Our New Morning Routine

http://tiredneedsleep.blogspot.com/2009/12/our-calendar-free-printables.htmlWe’ve got a great new 20 minute routine in the mornings that is getting our days off to a great start, so of course I have to share!

I recently read this very interesting article about helping children develop literacy skills, in particular doing away with “letter of the week” type activities and helping them learn their letters in context. Now, I can’t say I’m ready to do away with learning individual letters… M loves the letter lapbooks I’ve made for him (and I really do intend to make more!), as well as the letter collage pages he gets every week. But, I loved the idea of the “morning message” on the blackboard. I don’t know… call me crazy… but I love using M’s chalkboard – it’s just so teacherish. ;)

So, we start off by putting the current date on our magnetic calendar, and we talk about what day “today” is, what “yesterday” was, and what “tomorrow” will be. (Naptime is making a comeback, thank you dear God, and occurs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – so we discuss whether today is a nap day or not first thing in the morning so there are no surprises later on!)

We sometimes do the weather chart too, but really there’s only so much you can say about winter in Minnesota. Is it cold today? Yes. Is there snow? Yes.
Then we head over to the blackboard side of M’s easel. I write something along the lines of “Happy New Year!” or M gives me something to write, or some days it’s something like this:I say each letter as I draw it, then we go over them together with a cute little pointer (a pencil with an apple topper – also very teacherish, don’t you think?). I do it, then M does it, then I pick a “mystery letter” for him to find. Then he has to find all the “s”s, or whatever, on the board. This is a lot of fun and he always looks forward to it.

Soon thereafter we read a Bible story from this children’s Bible. We started at the beginning and read one short story a day. He is really enjoying this too, and I give a one or two sentence recap of the story from the previous day. We are covering them fairly quickly, but I intend to pick one or two stories every couple of weeks and start doing our “Sunday School on Fridays” again (which I will be posting) with crafts and activities to help reinforce some of the stories we’ve read.

Then we read this rather long prayer that we used to say every morning at breakfast, but somehow had gotten out of the habit. This is also when we pray things like “help us remember to pick up our toys and not argue with Mommy today”. Believe me, I’ll take all the help I can get!

Here’s the prayer, if any of you are interested… it’s pretty sweet:

“Jesus, I thank you for each new day.
I offer myself to you,
and all the things I shall do –
my work, my study, my play.
I thank you for the many good things you give me
and for all the kind people who take care of me.
Bless me as I begin this day,
be with me at home, at school, and at play.

May all I do honor you.
May your dear mother Mary
and my guardian angel protect and help me.
I believe in you.
I hope in you.

I love you,

Jesus, my friend and my God!”

Have a beautiful day! :)

What I want for Christmas – Confessions of a Mama-teacher ;)

I have a feeling a lot of moms out there who homeschool or do any sort of tot school or preschool at home with their kids are a lot like this (Dear God, please don’t let me be the only one)… I can’t think of a thing I want for myself for Christmas, but I could give you a list 5 pages long of things I’d love to have for M – toys that help him learn and develop many different skills while having fun.

I just love browsing through quality online toys this time of year; there are so many great things out there that would fit well with the activities I do with M. 

I thought I’d share some great deals with you on some fantastic things I’ve found… and it’s a great way for me to remember what’s on my wishlist when a little extra $$$ comes my way.  (Oh, Santa ??)

Take a look at all these lacing cards and lacing activities.  They  have every shape imaginable, even some that are dot-to-dots at the same time.  Isn’t that brilliant?  M would love the construction and tool ones.  And such great prices!!

And here is a group of ABC and phonics center kits.  There are so many possibilities with these.  There’s even a math center kit, a sequencing story kit, and several science kits that I need to keep in mind for a couple of years from now.  I am practically drooling, hee hee. :)

So, now that you know all this, send me presents!  OK, that is just a joke. ;)  Please don’t send me presents.  But do take a look around the site and the pages I’ve linked to.  You’ll be seeing me post about this site again, and you may just get a little present yourself sometime soon. ;)  For fun, let me know which item would be on your wishlist.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School, Christmas-style – Dec. 20, 2009

**M is 39 Months Old**

This post will be some of the Christmas-themed activities we’ve done in the past couple of weeks. We’ve had a productive, relaxed, insightful, and just plain fun time on my “blog-break” (more about that in future posts).

First, this is how I’ve been finding M first thing many mornings:(sorry for the blurry photo… these old hands of mine aren’t very steady before my coffee, heh) – he’s been sitting in front of the tree, all lit up in the dark, playing with toys so sweetly and quietly. I think he is really soaking up the magic of Christmas and those Christmas lights – remember how special they were when we were children? :) I’m loving this stage with him.

