Valentine Count and Clip Cards

I get so much enjoyment from making little activities for M and other kids his age… I know it probably seems crazy to a lot of people, but this kind of thing is really fun! :)

So, the latest is this set of count and clip cards.  The child counts the hearts on each card then clips (using a clothespin clip or anything similar) the correct number along the side.  These go from 1 to 12.

My little sweetheart and I will be using these during the week before Valentine’s Day. :) 

I printed my set on cardstock and laminated them in order to make them a bit sturdier for the clothespins.  You can print them by clicking on the thumbnail below.  Let me know if you use them!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Shapes Cutting, Pasting, and Sorting Pages – Printables

M was SO into his ABC cutting and pasting collage pages that I had to come up with something similar to keep him from going through the entire alphabet in a month. So, this is what I came up with for him… (This is his finished collage for the “square” page.)

I made a set of cutting and pasting shape collage pages. And then I realized this would be a fun sorting activity also!

I’ve made two sets of printables; one is for cutting and pasting, as M did in the above picture, the other is for sorting: (I’m thinking this will be perfect in our pocket chart).

It’s fun to use real, every day objects to show children how shapes are all around us. :)

Just Click on the links below to go to the download page.

Shapes Cut-and-paste Collage Pages
(You’ll see is a lot of space between the pictures on these pages. This is so the child will have plenty of room for cutting.)

Shapes Sorting Cards

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our Calendar (Free Printables)

One of the things I’m looking forward to doing with M in the new year is daily calendar time.

We’ve been learning the days of the week (we love this song), and we are working on the concepts of today, tomorrow, and yesterday.  We also need to work on morning, mid-day, evening, night, etc.  M thinks anytime the sun is out is “morning” – so pretty much all day, until “night” when it’s dark.  He also thinks if he takes a nap (a very rare occurrence) that when he wakes up it’s “tomorrow”.  Sigh.  If anyone has any ideas on how to help him understand that this isn’t so, I’m all ears.

I bought a piece of poster board and cut it to 14” x 18 1/2”, then marked off spaces for a calendar.  The calendar will hang on our fridge (via double stick tape) and the calendar day cards will have magnets on the back. 

We’ll do calendar time and weather chart time together. I’m planning on noting our birthdays, holidays, and other special days with these calendar cards.  However, I’m also making a full set of regular cards for each month too, so anyone can print and use them (and then you won’t have to celebrate our birthdays. :) )

As I make more calendar pieces for each month, I’ll add them in a list at the bottom of this post, as well as link them up to my printables page. These are listed in order of months, but I’m adding in parenthesis what the theme is in case anyone wants to use them for another month.  There are 31 days in each for just this reason. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Month, Year, and Day cards

January (snowflakes) February (dinosaurs) March (baseball) April (baby animals) May (bugs)    June (hot air balloons) July (seaside summer) August (work trucks) September (train engine and train cars) October (owls, pumpkins, leaves, squirrels) November (apples, scarecrow, cornucopia)

December (wreath, snowman, candle)

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! :)

Music Time – Printable Christmas Song Pages!

I am making an effort to bring more music into our days. Several months ago I made a songbook for M using a simple 3-ring binder:
I found clipart to represent each song, which I put at the top of each page. I printed out about 25 songs to start with and since then I’ve added many more.


M has a small stash of instruments:
Some are homemade… we don’t claim to be very fancy here. :) He has a harmonica, jingle bells, tambourine, a shaker I made for him from a soda bottle with beads and buttons etc., a triangle, and a metal bowl with a wooden spoon that he uses for a drum. You can just imagine the music we make. ;) He loves to sit with the song book in front of him and hand out the instruments. He has become very good at knowing which song goes with which picture.
We sit around and play “music” (I use that word very, very loosely) and sing our songs every once in a while. However, it’s usually put away and we really don’t think of it very often. Of course when the songbook was brand new it was a different story, but now… well, it’s been neglected of late.

Christmas seems like the perfect time to bring it back out and make sure our home is music-filled! I’ve typed up some of our favorite Christmas carols, and will have the song book along with the instruments set out on M’s activity shelves for the rest of Advent and the Christmas season. They may well stay there permanently. :)

Click on the image below to download our Christmas pages and make your own song book!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Yet another Bob the Builder activity…

I can practically hear everyone jumping up and down with excitement about this (that's me being sarcastic). ;) Well, M is loving these and so I keep going; he thinks his mommy is pretty cool right now, ha! Little does he know the really cool mommies have better things to do with their time. However, I do think this is the last one for a while. He may never get tired of Bob and his millions of work trucks, but I am. Just a little!

Anyway, let me show you the new *Bob the Builder – Counting and Comparing Flip Book*…
We had a little apple unit early in fall and one of the items we used was an apple counting book that I printed from Childcareland. M loved it! So, I used that idea and took it one step further by making this one into a split flip book. You can flip either side of the book, and then compare the amount of trucks. We’ll use this to talk about “more” and “less”.

