Our ABC Book – Letter Aa

So, here is our first post for our ABC book! Since we were doing apple activities this week, it just made sense to start with “A” is for Apples!

I saw this cute craft at Izzie, Mac & Me and knew it was perfect for our book.

M glued the big “A” , the little “a”, and a rectangle (for the tree trunk) to a piece of blue cardstock. Then he used his markers to color the pieces. I wrote which color each should be, as he has enjoyed being able to “read” the color names in other projects. He was apparently not that thrilled about coloring this time around:He put his head down like he was bored to death, but it did get colored… barely.

Then he glued “apples” to the apple tree – these were simply red holes I punched.

Next he cut some clip art of things that begin with A out and glued them to another piece of paper: (Yes, this was a different day, different jammies.)

Here’s what our A pages look like in our book. Aa craft page:

Collage page and tracing page:

There is a dry-erase marker attached to the front inside of the book, and a piece of felt to use for an eraser.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our New ABC Book

I have finally come to terms with the fact that I just. do. not. have. time. to make lapbooks for M for every single letter of the alphabet. At least not unless I want to take, oh two years, to teach him.

They are fun for me to put together, and fun for him too, so I plan to continue making them as I have time, but they will be for when he is a bit older and we’ll use them more for fun and as a review. As I complete them I’ll post them to the left over there where it says “ABC Lapbooks”. :)

In the meantime we are making a new, no-fuss, quick ABC book. I hope to do a letter per week, but I know realistically there will be weeks when I just haven’t had time to plan anything. The format of this book will work with that because I’m working on getting it all ready at one time.

The format is pretty simple. 3 pages per letter…

1. craft page
2. collage page
3. tracing page

So, right now I’m collecting ideas in a spreadsheet for a simple craft for each letter. This will be nothing fancy! Just something to help M remember the sound the letter makes.

The collage page will be a workbox activity for him, which will look like this: A blank page except for the upper and lowercase letters in the center. And this: Another page with 5 items that begin with the letter, which he will cut out and glue around the letters on the other page. I’ll include scissors and a glue stick in his workbox.

I am having a little trouble coming up with 5 items for some of the letters. For those letters I may do something different… we’ll see. For now, those are at the end of the list so we have time to think of something.

And the 3rd page is this: A tracing page from Making Learning Fun. The yellow dashed line in the letters is there if you look hard enough! I have attached a dry-erase marker to the inside of the binder with velcro. He can use the marker to trace the letters, then erase with a piece of felt which will be kept in the pocket.

I’ll be keeping a list of our crafts on the sidebar under “Our ABC Book”. I’ll also include a link to them in my weekly Tot School posts, where you'll find any other activities we did for the letter of the week.

I’m excited about this, and eager to go through the letters and phonics a little more quickly than we have been. It will be a fun ABC book in the end that M can look through and “read” on his own.

I’d love to know if you have something similar and what you do about those troublesome letters out there like X and Z. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – October 18, 2009

M is 37 months old

Well, this week M was recovering from having a horrible cold (I guess that’s all it was, but it was a bad one) and I was trying to not get sick, and hard at work keeping a migraine at bay for the first half of the week.  We are both feeling better now!  Whew!  But, unfortunately not many pictures were taken.  M did a lot of school on his own, with me lying on the couch, opening one eye now and then to make sure he was ok. :)  I’ve taken pictures of the shelf activities he did, but not many of them were taken when M was actually doing them.  Anyway…. here we go…

First, some apple activities… (excuse M’s half-dressed state, dressing was not a priority this week, sigh).  He sorted small and large apples into baskets with tongs:He loves any activity that includes tongs! 

An apple counting book that I downloaded from Childcareland : He did this on his own one day when I was napping (Daddy was home) – I couldn’t believe it.  He sat and put apples on all the pages from 1 to 10.  I will leave it out for next week so we can do it together and actually count. :)

Same / Different cards from prekinders with apples:I laminated these and put them in a container with a dry erase marker.  M must’ve done these 5 times this week and I didn’t get a single picture.  Some of these were difficult, but he did great!

Some fall-themed lacing cards:

 

An apple file folder game where he had to match up the combination of apples on the front of the pockets, from homeschoolshare:This is a great file folder game – M loved putting the apples in the pockets.