Music:
We have been singing and making music quite often now that his instruments and song book are out and accessible all the time: (Don’t let the blank look on his face fool you, he really does LOVE doing this!)

Fine Motor Skills:
This was a great post from Allie at No Time for Flashcards. However, I really didn’t feel like making one on my own so I gave M some yarn (instead of wire) and some felt I had cut into squares and cut a slit into the middle of – M strung the felt pieces onto the yarn, then we formed it into a wreath and hung it on the tree:
I made these fun rubbing plates using cardboard from a cereal box:I used a cookie cutter to trace the tree, star, and angel and free-hand drew the snowflake. Then I went over the drawings with hot glue. M used them with newsprint and crayons: This was a little tough for him because the paper slid around quite a bit. Here are the best samples of what he did: I plan to make more of these for other holidays – they were fun and really held his interest. He must’ve done dozens of these in the past two weeks.

Sensory:
I filled a large pan with “pretend snow” (shaving cream) one day and M played in it with his little cars for TWO HOURS. I am not kidding. TWO HOURS. There was a mess to clean up, which took me a good 15 minutes. But it was worth it for TWO HOURS of him being involved and interested in something. :)He asked for it again another day and played with it for 20 minutes, sigh. (ugh, look at that kitchen floor. So old and ugly. If anyone wants to give me a Christmas present, a new kitchen floor would be perfect. :) )

Math Skills:
M has really taken off with his understanding of patterns recently. He is really getting it. We did our pattern Christmas lights again, this time in an ABCABC pattern. At first he insisted that it could only be red, green, red, green, etc. Then I talked to him about how we sometimes play games with Daddy and we each take a turn, even though there are three of us. We ended up naming the green lights M, the red lights Daddy, and the blue lights Mommy, then strung them up – he really got it! At the end we were calling them by their colors again and he understood perfectly. We even did some AABB patterning and he picked up on that too! Yay!!

We did a quick counting game with some cardstock Christmas trees and pom poms. I drew little spots for 30 pom poms to go on each tree, then we simply took turn rolling the number cube and putting that many pom pom “ornaments” on our trees to decorate them. The first one to have all the spaces filled won.
I found some Christmas pattern mats here, and printed them in black and white. M was really into this, so I went back and printed a lot of the non-Christmas ones from the same site. The fact that they were black and white instead of colored like the ones we normally use provided just the right amount of challenge to M to make it interesting. He enjoyed “coloring” them with the pattern blocks.

Literacy:
M practiced spelling his name with this ornament stringing activity I made for him. You can read more about that here.
Religion:
We’ve really been enjoying our Jesse Tree stories every evening. I switched to a green felt Christmas tree to see if M would actually hang the ornaments on the tree. He has put some on the tree, but some are still in the “air” too. Such a silly boy sometimes. :) He has really learned a lot from this project, and is always so excited when it is Jesse Tree time!

Nature Center Time:
We are enjoying our Nature Center classes so much, and they just keep getting better and better. I’ve decided to start adding these into our Tot School posts so we’ll be able to remember how much fun we’ve had!

A couple of weeks ago we talked about what animals do when it snows. Did you know weasels turn white (except for the tips of their tails, which turn black) in winter? Or that frogs dig down deep into the mud and turn into frog ice cubes? :) The kids had a snowball fight inside with cotton balls, made candy cane animals,

(It’s a reindeer!)

and went ice-skating on wax paper:M had a ball. We are out of wax paper or we’d be doing this every day. I even tried it and it was fun for me too!

The next week “Nature Santa” visited and read a story about Christmas trees in the forest to the kids:
His glasses were fogged up here because he had just come in from a zero degree day.

M got to make bird feeders with bagels and seeds, and one with fruit loops on a pipecleaner: These are hanging in our yard waiting for the hungry animals to discover them.

We even got to eat a pancake breakfast with Santa! M had the time of his life until….
it came time to actually meet Santa and talk to him: He was suddenly very shy and completely forgot to say all the things he had planned on saying. :) It’s ok though because Mommy has Santa’s phone number and will be giving him a call to let him know what M would like. ;)

For more Tot School posts go here.

Have a beautiful Christmas with your families! :)

Stringing Ornaments and Spelling Names (printable included!)