The cover:
The inside:
The trucks are laminated and attach to the pages with velcro dots. I’ve placed the correct number of velcro dots on each page as an added help with counting and developing one-to-one correspondence.

After the counting is done, start flipping the pages and ask “which side has more trucks?” and “which side has less trucks?”. Discuss how 10 is a larger amount than 3, etc. I think there’s a lot we’ll be able to do with this!

Recently M was playing a number match game and someone (we had company over) asked him which number was the *biggest* number, and M just stared at the numbers with a blank look on his face. Bigger? Well, they (the numerals) pretty much all looked the same size to him. I realized that amount and size can be difficult concepts for a child, when referring to numbers. And then this book popped into my head and now here it is! :)

The .pdf file is available for download here or just click on the image at the top of this post!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Size Sorting and Sequencing – printables

Well, I’ve been keeping busy with the Bob the Builder activity packs.  As long as M is responding well to them (and is he ever!) I’ll keep trying to think up some new things.  Thanks to those of you who have given me some excellent ideas!

These were super easy and fast to make, please don’t think I spend all day on the computer working hard at these things.  It’s a lot of fun for me too, as well as for M.

First I made a size sorting activity with all the trucks: There are twelve different trucks, with a small, medium, and large size of each.   The child sorts them onto the mats.  I’ve only put them around the mats in the photo so you could actually see the mats.   I think there are other things we may do with these too – like sort by color onto a color wheel.   If you think your little one would enjoy this, you can download it here.

I also made a size sequencing activity of just one of the trucks – Scrambler, who is actually an “off-road” 4-wheeler.  He’s crazy and hyper and M loves him to death.  There are 8 images, each one a bit smaller than the next:
These can be downloaded here.

Enjoy!  If you print these and use them, I’d love to know about it!!

Have a beautiful day! :)

P.S. I know it looks like a lot of cutting, but I watched the clock and I had it all cut out and ready to go in 12 minutes!  No, I wasn’t even hurrying. ;)

Bob the Builder Game Cards

M loves Bob the Builder… obsessively. It’s really a great show – very positive about working together. It’s full of encouragement and confidence building and even forgiveness when something goes wrong or a mistake is made.

So, in our house the Bob talk is non-stop lately. I remember someone saying you can use something your child is interested in to help them learn about anything.

Well, I made these for M this week… Name cards for some of the trucks with glass pebbles to match the letters with. I found some flat glass ones at Dollar Tree (um, of course!) and wrote the letters on them with permanent marker. M loves it and gave me a list of names for other trucks that he wants me to make. Hee hee.

I also made these game cards: I printed two sets and we used them for a memory game today. He LOVED them and was so excited. I’m going to use them to teach him how to play “Go Fish” too.

Of course they are printable. :) If you have a Bob the Builder lover just click on the image above and you can download the set. There are 17 cards in all. You’ll need to print 2 sets of course. The names of the trucks are printed on there too because moms can’t always remember important things like that! ;)

I want to make some more activity pack type things with these lovely trucks since he’s responded so well to these two. Any ideas??

Have a beautiful day! :)


**UPDATE** The original version of the game cards had an incorrect name for one of the trucks in it. It's been corrected and the new version is now linked up. 11/13/09

Advent and the Jesse Tree - printable file and ornaments!

 **Please note - this post is from Advent of 2009.  A current  Jesse Tree packet, with schedule, ornaments, and prayers is here.**

A few of our Jesse Tree ornaments and the cards we use to go with them. They are decorated with glitter glue, which isn’t showing up too well in the picture. They’re pretty in real life. :)

We are spending a little bit of time this month Christmas shopping and getting ready for Advent, which begins Nov. 29th… I love having time before Christmas that isn’t hurried and rushed and chaotic… just time for our family to soak in the peacefulness and joy of the season.

One of our little traditions is the Jesse Tree. I use *tradition* in a pretty loose way here, because this is actually only our 2nd year:). But I do hope and plan to make this a tradition for years to come.

The Jesse Tree is a way of telling the story of Jesus’ genealogy and the history of God’s plan of salvation. It goes from creation to the birth of Jesus, hitting the high points like the fall of Adam and Eve, the flood, prophets, and the lineage from Jesse to Jesus. There is an ornament and scripture reading (or Bible story) for each day of Advent.

Because the number of days in Advent can vary a little from year to year (this year there are 26 days) there are a couple of options. You can do the same ornaments and stories every year starting with Dec. 1st and only doing 24 ornaments a year, similar to an advent calendar. Or you can have a couple of *extra* ornaments to slip in here and there, normally on the Sundays of Advent. This is what we will do.

There is no set way of doing a Jesse Tree, if you do a Google search you may find several other ornaments and ideas. It can get a little confusing the first time (or two!).

