Autumn Tic Tac Toe

I’ve been doing a lot of online searching, printing, cutting and laminating the last few weeks, getting ready for autumn activities with M.  Fall is my very, very favorite season (like the new look of the blog?) and we are going to be having a lot of fun learning over the coming weeks.

I ran across a great online Autumn Tic Tac Toe game at DLTK, and fell in love with the cute graphics of the pumpkin and leaf.  I wanted to turn it into a hands-on game to play with M, and  I was graciously given permission to publish it on here for you to download and print too!  (Thank you to Darren at DLTK!) It’s very simple, but I think it appeals to small children.

The download for the printable game is here.  The online game, for those of you whose children are already using the computer, is here.

Enjoy!  And have a beautiful first day of fall! :)

Tot School – Sept. 20, 2009

This week we worked on how letters are formed (M constantly wants to draw letters) and the order of the ABCs.  He knows the song, but actually putting letters in order is another matter all together.

We used our pretty glass pebbles and cardstock letters (both from Dollar Tree!) to practice forming letters correctly.  We worked on as many letters as he wanted.  I told him to start at the top, bottom, or wherever, and how to form them as if he were going to actually write them. He really got into this and we did about 6 or 7 letters before he wanted to move on to something else.

I found some upper and lowercase letter stamps at Target and Michael’s (I think Michael’s had the lowercase) and I’ve been wracking my brain for a way to use them.  Finally, I made this little name card for M:You can see the stamps are pretty tiny, but he did a great job and seemed to know exactly what he was supposed to do:

We did an ABC train activity with our pocket chart.  I found the ABC cards here, and the idea for how to use them was from Little Hands, Big Work.  We sang the ABC song a couple of times, then we tried singing it very slowly and stopping at each letter; the idea was for him to find each letter and place it in the pocket chart.  Right away he became a little frustrated.  I think the way we had the cards lying on the floor was a little overwhelming for him.  It’s a shame that this turned out to not be fun for him because he was really, really looking forward to doing something with the train when he saw me cutting it out and laminating it.  I should have put more thought into this and separated them by color so I could give him hints to help find each one. 

We did a couple of letters:

But, in the end, I put them all in the pocket chart and we just had fun singing the song and pointing at each one. We did that several times. Then later in the day I found him with a pencil pointing to each letter and singing, and that made me feel much better!

We did a color shade activity.  I let him pick the color sets he wanted to do then I put out the darkest and lightest of each one.  We talked about dark, and darker than,  then about light, and lighter than. He was doing great with that, but then I set a medium tone out for each set and asked him which was lightest and which was darkest and he had a little trouble.We switched to talking about light, medium, and dark and he did better, but then he said “I don’t want to do this anymore”, so we put it away. :)

We did his transportation same/different cards, and he did fantastic.  He’s done these before, but this time I asked him why the different one was different and he was able to give me a clear answer each time.

(Oh, I love those baby hands!)

I also gave him some new cutting pages… he loves his scissors. (Sorry no pics!)

Later in the day I found him doing these little puzzles in his room:

And he’s been calling this little teddy bear his “baby” all week.  We’ve had a lot of friends with new babies lately and I think he’s got the baby bug. :)  Here I found him rocking his baby:      Gosh, I sure do love this little boy! 

Go here for more Tot School ideas!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time – Aluminum Foil Art

We did this for a quick and simple art project this week. We haven’t done much with foil, but as I was wrapping up something to stick in the fridge, I thought about how much fun it would be to use for art time.

So we got out the foil and some markers. I said it was quick and simple!

We talked about how shiny, almost like a mirror, the foil is; how smooth it is; and how interesting it sounds when it moves. M enjoyed using his regular markers, and then we tried the window markers. I preferred the window markers (yes, I was drawing a little bit too). M loves the white window marker because it’s so unusual to have a white marker, so he used that one a lot, but I think he liked using both kinds of marker equally.

