Books of the Week {#3} – Autumn

I’ve been preparing an Autumn theme of learning activities recently, and so I thought I’d share three of the books we are going to read to get us started!

1. Mouse’s First Fall by Lauren Thompson, Illustrated by Buket Erdogan:

We love all of Lauren Thompson’s books and this one is no exception. I believe there is a “Mouse” book for every season, and I plan to check the others out too at some point. In this book, Mouse discovers all the beautiful colors of leaves, their textures and shapes. He has fun running, skipping and kicking his way through them, piles them up and then… well you can guess what happens with a happy little mouse and a big pile of leaves. :) It’s the same thing that happens with a happy small child and a big pile of leaves. ;) This is just a really delightful book to read and I am so glad we found it.

2. Fall Leaves Fall! by Zoe Hall, Illustrated by Shari Halpern:

This is written in the voice of two children who watch autumn arrive as the leaves begin to change colors. They talk about all the beautiful colors, the shapes and sizes of the leaves, try to catch them, stomp and crunch them, and watch them fly through the air. They collect some leaves (an idea I love) and examine them. They rake them into a pile and jump in. This book has great illustrations of leaves, which are labeled with the type of tree they came from. We will be learning about just this thing and this book will be a great addition to our leaf identification project. This book also has a cute idea for making pictures with the leaves. You have to check this one out – it’s definitely a favorite!

3. It’s Pumpkin Time! by Zoe Hall, Illustrated by Shari Halpern:

This is essentially a Halloween book – the favorite holiday of the two characters - and it has a great lesson about the life-cycle of pumpkins. The children plant the seeds, water them, watch them grow into vines with flowers, and then green pumpkins which slowly turn to orange and are ready to be picked, carved, and have more seeds inside to plant next year! Halloween is mentioned, but thankfully, nothing scary or spooky is in this book. We try to stay away from that kind of thing because I have no desire to be up at all hours of the night with a little boy whose imagination is working over time… but I digress; the book is great and I plan to use it along with some pumpkin life-cycle cards. And if you have a small child who isn’t sure what Halloween is exactly, this is a good introduction – it talks about costumes and trick-or-treating and is a fun book to read!

Go to the MckLinky at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to see what other kids are reading!

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! :)

Art Time! Salty Watercolors

This is one of those art projects I’ve had in the back of my mind for ages – meaning to do it, forgetting about it, remembering it, getting too busy to do it, forgetting it again… you get the picture. :)
Finally, we did it.  And, boy, am I glad we did!
It is from one of our favorite art books - Scribble Art by MaryAnn Kohl. 
We used white cardstock, glue, table salt, pipettes, paintbrushes, and our fabulous homemade liquid watercolors left over from a previous project.  (I covered our art tray / muffin tin with foil and the paints kept pretty well.  I did have to add a few drops of water to each cup and mix them up, but they worked just great and were still nice and vivid.)

M scooted up to the table and got busy with the glue bottle:
Then we tried sprinkling salt on with a spoon -
but it was not covering the glue as well as we needed it to.  If you do this, you need to put  a lot of salt on your glue pattern.  I finally just dumped it on right out of the box.  Then we tapped the extra salt off into the tray and we were left with this:
The idea at this point is to gently touch the salt pattern with watercolor paints and it will spread out – you can actually watch it soak through the salt along the lines you’ve made.  We started off with pipettes:It worked, but the paint was also forming puddles because M was squeezing too much paint out.  We (*I*) couldn’t clearly see the salt doing it’s thing because of the puddles.  So, I tried to get M to use a paintbrush and just barely touch it to the salt lines.  This is actually what the book directs you to do, and I should’ve listened to the book because M loves those pipettes dearly (they are fun) and we had a bit of a disagreement at this point.  ;)
Anyway, it did work better with the brush, as long as you just touch the salt.  Don’t brush the salt.  That point is very important!
It was a very neat and fascinating project, watching the soft colors of the paint spread along the salt, sometimes mixing together and creating new colors.  There was something just very slow and relaxing about it. 
Here are the finished art pieces:

This is definitely on our “do again!” list!
Have a beautiful day! :)