Stars!

We started off our week with a star themed sensory bin filled with all the items I could scrounge up from around the house and Grace’s toy collection. She played and played with this bin all week long!

Our book of the week is actually stashed in our sensory bin too! It’s a soft book with stars hanging from it, and when pressed plays a tune that goes with the book. We read Twinkle Twinkle Little Star everyday this week and danced along to the book’s tune as well as a YouTube version too! We also watched StoryBots’ Shapes video on YouTube.

Our first activity for our Star themed week was Star stamping! I grabbed some items from our star themed sensory bin and broke out the yellow Crayola Kid’s Paint. I laid out a piece of white card stock onto of a larger piece of coated card board (just to protect the surface). I put some paint on a paper plate and showed Grace what we were doing, by dipping a star into the paint and stamping the star on the paper. She followed suit with each star until she had pretty much covered her paper. When I removed the paper to dry she kept stamping on the cardboard!

Clean Up was a breeze with these paints and I was able to wipe off all the toys and Grace by just using baby wipes. I plan to do this activity for each of our Shapes, then take all of Grace’s stamped shape paintings and put them in the binder with the color Ziplock paintings for Grace to reference her shapes too!

Our next activity was a hit with Grace and was fun for Mommy to see how she would react. I grabbed some glow in the dark Stars a while back at Target for $1. I filled our small storage bin with black beans and after charging the Stars most of the day outside, I placed them in the bin of beans (night sky). I took our bin in Grace into a room with no windows (her bathroom) and shut the door. Grace was mesmerized by the glowing stars and worked quickly to pull them out of the bin, and then place them back where she found them. We played with this activity for a while with the lights off and on. I would bury the Stars in the beans and she would dig them out, etc. Amazingly when the lights were off she would only pull the stars out of the bin, but when the lights were on she wanted to pull the beans out as well, so I added a few bath cups and she could sort the beans as well as the Stars. Of all the activities we did for our star themed week this one held her attention the longest.

Next up for our Star themed week was a sticker activity! I picked up some star shaped stickers at our local dollar store and set out a black piece of card stock. I handed Grace the stickers and she would place them on the card stock where ever she wanted. She was particularly proud of her work. I had put it up on the refrigerator and when her daddy got home, she pointed at her stars and wanted me to hand it to her. When I did she took it to her daddy to see! Such a simple activity but such a huge hit with Grace!

Lastly, we played with some star shaped sticky notes. I’ve had this little sticky note pad for a long time just taking up space in my craft supply closet, so Grace and I put them to good use. I just opened the front door and handed Grace a sticky note after sticky note to place on the glass door. She thought about every one she placed before doing so, and after a while would remove and replace her stars. Super simple, but Grace loved doing this activity and repeatedly said “star” the whole time!

We had so much fun learning about Stars this past week! ⭐️

If you’d like to see a sample of how I plan out themes for a week check out the Tot School Schedule 🍍 page!

You can also see a list of this year’s themes on the Tot School Themes ☂️ page!

EVERYDAY a little Grace 🌷