Dr. Seuss and Other Stuff for Our Week

Whew!  There are just stretches here that life takes a bit much effort, and school gets overrun.  I am thankful, though, to be able to do homeschool here, as we are able to be flexible and roll with what life brings.  It's not my strength, but I'm learning.
We had originally planned for the first week of March to be big Dr. Seuss week, but we had quite an ordeal with transportation strikes and vaccinations and such, so it got bumped to last week, and I'm just now getting around to putting up a few things from it.
I had brought along a small stash of water beads, and I decided to pull out the last few packs (as my amazing parents said they would ship some more in a package to us soon!).  I tossed in some alphabet beads with them to connect up with Dr. Seuss's ABC book, which Ezekiel has been loving, so I knew it would be a good excuse to read it a bunch this week.
While Isaiah was busy with something upstairs, Zeke spotted the water bead bowl and wanted to jump in and play.  Big brother can often dominate the sensory bin stuff, so it was nice for Zeke to have a little time just to himself, and he scooped and poured and dug around it in with total delight for quite a long time.

He, at some point, insisted on dumping a bunch more things into the bowl, and he was insistent that he wanted to put his new hand-painted wooden truck in the bowl.  We compromised with letting him put some of the beads in the back of the truck.

Isaiah LOVES to find stuff for hiding types of games, so after we read A Wocket in My Pocket, I hid a few creatures that I had printed out around the house, and Isaiah had to use their names on a list to find their location (which are always rhyming).  This was a great idea I got from Taking Time to Create.  Isaiah loved it!

Then we got out some plain salt and traced a few letters in it with our fingers.  The part the boys really enjoyed was when I pulled out some bags of colored salt (just plain salt I had dyed with food coloring) and scoops to play with it and make art with it on top of the plain salt.  They could have played with it for hours!

Of course, the lego men had to join us and get in on the action.

And, as is often the case with sensory materials, the boys wanted to raid my kitchen tools and explore with them.

My boys love blocks.  Isaiah cannot get enough of his legos, and Zeke loves to do what he sees big brother doing.  I saw this great idea from the Princess and the Tot for Measuring and Creating Dr. Seuss Hats with legos.  I added some "duplo" size of blocks for Zeke to use for the activity.  There were strips of materials (I chose to make strips out of a few different textures--felt, foam, sandpaper, and corrugated cardboard with one side pulled off).  Isaiah measured each strip with a ruler and then followed the hat pattern to build a cat hat the same height.  Mostly, I just tried with Zeke to focus on building his hat following a pattern.  We didn't have white ones, so I had him alternate red and blue for his hats.

We did a lot of whole alphabet activities for the week (including one that Isaiah enjoyed so thoroughly that I couldn't tear myself away to take a photo, which was this Gross Motor ABC, based on the Dr. Seuss ABC book).  We didn't give as much focus to our specific letter of the week, but the boys did enjoy helping me gather items from around the house to put in our Letter M bin for the week.  Zeke got a little overly zealous playing with the "M" we made out of our connecting strip set we found here!

I've been linking up to a great Tot School Gathering Place over at 1+1+1=1, which is a great source for ideas for my little guy!