Pockets are apparently a big hit, because he loves this color-sorting file folder game too:I printed this from Homeschool Creations, and made pockets in a file folder with the color name cards.  There are several pictures of objects in various colors that are sorted into the pockets.  I made this a long time ago and M has definitely gotten his use out of it!

We did a fun counting activity with this printout.  I have discovered that adding a clipboard to any activity makes it a ton of fun. ;)  Here’s M taking off with the clipboard in hand to go count the windows in the kitchen:(Still in his jammies at noon, yes he is.)  We had a lot of fun walking around counting items in our home.  M colored over the pictures, then I helped him write the numbers in.  Here he is very seriously making a notation with his little pink crayon, hee hee:

 

I gathered up M’s foam uppercase letters, and some wooden lowercase letters, as well as some clipart from our ABC lapbooks.  M matched the lower and upper case letters, then we sorted the images by beginning sound.  M did great with this; I have to say I was pretty proud of him!  It helped that we only had 3 letters and sounds to work with.  I think he really enjoyed this and I plan to do it in the future as we add more letters to our lapbook collection.

 

M has been making up a lot of rhymes lately, he is really into it.  So we did this rhyming card activity: These can be printed from here.  There are several to choose from and I will be making more of these.  This was  a fun activity for M and he did very well.  I wrote the words on the back (mainly for my reference so I could give M the right words – bug, not beetle for example) and put red stars on one set and blue on the other so he can sort them out first.  The red group rhymes with cards from the blue group.

 

M also helped gather in the last of our carrot crop (goodness, there were a lot): And yes, he needed to be bundled up like that – it’s been snowing on and off all week, and in the 20’s. 

We also saw more of these guys: Gobble Gobble!

Hope you all had a fabulous week and are warmer than we are here!  Go here to see more Tot School posts!

Have a beautiful week! :)

Build-a-Letter Templates

A week ago, in this post, I mentioned the letter templates and foam shapes I created for M to use in “building” letters.  There are a couple of books out there that do this same thing, but you know me – I won’t pay for something I can make myself. :) 

There has been a small amount of interest in these, and I have decided to post my templates for anyone who might want to do this too.  Click on this image:
A couple of things you should know…

1. The first two pages of the file have the shape templates that you will need to cut out and trace onto craft foam.  The rest of the pages show how to put them together for each letter.
2. I’ve made notes on the file telling how many of each shape you will need to cut from foam in order to build any letter.  However, if you want enough foam shapes to put all of the letters together at the same time, you will have to cut several more.  We do one letter at a time, then pick another letter and re-use the shapes we need.  (Sure hope that makes sense!)
3. Because the template pieces will need to overlap a little to make many of the letters, some of the lines are not showing up on the file.  For example the B: I could not figure out a way to get them all to show, so part of the lines are missing.  It was the middle of the night when I created this and I finally gave up trying!  I suggest you go over your sheets with a marker and fill in the missing parts so your child will have an easier time *seeing* how to build the letters.  This was only a problem because there was extra space around the templates in the file.  Obviously, it won’t be a problem when you are using the actual foam pieces.

If you use these and blog about them, please link back here!

Only uppercase letters are included in this, but I hope to make a set for lowercase letters sometime soon!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Stamping Game for Counting and Pre-reading Skills

Have you seen the oh-so-cute pencil-top stampers in the dollar spot at Target lately?!?  We love stamps so I grabbed some of the monster kind.  We call them “sillies” here, because M is not at all comfortable with the idea of monsters.  ;)

I made a quick and simple game with these to go on our activity shelves.  All you need is a couple of stamps (or you could use buttons or some other manipulative as markers), a number die (we made ours from this template), and a simple grid with 20 spaces.

{I created a grid game a while back to go with a Bible story lesson, and the large grid for that game can be printed from here.  I also made a smaller grid – 2 to a page – and that can be printed from here, then cut.  You could simply draw some on some scratch paper also.}

To play, take turns rolling the die, then stamping that number of squares on your grid.  The first to fill their grid is the winner.  Fill your grid going from left to right, and top to bottom.  This helps develop the habit needed for eventual reading. 

