Learning by Heart – Week 6

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but computer problems delayed me a bit.  Just thought I should explain why there are Halloween pictures at the end. :)

M is 4 years old 

 

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

Well, the hit of the week was dropping colored water:This is how I had it set up for him (we were doing letter F things this week).  M loved this activity so much, it merited its own post, here.  If you’d like to keep your child busy for hours, go read it. ;)  Ok, I can’t promise that your child will be as into this as mine was, but I definitely say give it a try!

Mini peg board and marbles, for fine motor skills:The idea was to place pegs in the peg board, then use the tongs to place a marble on top of each peg; turns out it was too difficult to get the marbles on the pegs with the tongs, so M used his fingers.  The marbles are all a clear, light blue.  When they are placed on the colored pegs, look at what happens to them: They change colors!  And, you can’t see this in the photo, but there are tiny air bubbles in some of the marbles that make them *sparkle* on top of the pegs.  Very, very cool.  We were fascinated by this (I really didn’t know this would happen!).

Sand art pictures, which are always a hit, good for fine motor skill development, and so simple for me to prep:  The yellow pages have shapes on them that you can’t quite see in the photo.  Various sections peel off and reveal sticky cardboard, which the child then fills in with the colored sand.

Apple Basket Game, for counting and fine motor skills: To play this, we separated out the apples into two groups of ten.  We took turns rolling the die, then used the tongs to grab the apple stems and place that many apples back into the basket.  Whoever got all of their apples into the basket first won.  We played this once, then M was not interested in it again.  This basket and set of apples was given to me, and I’d sure like to come up with some interesting things to do with it.  Ideas??

Mr. Turkey Heads: These were used with cutouts of Mr. Potato Head parts (pic below, before they were cut out), and M loved making them! We did something similar with Mr. Pumpkin Heads for Halloween and M had been begging to do some more.

Fuse Beads, for fine motor skills, and fun ;)  :                       Another airplane, besides the 5 he’s already made.

M continues to love using his fuse beads to create things.  We are being overrun with plastic bead creations here.  And recently he discovered that they make small glow in the dark fuse beads (biggie beads are pictured above, small ones below).  That’s right – glow in the dark.  Can you even imagine how glorious a 4 year old boy thinks this is?  So, he’s been busy with these babies quite a bit:And yours truly has been kept busy ironing these little buggers.  I’m ready to put them away!

New F and G objects for our phonics box:

   football, fish, frog, flowers, flag, giraffe, guitar, girl, gorilla, elephant, and cake.  (Hee hee, I’m not sure how elephant and cake got in there!)

By the way, if you are interested in finding miniature objects a great place to look is at the decorative buttons at Michael’s.  I found some very cool things there!  (But, oh, how I wish a Hobby Lobby was nearby!)

Lowercase f letter craft, a frog on a log with his leg dangling down:

The letter crafts have officially lost M’s interest.  This was the only one of 4 that he did this week.  Ah well, we may pick them up again some time.  For now we’ll take a break, and focus on other ways to sharpen letter knowledge. 

As a little aside here, it is easy to get discouraged when he is not interested in something I planned; BUT I am trying, trying, trying to remember that there’s no need to learn it all now.  Simply exposing him several times to various skills is all he needs academically at this point (quite honestly, academics in general aren’t really necessary at this age.  This should all be just for fun!).  Even more importantly, he needs patience, love, and for me to listen to him with a mother’s heart.  If we accomplish nothing that I’ve planned, but we did snuggle and read books together, then we had a successful day!

Polishing Pennies with vinegar and salt (from The Wonder Years), a little science, a little practical life work:This was another big hit and he worked on these pennies for over an hour!  Some he let soak in the vinegar, some he cleaned with q-tips.  The white cloth is there for rubbing each penny dry after it’s been cleaned.  The copper in the pennies oxidizes because of the oxygen in the air, and makes them look dirty.  Vinegar is an acid that removes the oxidized copper and reveals the shiny, pretty copper underneath.  Does he understand all this?  I’m not sure, but he did have fun!

 

OTHER ACTIVITIES:

A fun counting activity with pennies (I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post):

Our nature center class, where we got to touch a turtle and a snake, and take a hike to see some beautiful nature. :)

           The beavers have brought all this wood to the middle of their pond so they have food in winter without having to travel far from home.  You can see the very edge of the beaver lodge at the top of this photo.