I found a  fun activity at kizclub.com, and tweaked it a bit for my own purposes…

Now one of M’s shelf activities for the week is this stringing and spelling activity.  I am working on helping him identify his name, so I created these ornaments from cardstock and then made a mini-picture of what his name should look like once the ornaments are strung together.
I also made one that spells Mommy and one that spells Daddy.  Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll have all three hanging on the wall. :)

I traced my ornament template onto several pieces of colored cardstock, cut them out, added details and letters with a black marker, then laminated them.  I punched two holes at the top where the hanger would be for real ornaments, and put it all in a box with a needle and yarn.  M loved doing this, and loved that it was his name and his “special letters”! 
The printable I’ve created has the large ornament template as well as rows of smaller ornaments in color.  You can print these and cut them where you need to, then add the letters you want with a black marker.  I’ve included a page of black and white ones too if you want to color them in yourself or use different colors.  There are instructions on the first page of the .pdf file.  Click the image below to take a look and download:Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – December 6, 2009

M is 39 months old

 

This was a pretty easy and fun week for us.  I filled M’s shelves up with some Christmas-themed file folder games I made last year, a new puzzle, his ABC collage pages, and a couple of fun clothespin math activities.  We also had no less than 3 play dates and a day at our local community center’s creative play area.  And a big dinner at the in-laws to finish the week out.  Whew.  The busy season has begun I guess. :)

 

ABC Activities:

M can not get enough of cut and paste pages lately.  He is going through 2 letters per week in his ABC book and we’ll soon be done with the whole alphabet at this rate.  He always asks for his “cutting pages” first; I think he loves that he can do it completely on his own and has the routine down.  However, I’m not sure he’s really learning much about letter sounds from this activity, except when we take his book down and “read” it.  I’m thinking of starting up the letter lapbooks again after we finish our ABC book with the collages, because he really seemed to soak in a lot with the lapbook activities.   He’s still not interested in doing any letter crafts, so I’ll wait a while before trying that with him again.  Anyway… here are the collage pages he’s done in the past two weeks:

He also spent some time looking at the ABC Book and doing the tracing pages: See that tripod grasp?  He’s really come a long way with this lately.  I showed him how “real artists” hold their paintbrushes and told him it’s important to make those muscles really, really strong, and he totally got into it.  He always wants me to help him hold the paintbrush the right way and it’s carried over to activities like this!

 

We matched the capital letters on a gingerbread file folder game from here.  Next week this will be out again and we’ll match “baby” letters to the “mama” letters. When I made this I put magnets on the back of the letters and we do one half of the alphabet at a time on a cookie sheet.  We also take turns (I made a lot of mistakes that he had to correct ;) ), which makes it more fun and game-like for him.  He tells me a letter to find and then I have to find it and put it on the right spot, then I do the same for him.  If he is having trouble, it’s easy to tell him the color of the circle he needs, as a little help.

 

Counting

We played this fun clothespin counting game with Christmas tags, ribbons, and foam stickers:

And we counted lots of things throughout the week in our everyday normal routine.  He is really doing well with counting and I love seeing him light up when he really “gets” something!

 

Patterns

We played another file folder game from here.  In this one M had to match patterns to create mittens: The right side piece of each mitten attaches with velcro.  He did great with this, which I knew he would (he was able to do it last year), but I added in a step where he had to describe the design to me - “a green rectangle above a blue circle” – as he found each mitten to match.

 

We also played a mitten matching game from the November issue of our High Five magazine.  Each mitten has a multi-colored design on it.  We played this Memory-style with the cards face down:

 

And we made ABAB patterns with some cardstock Christmas lights I made, using clothespins and yarn to string them up:

 

Colors

M did some color mixing with water in jars: He’s been asking to make colored ice cubes lately, which was something we did quite often over the summer.  He wants to use them in his bath.  Seriously, this kid comes up with some funny (but fun!) ideas sometimes.  So I decided to add a color mixing lesson in.  He loves using pipettes, so this is always fun.   Then he had fun dripping the water onto paper towels:

 

We did another file folder game.  This one was from here (also made last year).  I made the stockings into pockets and M loved fitting the candy canes into the matching stocking. 

 

Fine Motor Skills

Several of the above activities involved the use of fine motor skills (almost all of them, actually), but I also surprised M with a new (Dollar Tree) Mickey Mouse Puzzle.  He’s been putting his 24 piece floor puzzle together with no problem lately, so I wanted to see how he’d do with a 25 piece small puzzle.  He had it done in no time – all by himself!  He knew to look for pieces that had a little bit of whatever image he was looking for, and didn’t need any help at all.  I’ve asked for some puzzles for him for Christmas from relatives, and I’m interested to see how he does with a 50 piece one.  Needless to say I have bought out all the 25 piece ones at Dollar Tree. :) 

 

Music

We sang a lot this week and played instruments.  I have a binder of songs that I’ve put together for M and he has a small bin of instruments.  It’s more noise than anything, but it’s a lot of fun and he loves it.  There are no pics; I’ll have to do a separate post about it sometime!