Here’s his finished picture:

And here’s mine :) : Can you tell I am just itching for fall to get here?! :)

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! :)

Our Flannel Board – part 2

(Part 1 of this series is here)

Before I get started, I want to correct a mistake in last week’s flannel board post. I wasn’t sure I had the correct measurements of the foam core board I used to make our flannel board, and I was too lazy at the time to go measure the silly thing. I have done so since then and it is approximately 20” by 30”. It seems to be the perfect size, and the foam core board works wonderfully so far (close to 3 years now)!

I just love making felt sets for M to use with our flannel board. You can find many templates online, draw your own, print out pictures to use, or even clip images from magazines and back them with felt! I’ve done this to create puzzles for M to put together on the flannel board. And, anything you do for the flannel board can be done for a magnet board too! It’s fun to switch things up a little bit sometimes and have some magnet sets that you use on a cookie sheet!

M played with the (very few) felt sets we had when he was small, then lost interest for a time being. I would say he regained interest (and boy, it was a LOT of interest) when he was about 2 1/2 years old. At this stage, many children are intrigued by the way you can *see* a story unfold by using the flannel board.
They also love poems and songs that have manipulatives (the felt pieces) that they can use to bring the songs to life. Poems and songs are a big hit here, in part because they are short and easy to memorize, so M can “do” the flannel board by himself.

And I love the counting poems we have! It’s great to see M learning to count and even learning to subtract or add as pieces are added to the board or taken off.

Pictured below are our poem and song felt sets. When appropriate, I’ve linked the title to the site where I found the templates. You can find more templates and ideas at these sites too, so be sure to click over!

5 Green and Speckled Frogs:

5 Little Seashells:
There’s no link for this one because it was a freebie as part of a membership at The Mailbox.com (which I no longer have). However, the shells and wave are super-easy to make and here’s a link to a poem that goes with them. It’s not the exact same poem we use, but it is cute!

5 Little Pumpkins:(um, yes, there are only four pumpkins here and no gate. This one still needs a few finishing touches, but the pumpkins are just so pretty, aren’t they?)

 

5 Little Ducks:


10 in the Bed (This one was made by printing the pieces, laminating them, attaching sandpaper to the back of the bed, and putting velcro pieces on the pillows and the backs of the bears):


Old MacDonald Had a Farm (also made by printing and laminating!):

There’s a Little White Duck:

Polka-dot numbers 0 – 20 :
We use this for number recognition and number sequence, playing a kind of Brown Bear, Brown Bear game – We’ll put #1 up and say “number one, number one, what do you see?” “I see a number two looking at me”, etc. M has to find the correct number and put it on the flannel board. Often, I will put them out on the floor pretty much in sequence to make it easier for him. Occasionally we mix them up a little bit. Sometimes I have him recite the poem and see if he can get the numbers in order. Right now we only use 0-10, as that seems to be enough for him to deal with at one time.

2 Little Apples: I made this one myself – simply cut a trunk and tree top out of brown and green felt. Make two apples with faces (if you wish) and you’re done. Here’s the poem that goes with this one in case you are unfamiliar with it:

Way up high in the apple tree,
I saw two little apples looking at me.
I shook that tree as hard as I could,
Down came the apples,
and mmmm, mmmm, were they good!

When M was a tiny baby I would recite this poem for him like this:

Way up high in the apple tree,
I saw a little baby looking at me!
I shook that tree as hard as I could (gently, gently “shake” baby, without really shaking him at all),
Down came the baby,
and mmmm, mmmm, was he good! (eat him up, but don’t really eat him up, ha ha).

He always giggled with that one! :)

Next week (hopefully) part 3 – telling stories with the flannel board and how I (try to) keep them organized.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 13, 2009