It looks like the end of autumn is beginning in this picture, and now that we have several inches of snow, I’m pretty sure that’s true.

 

Mixing vinegar and baking soda, to kill many a dinosaur with red hot lava from a volcano: Actually they just said “ow” a lot because their feet were a little hot.  M is too gentle of a soul to really want them to die from his volcano. :)

To prove this point, here’s a couple of photos taken during M’s free play this week… Superman and The Thing (from the Fantastic Four, if you know your superheroes), who apparently got a little tired and needed to nap, and so used cotton balls for pillows.  :)  Seriously, is that not sweet?!  Superman was lucky enough to even get tucked in with his cape for a blanket. 

When this guy bangs into something he yells, “It’s clobberin’ time!”, but M insists he is saying “It’s cooperating time!”.  Hee hee. :)  

Here’s my little Superman on Halloween, all buff because he has a coat on underneath his costume:He was flying high, let me tell you, after all that candy!   

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Learning by Heart – Week 5

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

We are finally getting into our “rhythm” here, and it feels so great!  I’ve lightened up my own load by deciding to only do preschool activities 2 to 3 days of the week, and to do them in the mornings, which is key for us.  We are both more enthusiastic about this kind of thing in the morning, rather than in the afternoon after being busy all day.  We’ve established a sort of schedule that is really working for us.  I hesitate to use the word “schedule”… The idea of a schedule can feel stifling and for many of us just leads to feeling more pressure.  That’s not at all what I’m talking about – I want to free up time and energy and feel less stress!  Really what we are trying to do is establish good habits that make it easier for us to use our time wisely.   More on this in an upcoming post!

For now, on to what we accomplished this week:

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

D and E items for our phonics box:

dragonfly, diamond, dog, duck
(oops!  somehow only the D items made it into the photo.)

Letter Crafts:

I continue to make and print out a quick sample of the letter crafts for M to “read” and make on his own.  I do believe interest in these is waning though, so in a couple of weeks we may take a little break from these.

D is for Dragon (from No Time for Flashcards).

d is for door (from No Time for Flashcards).  Open it up to see…dots!

 

E is for Elephant (from Totally Tots).

e is for egg (from Totally Tots).
There are so many great sites out there for letter crafts, and it’s hard to think of something original.  Next week, however, I hope to have a couple of new ideas, so stay tuned!

Tonging marbles onto Dinosaur suction cups:

Dropping water into Dinosaur suction cups with a pipette: the object of this was to drop just one drop of water into each little suction cup, then use the sponge to suck the water up.  This is a very Montessori-type activity, and a great explanation of how to set it up is here.

 

Play dough and Jolanthe’s great letter mats: I recently ran across these letter mats for play dough too; I really like them, but already had the ones pictured printed out.  I think I’ll be able to use both sets for different activities.

Whiteboard letter practice:

Using Wikki Stix to form letters:

 

Sand tray with pipecleaner letters:

 

Scissor practice pages: The stickers are there to guide him and help him stay on the line.  This is way too easy for M now (he’s been using safety scissors since he was just under 2 years old).  He did one page, then wasn’t interested.  I think I need to find something a bit more challenging in this area.  He used to really enjoy these; if you are interested in them, you can find them here.

I put out some sunflowers (from Michael’s – on sale!) for M to add to his autumn leaf arrangement.  I’m amazed at how much fun it can be to stick things into a block of foam.  The result is really beautiful (see photo at the top of this post).

 

 Making Mr. Pumpkin Heads:    I wrote about these in this post, and M enjoyed making them SO much.  It was the first thing he went for the morning I put them out, and they are all hanging in his bedroom.   Last night he asked me to make more of these for him to do – I think it would be fun to try with turkeys for Thanksgiving, don’t you? :)

 

 TOGETHER ACTIVITIES: 

 Tic Tac Toe: After seeing Jolanthe’s cute-as-a-button fridge tic tac toe game (here), I got out our tic tac toe game that I made last year (free printable!) and made it into a magnet game for our fridge.  I wish I would’ve gotten some action shots, because M loved playing this game!  After a few games he was really beginning to strategize, which kind of surprised me.  We’ll be leaving this up for a while!

