I wasn’t sure if we were going to have a very successful week in Tot School due to the increase in power outages. I thought last week was bad but it was nothing compared to this week. Some of my plans for this week’s activities had to be scratched and moved to later but that’s life. Nothing can be gained in getting bent out of shape over trivial things. Fortunately, Tot School isn’t limited to a certain time or schedule. Some form of learning took place at some point on any given day ;-)


That being said, let’s jump right into the activities for this week’s letter: D. I’ll be honest, we pretty much stuck with dinosaur activities, for the most part. I realize that dinosaurs might not be as appealing to little girls but you never know. I enjoyed watching The Land Before Time when I was young.


Little Man already had a lot of tiny dinosaur figurines. I pulled them out at the beginning of the week so that he could start playing with them. I kept 4 of them so that I could put together some fun dinosaur ice eggs.

If you have dinosaur toys like these, you simply wedge the toy into balloon (albeit, a slightly cumbersome task) and then fill it with water. Be sure to let out any air that gets trapped inside. I wasn’t thinking about that until after I tied up the first balloon and realized there was an air bubble. Not really a big deal but it just doesn’t make that perfect egg shape.


Once completely frozen, cut away the balloon and allow your child to have fun trying to get the dinosaur eggs to “hatch”. Since it’s always summer weather here, this made the perfect, cool activity for the heat. But this can also be an indoor bathtub activity for the cooler seasons.


Once the eggs got smaller and more fragile, Little Man started chiseling away. This gave a lot of practice with fine motor skills, especially with these slippery, melting eggs.

Speaking of motor skills, we also had a lot of fun with this balloon paddle game. Sometimes I played with Little Man and other times he liked using both the paddles to pick up the balloons and toss them in the air. This is a very easy game to throw together if you have all the supplies: balloons, popsicle sticks (or another sturdy handle option), paper plates, and strong tape. As you can tell from the darkness of the photos, we played this game during the power outages.



In place of our sensory bin this week, we made dinosaur fossils with play dough.

For the snack this week, I was excited to use a dinosaur sandwich cutter to make my homemade cheese crackers in the shape of dinosaurs. I don’t know which Little Man enjoyed more, the taste of the crackers or playing with them ;-)

Screen shot from pbskids.org

Keeping cool with our battery powered fan when ...not if.. the power goes out. Making sure this thing gets charged is a big deal. The smallest breeze keeps me sane in this heat.