Matthew is 36 months

It was another fun week in Tot School land. :)  I know it looks like we do a lot, but I want to stress that we normally spend about one hour “doing school” on Tuesday mornings, with only a couple more planned activities thrown in here and there if M asks for them on other days, which he normally does lately.  We try to spend time every day on an art project too, but other than that M’s time is spent mostly in self-directed play; normally I try to let the art project be very self-directed too.  Sometimes his free play time is with me or Daddy (and if it’s a definite learning-type activity I try to capture it with some pictures) and very often on his own, or with a friend.  Regardless of what it looks like we really don’t spend all our time on school! :)
Ok, now that that is out of the way… here’s what we did this week. :)
I showed M the new letter H file I put together for his ABC book.  I posted about this here and made it available for download. :)
First, He put helicopter and “H” foam stickers on the Hh templates:
He pretty much insisted on putting the stickers around the letters instead of on them. :)  Simple as this was, M absolutely loved doing it.
Then he practiced tracing the letters.  He wants to draw his letters so badly, so I included this activity in the file (you can see his tripod grasp is pretty non-existent, or was on this day anyway):
We played a tic tac toe game using Hard Hats and Hammers:

And we went through little pictures of things that begin with H.  I’ve found this is a one of the best activities to help him learn the sound a letter makes.  I always include this with our ABC book pages.  We say /h/ /h/ /h/ hammer, /h/ /h/ /h/ house, etc, stressing the initial sound as we look at each picture.  It’s fun and kind of turns into a chant of sorts.
We worked on the Heart pattern strips… he is just not getting the concept of repeating patterns.   Ah well, I need to remain patient and remember at 3 the important thing is lots of exposure to a concept and it will finally *click*. :)  Here’s the pattern strips after I re-did them the right way, ha:
Finally, he colored the shapes for the shape House.  He is so not into crayons.  If I had let him use markers I would’ve gotten a better response, I think.  He colored for a while, like this: then he wanted me to finish it.  I had him tell me which color to use for each part, then did it.  He enjoyed being the teacher. :)  Here is the shapes house all finished and put together:

After that we did a few more tot school activities – we used our counting mats to count with M&Ms. :)  We are still only going up to number 4 because he still is working on one to one correspondence and the idea that the last number you say is the number of items.

I created a little measuring activity for him.  I got the idea here, and altered it slightly.  M is really, really into tools lately and of course that includes what he calls his “measurers”, which is a tape measure and a square with a ruler on the side.  So I made this: (ignore the close up of my dirty carpet, please)

He loved this and I think it would’ve gone over even better if I had used something other than ribbon to measure.  But, that was all I could think of at the time.

Then we practiced scissor skills by cutting out large shapes drawn on construction paper:He did so well with this, we saved the shapes to show to Daddy later.  I wish I would’ve taken a picture of them all cut out.   
He loves this little paperclip color match game.  He just recently became very good at doing this and is enjoying his new found skill.  He wanted to do this again another day but lost interest pretty quickly.  So I grabbed the bag of paper clips and gave him a new challenge – paper clip chains: I’m noticing this kid does not smile much for pictures.  Please believe me, though, when I tell you he enjoyed an activity. :)

He practiced spooning the pretty, pretty glass pebbles from a glass dish into an ice cube tray:

We did our fantastic movement cards again and got a little exercise in.  I am thinking of making this a daily activity.

Another day he was itching to do some hammering, so I gave him a large piece of styrofoam that came in a package we received and a baggie full of golf tees.  This kept him busy on and off for most of the day.  The next day he took the golf tees (“nails”) out with his pliers – I was impressed he thought of this – I sure hadn’t. then as I was doing laundry he decided to saw it.  The boy is all about tools these days.  This is what awaited me after the laundry: It was a mess.  But I was not too bent out of shape about it – he had thoroughly enjoyed himself, and the amount of time it kept him occupied was definitely worth the 10 minutes or so of cleaning and vacuuming I had to do. 
I’ve been trying to have a small activity set up for him to do independently around 4:00 pm when Daddy is not yet home but dinner needs to be cooked.  This week we tried stenciling with our do-a-dot painters:I really need to pull together some more activities for this purpose – any ideas?  Nothing too complicated to set up and something he can do by himself.  You know how it is when that time of day rolls around…
Here’s my favorite picture of the week.  M’s cousin S came over and she is a crafty kind of girl.  They crafted all day.  She has been dying to make a sunshine guy like M made a long time ago.  They both made new ones and then posed with them for me: Aren’t they sweet? And the kids are nice too.  ;)  Hee hee.
For more great tot school ideas, go here!  Sorry for so much rambling this week! :)
Have a beautiful day! :)