M received a guitar for his 3rd birthday and this is how he likes to play it: Hee hee.   He asked me to get it for him a lot this week, and loves experimenting with the different sounds he can make with it.  We also listened to a lot of Christmas music – grown up and kid kinds. ;)  I have to be diligent about playing cds in our home because since he was born I haven’t listened to much music.  We never listen to the radio and I feel like I am always craving peace and quiet.  It’s been nice to have music back in our day, it can do so much to brighten our moods!

Creative Play

M has been dying to build a maze lately, but wanted help.  So this is what we did Friday morning:

He’s helping the Christmas Angel from his nativity set find her way out here. :)

I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots!  Go here to see more tot school posts!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School

November 22, 2009

 M is 38 Months old

My camera battery died in the middle of tot school one day so some photos of just the activities were taken later in the week... like 5 minutes before I wrote this post. :)

ABCs and Pre-writing:

M is going through some anti-craft phase right now, and this includes the craft pages for our ABC book.  He loves cutting and pasting for the collage pages though: So, apparently we will now have an ABC collage book.  I’m hoping the craft pages will make an appearance again sometime soon, but I’m leaving this kind of thing totally up to M.  Here are his Ll and Oo pages: (This was when the no-crafts discovery was made.  M cut the letters out, but refused to do the rest, so yours truly did it in a futile attempt to get him interested.)

On a more positive note, he was totally into the tracing pages.  We “read” his book together and then he practiced holding the dry-erase marker correctly and traced the letters:

We also did our cardstock letters and glass pebbles activity (both from Dollar Tree!): He loves this.  It’s simply setting a letter out and then tracing it with the pebbles in the same way you would draw the letter (start at the top, go down, etc.).

For the very first time we had a sand tray to trace letters.  I was hesitant to do this because I thought at some point M would just want to play in the sand, most likely getting his little cars involved.  We had a little talk about how this is only for drawing letters, shapes, or numbers in, and he actually did pretty well.  He did experiment with just doodling in it too, which was fine with me.  We used this with our sand letter cards: He really did a great job.

We also matched up our Mama and Baby letters with these fun cards (Dollar Tree!):

 

He’s been playing quite often with a fishing game I made 2 years ago (he loved it then and still plays with it frequently) : The fish have letters on them and metal grommets for eyes.  The fishing pole has a magnet on the end of the string to catch them.  The chair, in case you were wondering, is M’s “fishing bridge” and the floor there?  “Floaty Pond”.  :)  As opposed to other side of the room, which is “Sinky Pond”.   Yep!

Pre-literacy Skills:

I have a subscription to an email full of free samples from Dover Publications.  The email comes weekly and I always save a ton of things.  One was these Opposites cards: M was very interested in this – of course he knew about opposites, but didn’t know the term for it.  He enjoyed matching these up and I plan to print more for him soon.  He would say “If it isn’t hot” (and grab the hot card), “then it’s cold!” (and match it to the cold one). 

Fine Motor Skills:

He played with another I Spy Sensory Bin – I found some great new things to put in it for him – a little hammer, screwdriver, pliers, and saw – such cute and tiny things!  We also used a variety of other things found around the house.  I didn’t have a theme at all… but he loved it!

And a Curious George puzzle:

 

Large Motor Skills:

After reading about how important a workout of large muscles can be in a boy’s learning, we did our movement cards before a lot of the other work.  M always enjoys this!

Leaping :)…

 

Math Skills:

I thought this would be a super-fun activity – connecting dots to make shapes: M was interested at first, but quickly moved on to something else.  The idea for this was here.

I found some wooden tan grams at Michael’s  ($1.00 – you should go now!)  and printed a couple of puzzles for him:

 

Size sorting with Bob the Builder trucks (loved this activity and the next one, of course):

 

And size sequencing with Scrambler, also from Bob the Builder:

 

History:

We have been reading some great Thanksgiving books and I told him the basics of the first Thanksgiving with this flannelboard set: He listened very well and then told Daddy the story later!

 

Life Skills:

This week we took the drawer locks off of M’s dresser drawers and he was given two new jobs – put his own clothes away after they are folded, and pick out his own clothes to wear each morning.  He is loving this new-found freedom, such a big boy!  And while the clothing choices are not ones I would’ve made, I’m very, very proud of him!  And now I know that the red shirt is way too small and needs to be packed away. :)

Nature and Science:

We also had a class at our local nature center all about apples this week.  M had so much fun taste testing and graphing his favorite apple, cutting an apple to see the star inside, and even squishing an apple to make cider!  The children were all given their own apple seed and we went to a beautiful sunny field where they planted them. So much fun!  I need to start including our nature center experiences in my tot school posts – we always learn so much there!

For more Tot School, go here!

Have a beautiful week! :)