Some families print ornaments out and let their children decorate them, then hang them on a tree. Many use a bare branch in a garden pot for their Jesse tree. I decided on making a felt tree just for simplicity’s sake so we can do the same thing year after year. I created felt ornaments last year, but when M is older I may print them out, let him decorate the ornaments, and then glue felt to the back of them to hang on the tree. Here’s a picture of the felt tree we’ll use:
I’ve created a file which lists the ornaments and stories for each day. It also has some cards we use that have each day’s scripture reference on them, the special “emphasis point” to talk about, as well as a short prayer to read each evening (suitable for small children). Click on the image to go to the file and see all the elements. The last few pages have printable ornaments to color and decorate.
Last year I checked out a book about the Jesse Tree from the library, but for the life of me I can’t remember the title. I got the ideas for many of our ornaments and prayers from the book, as well as some of the other ideas.

Here’s the specifics of what we’ll do each evening of Advent…

• M will open his special Advent box: Inside the box will be a piece of candy, a sticker, a short length of yarn, the ornament of the day, and the card (for our reference):
• M will eat his piece of candy first (pretty sure of that :) )
• We’ll read the Bible story for the evening from one of our Children’s Bibles or from other religious story books we have. The scripture reference for each day is on each card if you want to read directly from the Bible for older children.
• M will place the ornament on the tree while we talk about the “emphasis point” for the evening (also on the card… things like God’s promises, what makes God sad, etc.).
• M will put the sticker on a tree cutout that we’ll use as an Advent calendar.
• We will read the short prayer written on the card.
• Finally, M will place the piece of yarn in the manger. One piece of yarn per evening to make a soft bed for baby Jesus, while doing this we’ll say something along the lines of “Come Baby Jesus, be born in our hearts”.On Christmas Eve there will be a baby Jesus to place in the manger on top of the “hay”.

Last year he was two and needed quite a bit of guidance, but by the end of Advent he had the routine totally down. Especially the candy part. ;)

If this is something you want to try with your family and you have any questions, please let me know!! Or if you already decorate a Jesse Tree as part of your tradition, I’d love to hear about it!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Raccoon Shapes Craft – printable :)

So, tonight I had two hours of uninterrupted internet time. I was going to write 3 posts for later this week, comment on all your lovely posts out there, and maybe even play some sudoku.:)


What I ended up doing instead was creating this little guy: Isn’t he cute?

Next week our theme is autumn animals – think owls, squirrels, bats… and raccoons. I found some great raccoon books at the library today, and wanted to make a fun workbox activity for M that went along with them. We haven’t done much with shapes lately, so I came up with this. He’s entirely made of shapes. Well, except for the googley eyes we’ll be putting on him and the whiskers (probably black yarn since that’s what I have on hand).

I looked all over internet-land and couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, so I *had* to make one from scratch (oh, darn!). DLTK has a cute one that is entirely made of hearts, but M, being very manly, is not into hearts so much. ;)

If you are interested in making one, or if you ever do a raccoon theme, you can print out the template and instructions from here. I’ll probably cut the shapes out and then use them for a template on black paper. I’ll let M color the shapes on the second page gray. If you have a kid who is good with scissors, they could do a lot of the cutting too.

Enjoy!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Thanksgiving Tree Idea and Template

I’ve been seeing a lot of Thanksgiving ideas online lately, so I thought I’d go ahead and share what we are planning to do this year… and hopefully every year from now on! 

A couple of weeks ago I had a whole day to myself while my husband took M to his family farm and they picked apples in the orchard.  So what did I do with my free time?  Why, I made something of course.  I can not stop myself…

We plan to do a Jesse Tree for Advent this year.  We did one last year and it was a lot of fun for M, plus a great way to sneak in a lot of quick Bible stories – one per evening. I’ll write more about the Jesse tree in November.  Anyway, I drew a tree with bare branches and then realized it would be perfect for Thanksgiving too.  I always love something that has more than one use. :)

In fact, I’m guessing there could be a lot more uses for this – like a seasonal tree to decorate with felt ornaments.  Maybe snowflakes in winter, flowers in spring, green leaves in summer, red and orange leaves in fall…

So, I uploaded the template I made, enlarged it, then printed it and cut it from some brown flannel.  Here’s the paper pinned to the fabric:  It ended up being about 24 inches long and maybe 15 to 18 inches wide (my estimation powers are not great so don’t hold me to that!).

I made another flannel board for it (foam core board and flannel) and attached it with some gold-colored tacks so the branches would not be floppy.  I plan to cut leaves from some fall-patterned scrapbook paper and we will each write one thing for which we are thankful on a leaf each evening of the week before Thanksgiving.  We’ll attach them to the tree with more tacks.  :)

I’m really excited about this idea, I think it’s going to look nice!  I’m so pleased with how the tree turned out.   And it’s going to be nice to have our focus on what we are thankful for instead of just how are we ever going to stuff all that food into ourselves.  ;)

If you are interested in making one like this, feel free to use my template.  You can download it here.  Be warned that the cutting can be a little tricky in some places.  You can find the original small version here if you need a visual to help you out while you are cutting.  This is my original drawing, so please link back here if you make this and post about it. 

Have a beautiful day! :)

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! :)

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. 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! :)