Dropping Colored Water – a Fine Motor Activity

This week I had as many shelf activities out for M as I usually have, but one of them was such a huge hit he did it for 2 hours the first day, and went back to it each and every day, while completely passing by every other activity.  I finally had to take it off the shelf so he would choose something else!

It was simple to put together and not at all time-consuming.  I simply printed magnet pages from Making Learning Fun (which are supposed to be used with circle magnets) for the letter F, one of our letters for the week.  I placed the pages in plastic page protectors and put them on a tray along with a few paper towels and a small dropper with red water in it.

 

The idea was for M to squeeze one drop, and only one drop onto each circle, then place a paper towel over the top and watch the color soak through. 

Well.  Never did I imagine that this would be The Best Activity in the World,  but apparently it is.  He did both F pages a few times, then begged for more.  I had some number play dough mats printed out and in page protectors already, so I grabbed those and he did them several times too. And, he got in a little unexpected math work by counting the circles on each page as he dropped water onto them.  Gotta love an activity that multi-tasks! ;)

 

It was M’s idea to trace the numbers with the colored drops.  It was so neat to see the number form as the water soaked through the paper towel.

Our dropper was just an old food coloring dropper.  You can pry the tip out, fill the container with water, drop in a tiny bit of food coloring and put the tip back in.  It worked perfectly!   I must have refilled this thing 20 times during the course of the week and it kept working great.  I didn’t want to use a regular eye dropper with an open bottle of colored water because  I wanted to eliminate any chance of spilling the water (food coloring stains!).  This turned out to be the perfect solution. 

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Floor Number Game – free printables!

 

I’m having a blast coming up with fun math games and activities to do with M.   I’m almost glad he didn’t take an interest in the bead bars and number boards (although, honestly, I do hope that he will, eventually!).

For our Floor Number Line Game I printed out some large number cards, 1 – 20, and laminated them.   I also made two dice – one has numbers on it, and one has actions on it. 

Here is the number die:

The action die looks like this:

To play, we scatter the numbers around our floor, while still keeping them in order.  So #1 goes nearest the starting place, and number 20 goes the farthest away.  You want enough room between numbers to have space for doing the actions.  It’s hard to crawl from #1 to #2 if there’s only a few inches between them. ;)

Each player starts at number 1, and the first player tosses both dice.  If you get “+2” and “hop on one foot”, you would hop on one foot forward two spaces to the number 3 card (forward means towards the higher numbers. Depending on how you have the numbers laid out, it could actually be sideways).

The number die has a zero on it, which means stay where you are; and some numbers have a minus sign (-), which means go back towards one. 

Whoever reaches 20 first is the winner!  When we first played this we only used numbers 1 to 10 and that was a lot of fun too!

If you have more than one child, this is a great game, as you can retrieve the dice for them.  If you only have one child and you are playing with him or her, it’s still a great game, but whoever is retrieving the dice for each turn will need to remember his or her spot on the number line!  This could also just be a fun activity for one child, without being a competitive game at all.

The floor cards are made to be printed on colored paper, and so don’t appear in order on the printable (I didn’t want 1 through 4 to all be purple, and so on, so I mixed the numbers up a bit).  You can download the game materials below.

Floor Number Game

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 3

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”

- Henry Ward Beecher

I don’t know if we just got off to a rotten start with school (sick the first week, funeral and lots of other activity the following two weeks), or what, but I can’t seem to get anything I’ve planned to do with M actually done.  

I’ve got to re-think our schedule a bit, I think.  I know I’d be more enthusiastic about it if our time was in the mornings; however, we are busy with other things 3 to 4 mornings a week.  And at least 2 (maybe all 4) of these are things neither one of us wants to give up.  But school in the afternoon when my level of fatigue is at its highest (my blog isn’t titled that just for fun!), just is. not. working.  Thank goodness we are only talking preschool here, but still.  Why is it every thing we want to participate in is held in the mornings?  It would be great if we could break up our afternoons with some of these outings instead.  It would be perfect, actually, and I guess that’s just asking too much.  ;)

Ah well, if nothing else, at least the shelf activities were not overlooked.  So on we go…

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

Craft punches (leaf and frog) with strips of paper.  Each paper has a number on it and M punched out that many shapes on each one.  Craft punches are always a hit around here:

Biggie fuse beads and patterns:

A sand art activity – fill small containers with a spoon and funnel:The results:  

A “rubber band-jo”, hee hee.  I thought of that myself, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one – it just begs to be called that, doesn’t it?I wish I would’ve gotten some action shots with this – M loved playing with it.  We talked about how the rubber bands vibrate over the space below to make music; you can actually see them vibrating, which was neat.  We also talked about “plucking” and “strumming”.  And we listened for low notes and high notes.  M commandeered this to go with his other instruments, so it looks like yours truly needs to buy a new bread pan. :)

 

Sensory activity with sandpaper cards.  I cut out 6 pieces of sandpaper - 2 each of a rough grade, a medium grade, and a fine grade – and we took turns trying to match the pairs by touch alone.  The matching pairs had the same sticker on the back as a control of error.  M really enjoyed this and I found him doing it on his own a few times throughout the week.

Leaf arranging – a wooden bowl, a small block of florist’s foam and some silk leaves.  I bought a couple of bunches on clearance at Michael’s and separated the stems with wire cutters. This was the big hit of the week.  M wanted to do this over and over.  Now, I don’t necessarily think leaf (or flower) arranging is a skill he absolutely must have, but the attention to detail, the fine motor workout, and the appreciation of something beautiful (and the work needed to make it beautiful) are all very, very good things!  And look how pretty it turned out! Well, it’s pretty in real life, not at all blurry like in the photo. ;)

Matching up numbers 1 to 15 with squirrels and acorns.  I think I found this printable here, but have had it now for a couple of years, so it may not be available any longer.  The acorns have magnets on the backs, hence the cookie sheet:

 

Lacing craft leaves onto a ribbon, from here.  I sewed a button on each end of the ribbon and cut slits in the leaves.  The clips are for hanging it on his art string.  I took a picture of it hanging, but it seems to have disappeared.

  

It was “C” week, so some C items for the phonic box – cow, car, camel, circle:

We’ve been doing simple crafts for each letter.  M is not much into mama-directed crafts, but he is really, really into looking at something and then re-creating it on his own.  So I make up a small copy of what it should look like and he goes for it.  :)  

C is for caterpillar (idea from here, although I just cut my own circles):

c is for cars:

We put these in our ABC Collage and Trace book, which he is absolutely loving.

Here’s a sample of how he “reads” it on his own.  He sat down one evening and did the entire book!  His voice is not very loud, so you have to listen closely.

Other than that, not much school has been going on.  Oh, except for a lot of this:

Because if you’ve already dragged the cushions to the floor you might as well jump on them until Mommy comes in.  So, he’s getting his exercise – that’s homeschooling, isn’t it? ;)  Homeschooling and regular life look a lot alike, come to think of it, don’t they?

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


Have a beautiful day! :)