While I was adding magnets to things, I decided to make his name leaves magnetic too and now they are on the fridge too.  M wasn’t too interested in placing them in order, but I like how they look so they’ll be staying up too. :)

Exercise:

Since E was one of our letters for the week, I thought exercise would be a good thing to add into our week.  Honestly, I need to start making this part of our regular routine, for my sake as well as M’s!  We have a Bobby Susser cd titled, “Wiggle Wiggle and Other Exercises ".  It is so much fun, and a great addition to our days.  I plan to find a variety of cds like this, or just come up with ideas, and plan some sort of exercise each day.  M doesn’t really need this, but somebody else sure does!   

                                      Twisting and wiggling away

Marching in a circle with his hands on his head
(actions for one of the songs)

 

Math:

My big plans for math have been kind of a flop lately.  The bead bars just don’t engage M like I’d hoped.  I’m disappointed because I think the Montessori method with the bead bars and number boards makes so much sense, but it seems to only confuse M and he’s not interested in sitting and listening to me say the same thing over and over or watching me do the activity first. 

It seems to me that before we start looking at how and why the teens, twenties, and so on have two digits and what each place value is, M just wants to count.  He just wants to know the numbers and their order before we go any further.  So we’ve been doing a lot of counting (more on this next week), and I decided to make an activity that engages his whole mind and body, and ended up creating a number line game.   We played it for the first time this week.  It is very active, and a lot of fun.  I hope to give it its own post sometime soon (a printable will be included!):

Science:

We’ve been talking a lot about leaves lately, so we pulled out the leaf nomenclature cards and M matched the parts up.  He really loves this type of activity for some reason (partly because the black and white pictures with only one portion colored are interesting, and partly because he pretends he can read the big words :) ), so I hope to make more some time soon.We also did a science experiment related to this with celery, which will be in a post on Sunday. :)

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Learning by Heart – week 4

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

This was supposed to be our Review-and-Catch-Up Week (yes, in capital letters), so I didn’t have many activities planned.  I wanted to use the time to plan activities for the weeks to come, but that didn’t really happen.  I’m learning that it’s more normal to have things not work out as expected than it is to have things go according to plan. :)

I set out some easy, no-prep shelf activities for M to choose from throughout the week, giving myself a huge break from planning and prepping our normal variety of activities:

Top Shelf – Guidecraft Feel & Find, small set of Magz, and our Wedgits:

Second Shelf – Lite Brite, Hammering Shapes, and a card game from M’s High Five magazine (on top of his work mat):

Third Shelf – See & Spell, M’s Collage and Trace ABC Book, a whiteboard and a little whiteboard ABC book (Target Dollar Spot!):

No photo of the bottom shelf – it held M’s Thomas the Train engines and track pieces, as well as his flannelboard sets which are there pretty much all the time. 

M chose each activity several times throughout the week, but the definite favorites were the Hammering Shapes and the Wedgits.  He worked very hard, with a specific design in mind, as he hammered in the little nails (more like tacks, definitely something that should be supervised, but lots of fun!). 

He made this boat scene, with the moon rising at night and the sun setting (I’m just telling you what was told to me):

The Wedgits are always a ton of fun, and M’s cousin S got in on the action too – she really loved them (despite the blank look on her face in this picture).  There’s a two year age difference between these two, so it’s good to know that they’ll still be interesting to M when he’s older!

I found an extra little fine motor activity for him at Target – these cute containers and some rub-on transfers (for scrapbooking or similar hobbies):He really enjoyed decorating the little boxes with “tatoos”, and loved placing each one where he wanted it and then rubbing it on with the little craft stick. Those little fingers got a good workout!
I learned this week that regardless of what I do or don’t do, M will learn.  In fact, it would take purposeful actions on my part to keep him from learning… he just learns.  That’s what he does.  When he is interested in something it’s almost impossible to keep him from learning.  This week, in which I did nothing in the way of preschool with him, he taught himself.  He taught himself all seven letters of his name and how to write them, using an uppercase ‘M’, then lowercase letters for the rest.  He also taught himself how to measure by building Wedgit towers and then measuring them with the little tape measure from my sewing basket.  Both of these things were initiated by him; he set out to learn how to do them, and mastered both skills by week’s end. 

He should be teaching me!

I guess he is. :)

To see some of our Halloween-themed activities, see this post from earlier this week.

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)