Books of the Week

November 21, 2009

The Barn Owls, by Tony Johnston
This book is illustrated by Deborah Kogan Ray, whom I’ve never heard of before reading this book.  The illustrations are what I love about The Barn Owls.  I was mesmerized on every page by the subtle shadings and beautiful autumn colors.  The pictures were done with transparent watercolors and watercolor pencils.  They are really very beautiful.  The story is very good too, and tells of 100 years of barn owls who have lived, hunted, and flown in the area of the barn which is their home.  Baby barn owls are shown hatching in the rafters of the barn, and an adult owl is shown hunting in a golden wheat field.  The story is very dream-like and poetic, I read it very slowly and softly to M, and he really seemed to enjoy it that way (me too!). :)


What Makes the Seasons?, by Megan Montague Cash
This book does a great job of explaining what happens in each season and how one seasons fades into another.  It also talks about how seasons *happen* because of the earth’s orbit around the sun.  This contributed to M’s first real understanding of the idea of outer space.  He’s seen pictures of the earth before, but this time we really talked about how the stars are in outer space and if we were up there with them this is what our world would look like – a green and blue ball because of the grass and water.  And we talked about how the earth moves in a circle around the sun and how that makes day and night.  There was a great illustration in the book that was a good aid to our discussion.   Another picture in the book was very interesting to M – a window with 4 panes and through each pane a different season is shown of the outdoor scene.  We looked and talked about this picture for quite a long time.  I LOVE books that interest him (both of us really) like this!
For more book reviews, go here!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Oct. 25, 2009

M is 37 months old

We continued with a few apple-themed activities this week that we weren’t able to get to last week…

First Two Little Apples in an Apple Tree poem and mini-flannel board: M has always loved this poem! :)

We read 10 Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss (such a great book!!), and did a cute flannel board activity putting apples on a picture of M! They are numbered 1 to 10 and size sequenced too. I have seen this in a few blogs lately, but I can’t honestly say where I saw it first. It was before I started keeping better track of that sort of thing!

We also read The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree, by Gail Gibbons. With this book we used these apple life-cycle cards from Montessori for Everyone. I made them into a little flip book so there would be no end or beginning to the cycle as we went through them a few times.

We also did a fun activity matching apple patterns on a boy’s head. The cards and patterns are from Making Learning Fun. We made them into magnets and did them on a small pan. I saw this at Izzie, Mac & Me.

Notice that green visor? It was in our “pay it forward” gift package from whisperingwhispers at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn. I put it in one of M’s activity containers this week and he had a lot of fun putting race car stickers on it. He wore it for a long time afterwards too! :)

He did his first dot-to-dot page: an apple! I think he did pretty well! It’s in a page protector and he used a dry-erase marker and a piece of felt for an eraser.

We did an A activity for his new ABC book too! Check it out in this post.

M also used his dry-erase marker on a zoo page from a workbook and tried drawing straight lines.

He got in some more fine-motor-skill practice putting this button board together:

And the big hit of the week was this: I made some 3”x3” cards from construction paper, used a black marker to write a letter on each one, and put it in a box with some toothpicks. M picked a letter and a toothpick and, working on the carpet, poked holes along the letter. This was a lot of fun for him and was good for letter identification, letter formation, and fine motor skills (again!). We held them up to the window and saw the light shine through the little holes. I got this great idea from prekinders – that site is full of good ideas! And so many of them are super simple like this!

We learned a fun new song (tune of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”) from preschooleducation.com:

Once a little appleseed

was planted in the ground.

Down came the raindrops

falling all around.

Out came the bright sun

as bright as bright could be

and the little appleseed

grew up to be an apple tree!

We added motions to it and M wanted to sing it several times. Preschooleducation.com is a great place to find poems and songs!

That’s it for us this week! Next week we will be having some pumpkin fun!! :)

Check here for more tot school posts.

Have a beautiful week! :)

Leaf ID sheet and a little Art Time

We are fortunate to have a yard full of trees, and lots of different ones to choose from.  A couple of days ago I went out and grabbed some leaves to make a leaf identification sheet for M. 
I simply arranged them on the scanner and copied them onto a piece of cardstock:Then I labeled them (I only picked leaves that I was sure of, but I clearly need to learn a bit more about the trees we have.  There are several I can’t identify). 
I gave the sheet and the leaves to M to match them up as I told him their names: I hope to have him gather some leaves on his own and use this sheet to identify them some time soon (he’s been sick all week, and stuck inside, poor guy!).
Then we did some rubbings of the leaves:We’ve never done rubbings of any sort, although it is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while.  M enjoyed seeing the magic picture show up. ;)  I hid the leaves under the paper while he was out of the room.  When he started the rubbing he said, “I’m making a tree!!”.
Finished products (top pic is chalk, bottom pic is crayons): 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Color Mixing Bags

So, M has really been into the color mixing idea lately. But, he’s not quite “getting” it, if you know what I mean. He loves that you can mix two colors together and get a totally new color. I mean, that is pretty neat if you think about it – I’m sure to a toddler/preschooler it seems like magic.

But he will pick random colors and say things like “Mommy, guess what you get when you mix together pink, brown, and orange!” Then he’ll say “Green!!” :) Sometimes he says something along the lines of “dark green” or “light green” which really cracks me up.

So, apparently we need to work on shades of color (which will be in a separate post – probably a tot school one), and exactly which colors mix together to make new colors.

He loved the color mixing activity we did a while ago and I’m going to try to do a new color mixing activity on a regular basis. Lots of exposure to the idea in various ways means it will eventually come together in his mind and he will understand it (I hope).