M is having a lot of fun playing this – it’s such a simple way to make counting fun and he has no idea he’s learning pre-reading skills too.

This morning while I was lying in bed being lazy, I heard M begging Daddy to play this game with him.  So cute!  And, again, a quick lesson for me that the things which are simple and quick for me to put together are always more popular with him than the things I spend hours on.  Kids! :)

Here’s a shot of the used grids from yesterday afternoon.  I’m not kidding – M loves this game!
Have a beautiful day! :)

P.S. Happy Birthday, Honey!!  I love you! (my hubs :) )

Tot School – October 11, 2009

M is 37 months old

We began this week by moving an old TV stand / media center to M’s reading spot. Tuesday morning I grabbed some kitchen plastic ware and filled the shelves with activities.This worked so well with M, even better than I expected. He was able to pick and choose which activities to do (or not do) and many of them were things he could do independently (which gave me a little time to check the laundry, tidy things up, etc).

We worked on putting one activity away before getting another one down, and I was ok with him quitting an activity whenever he wanted. I’m trying to concentrate on having fun more than anything else right now in regards to tot school. And M woke up with a horrible cold that morning, so I wanted to go easy on him. Just cleaning up one thing before getting another one down was enough in the way of rules for us this week!

First, he strung some pony beads onto a length of yarn, using a plastic needle.

Next, matching up some paint sample strips with clips.We are working on learning the gradation of color shades. I thought the clips would get him a bit more interested in this. They did, but only a very little bit. He did the blue and then that was enough. This post from Shannon at Growing and Learning by Leaps and Bounds gave me this idea. Maybe next time we will work on just one color like she did.

He also did this super-fun activity that I whipped up for him over the weekend – an ABC tube with stickers to match: I simply took a cardboard tube and wrote the alphabet on it in random order, and put it out with some foam letter stickers. M would pick a sticker, then roll the tube around to find the matching letter. The idea for this came from Sophie’s mama in this post. I just added stickers! It was a big hit for M! I plan to do one with numbers sometime soon too.

M did some scissor practice pages:

In one of the plastic tubs I placed a piece of green construction paper, scissors, a glue stick, and some pages from a toy catalog. For this activity M had to cut out any toys that had green in them, then glue them to the construction paper and make a collage.He liked the idea of this, but didn’t work on it for very long. We put it back on the shelf and he can pull it out some other time to finish it.

One of his favorite activities was this:I wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on bottle lids, then made cards to match them up with. The cards also have the corresponding number of X’s to put any small manipulative on. In this case, it was m&ms, which is why M loved it. :)

He did a little pom pom transferring with tweezers:He made this into a game and I had to use his pliers. :) We would each grab a pom pom, say “cheers!” while clinking them together, then drop them into the ice cube tray. He’s a funny boy sometimes. :)

Hands down, the all time favorite of the week was this *I spy sensory tub* activity. It was inspired by the many posts in the blog world about making I spy bottles, but I knew M would never be happy just looking for small objects – he would want them in his hands where he could examine them and get to know them. So I photocopied a bunch of small objects, then hid them in a mixture of rice, macaroni, and lentils. He had so much fun with this, I was amazed.He did this 7 times that day. Sometimes he would hide them, sometimes I would. He was totally enthralled. Which made for a very happy mama. :)

I worked the hardest on this activity, and it was the only one M was not even mildly interested in:I’ve been seeing this book everywhere - and just love the idea of it… so I made my own! I cut some foam shapes to use, and made letter templates for them, which I then laminated. I thought M would love this, but he was absolutely. not. interested. Ah well, we’ll try again another day! I’m still showing you because I’m just so proud of it. :)

We did one more sensory activity – packaging peanuts and water. If you get them just a little bit wet they stick together and you can create things. If you get them a lot wet they dissolve. M had fun making them dissolve. :)

One day we made this pretty autumn tree:

And we learned more new songs and poems. First, from Preschooleducation.com:

(tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”)

All join hands and circle around
While we watch the leaves fall down.
See them twirling to the ground.
See them skipping here and there
See them flipping in the air.
Autumn leaves so peacefully
Falling, falling from the tree.
(I would have loved to have sung this one outside while twirling M around, but his cold and our rainy weather just didn’t cooperate.)

