Tot School – Dec. 27, 2009

M is 40 months old

Tot School was pretty much non-existent this past week, but we managed to get a few things in…
Snowflake matching:
I printed the snowflakes from here, cut them into cards and M tried matching them up in our pocket chart. He did pretty well with this considering some of them were pretty tricky.
No picture for this one, but I printed some snowman grid gameboards from here, and we took turns rolling a die, then putting that number of cotton balls on our game cards. We went top to bottom and left to right. Whoever filled their card first won.
M’s cousin S came over for the day on Tuesday and we made homemade playdough. I didn’t add any coloring (it was a little off-white due to the brownish vanilla I put in it), but we did add silver glitter and vanilla extract. Yum! And pretty! I set out a tray of goodies: There’s buttons, googley eyes, ribbons, pipecleaners, and various lids here.
And the kids had a great time making snowmen:
Aren’t they adorable? And if you’re wondering which child used the pipecleaners for super-long noses… well, that would be my child, hee hee. ;)
We also used up our green playdough that was getting a little old. We used cookie cutters, glass pebbles, colored pasta, buttons, and glitter glue to decorate them. M gave these to grandparents and godparents for Christmas.
On Christmas Eve we had about 8 inches of snow dumped on us. I grabbed a couple of buckets and M played (well over an hour) with real snow and his little cars on the kitchen floor.I’ve noticed that if I occupy him with this kind of thing, he is quite happy to play on his own as long as I’m sitting at the table, cooking, or just hanging out in the kitchen. We explored how snow melted into water and then we set it back outside. Saturday morning he remembered it and we brought it in and he played with the ice!
I hope you are all having a Merry Christmas (remember, Christmas has just begun - it lasts for 12 days!!!). :)
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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! :)