This week we made simple color mixing bags with paint. We’ve all seen these on other blogs, this is nothing new! But anyway, here’s what we did…

First, get 3 good heavy duty ziploc bags (you may want to double up your bags – one of ours tore.) Place two dollops of paint in each one, one in each corner. Bag 1 – red and blue, bag 2 – red and yellow, bag 3 – blue and yellow:Tape the bags shut with duct tape or packaging tape.

Then talk about how colors can mix together to make new colors. Give your child a bag and ask him/her to guess what these two colors will make mixed together. If he says “kinda purplish-green, I think” just smile and say “let’s see!” and let him squish the paint around and mix it up. It’s important that the discovery be solely the child’s… they remember things so much more easily if this is the case. Act surprised when he says “it’s orange!” :)

You can do more with these after the colors are mixed – I showed M how to draw shapes with his finger, and we practiced a few letters too!. You can smooth out the paint into a very thin layer and see if you can look through it. Hold it up to the window if it’s sunny and see how pretty it is!

Enjoy! Have a beautiful, very colorful, day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Noah’s Ark

I have found that M seems to gain more from our Bible story times when we do activities and talk about the story a little bit before actually reading the story from one his children’s Bibles.

So, on Thursday I let him watch a short (3 minutes) video about Noah’s Ark on his Read And Share Toddler Bible DVD. He really enjoyed this.

There are so many inspiring ideas online for a Noah’s Ark theme. We almost weren’t able to fit everything in!

Friday morning when he woke up, this was waiting for him:

The printout is from Making Learning Fun (a fantastic site, by the way).

M got right to work:

Later we talked about all the colors of the rainbow as we did a little color mixing:

Next we had fun playing “Sink or Float?” in our kitchen sink:

M came up with some pretty interesting things to drop in. :) We made a little boat with a sponge, straw, and foam sail, and tried to see what we could carry on it and what would make it sink.

We talked about the ark and how God kept Noah, his family, and the animals safe on it.

I found these story cards on Sparklebox (another fantastic site!). M has never done sequencing with story cards before, and I wasn’t sure he was ready for that challenge, so I simply told him the story with the cards, and then we did it a second time while he told the story (with me giving some prompts).

I made up some game mats by printing this template out on colored construction paper, and we played an animal matching game. The game we used is one we’ve had for a while, but as we found matches, we got to put our animal couples on our arks. Whoever had the most animals on his/her ark won. :) Very simple, I know, and it was really unnecessary to print out ark game mats, but simple things can make a difference. M felt like it was a brand new game. And he won. ;)

We didn’t end up actually reading the story about Noah and the Ark from M’s Bible until bedtime that evening!

I had a craft planned, but we just didn’t get to it. However, I do still plan to do it with M, and I’ll create a separate post for it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time - Mixing with Yellow

The Open Ended Art theme for this week was “mixing with yellow”.  You can check out other works of art here.

I am cheating a little with this post because it’s more of an activity than actual artwork.  And we did this as part of our Noah’s Ark theme for Sunday School on Friday this past weekend (the post about Noah’s Ark will be coming this Friday).  However, it includes yellow and there was plenty of mixing involved, so I am hoping it qualifies! :)

M had a great time with this.  It seriously kept him enthralled for an entire hour.  There was a higher than usual danger of messiness, so I had to stay right there with him, but I really enjoyed it too.  It could’ve (should’ve) been done outside; I was just too lazy to take everything out.  There’s a towel on the table for obvious reasons.

I set up several glasses and jars on our kitchen table and filled them about halfway with clear water.  We started with six and ended up adding one or two more as we went along.  I put red, yellow, and blue food coloring into an ice cube tray, gave M some pipettes, and he started mixing. 

Here he is with yellow in his pipette (it’s looking a little green; I think this is due to my camera for some reason):

And… Yellow + Red = Orange:

 

Then he filled 2 ice cube trays with the colored water so he can have more outside ice fun one of these days.

This was such a fun activity for M, and it was fun for me to watch him be a little scientist.  I highly recommend doing this with your kids – just pick a day when you are feeling brave and very, very patient!  I had to remind M several times that this wasn’t an activity we could be silly with.  I didn’t want broken glass and food coloring all over my kitchen! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art time – Ice paints

Several weeks ago I made ice cubes in our freezer using water and some tempera paints. I planned to let M paint with them outside some hot summer day. And then I totally forgot about them. I found them a couple of days ago and brought them out for him. It ended up being one of the most fun activities we’ve done in quite a while.
I put some newsprint out on the patio, in case he wanted to paint with them. Well, first he experimented with them, watching them melt in the sun. Then he put some in his little wading pool and watched them float around. Luckily that water was pretty cold so they didn’t melt in there. He brought them back to the patio and moved them around on the paper for a while, and made this:
Then apparently inspiration struck, because he grabbed a paintbrush, dipped it into the puddles of icy paint and began painting…. himself. As in, his body. First it was simply feet, and he made this:
Then, well, he got a little carried away:
Ok, I got in on the action too. I wrote “I *heart* u” on his tummy, and made a funny face on his back. Heh. :) It wasn’t quite so much fun when he decided to paint me, but that’s neither here nor there.
He had a great time, I was surprised at how much time he spent with these simple ice cubes, and how much fun it turned into!
To make them, I just put a baby-spoonful of paint in each part of my ice cube tray, then I ran water from the faucet over them and popped them in the freezer. I may have stirred some of them up with a toothpick, but the paint pretty much settled to the bottom of the ice while they were freezing anyway.
I hope you do this with your little ones! It was so much fun. You will obviously need to be ok with messes (or have a stiff drink nearby), and a swimming pool or hose is a good idea too for clean up time! I actually brought a washcloth out and washed him (no soap) in the pool.
Enjoy! And have a beautiful day! :)