tot school: alpha-fishing and caterpillar-making

Today's main tot-school activity was another one of those where the time, effort, and dreamy-eyed imaginings on my part far outweighed the amount of value Basbusa actually got out of it! The basic idea was to make some flashcards with the letters she knows on them, attach paperclips to each card, and then go fishing for them with a magnet on a string. Like so:

I was imagining all kinds of excited conversations along the lines of, "ooooh, look, you caught something! What is it? Yes, you're right, it looks like a sssssssss! It is, it's a red ssssssssssssss!" It kind-of worked, for eight cards, as in these photos:

("ooooooooo! oooooooooooo!" and "g!", said Basbusa), but after eight cards she was all done with the game, with a very definite "been there, done that!" air.

Why, exactly, did I think it was so important to glue on letters that I had cut out of craft foam, in three different colors, rather than just writing the letters with a pen?! There was some logic to it at the time, I swear, but I no longer have the slightest recollection what it might have been. In retrospect, in the light of all the tracing, cutting and gluing I did, and the four-minute activity length, "mild insanity" seems like the best guess.

Next up was an activity which I found here, to go along with one of Basbusa's current favorite books, The Hungry Caterpillar. Here's what we ended up with:

I drew the face, and cut the big green strips. Basbusa did all the tape-pulling, tape-tearing, and tape-trimming with the scissors (when four miles of tape ended up stuck to each link of the caterpillar). She loves both scissors and tape, and she understood the connection between the book and the finished product, so she enjoyed the activity. Plus, since the whole craft took only about five minutes at most, we could easily finish it before her attention-span ran out. Mr. Caterpillar survived as a toy for another day or too, before ending up in a sad crumple on the bathroom floor.