And a poem, from childfun.com:

Leaves
Little leaves fall gently down
Red and yellow, orange and brown. (flutter hands like leaves falling)
Whirling, whirling around and around. (turn around)
Quietly, without a sound. (put finger to lips)
Falling softly to the ground (begin to fall slowly)
Down and down and down and down. (lie on floor)

I hope everyone had a wonderful week! Check here for more tot school posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Game Book

In an effort to help M develop some pre-writing skills (since he is forever wanting to “draw letters” but gets frustrated when he can’t), I made him this little game book.  It’s full of mazes mostly right now, and a couple of dot-to-dots.  Dot-to-dot is a new idea for him, but I think he’ll catch on quickly. 

I simply printed a few pages I found online, put them into page protectors, and popped them into a 3-ring binder.  He can use his window markers on the page protectors, then wipe them off and do them again. 

Eventually I’ll add shape tracing pages, maybe some “draw a line from the dog to his doghouse” type of worksheets (do you know what I’m talking about??), and even some large letter patterns to follow.

This was super-easy and super-fast to put together. 

Here are some of the links I found for good game pages to print.  I copied some of the smaller mazes into my photo-editing program, enlarged them, and then printed them out.

• Simple dot-to-dot pages
• Simple mazes (.pdf file)
• More simple mazes
• Mazes ( a tiny bit more difficult)
• Website full of game links, rated by difficulty

 

I hope you enjoy this idea!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 27, 2009

M is 37 Months old

This week we began our autumn theme! I’m very excited about all the great activities and learning tools available with this theme.

We did a little normal school stuff too – that first…

We did our ABC train in the pocket chart again. Right away, when M saw me setting it up, he said, “I don’t want to do that, I didn’t do so good with it”. :( I told him that we were going to do it a different way this time and that he would do great. I sorted the train cars out on the floor by color, and then told M which letter we needed and which color group it was with. Each color had only 4 to 5 cards, so it was really simple for him to find the one we needed. He did great! His favorite part was after the train was put together. He grabbed two pencils and we pointed to each letter while we sang the ABC song. I’ve got to remember to always set him up for success while still challenging him. It went so much better this week and he felt much better about his abilities than he did last week.

I made some dots on colored paper for him and he drew lines to connect them and make simple shapes. The inspiration for this activity was this post. He did well with this and was excited to draw shapes, but we sure need to work on that tripod grasp a lot! Later in the day he cut his shapes out. :)

We did our weather chart, which has been sorely neglected the past few months:

M practiced his sawing. :) He lined up his blocks and sawed them apart, one by one (making all the appropriate chainsaw noises – you did know that’s a chainsaw, right?) : You can see we aren’t getting very far on the road to cleaning one thing up before starting another. Sigh.

For our autumn theme, we did a sort of circle time activity a few days this week. First, we talked about all four seasons, and what changes take place during each one. I found these great seasonal clothing cards at Montessori for Everyone, and we set them up on the pocket chart and talked about them. I plan to use these at some point for sorting too. I put different colored star stickers on the backs of these so when we sort them M will be able to tell if he sorted them all correctly on his own (blue star for summer, purple for winter, green for spring, orange for fall).

I found some fun seasonal clipart at Kizclub and we sorted them out onto colored paper. Green for spring, blue for summer, orange for fall, and red for winter. M did pretty well with this. He had a little trouble with summer and spring items, but in my opinion some of them were a little confusing.

M hung up fall window clings in his room:

We played our autumn tic tac toe game:

And we read some library books about autumn (see reviews here and here):

We learned this fun seasons song (click on image to go to web page):

And I taught M this little poem…

Two little eyes to look at God,

Two little ears to hear His word,

Two little lips to sing His praise,

Two little feet to walk His ways.

Two little hands to do His will,

and one little heart to love Him still.

I’m not sure who wrote this, it is in one of M’s baby books. I’m trying to bring something more about faith/religion into our time together on a more daily basis. We pray at mealtimes and bedtime, read Bible stories, and do our (somewhat sporadic) Sunday School lessons, but I feel he’s ready for more than that.

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots! Check here for more tot school ideas.

Have a beautiful day! :)