Friday, September 30, 2011

Tot School - Cc

Tot School - Cc is for Caterpillars, Cows and Camping
Owen & Eli: 37 months
Cows & Caterpillars
The alphabet tracing pages from Money Saving Mom for the letter C tied in great to the caterpillar portion of our week. We also made pompom caterpillars and The Very Hungry Caterpillar using handprints. By the end of the week, the boys were talking about cocoons and caterpillars turning into butterflies just like they learned about in the books. Our paper plate craft this week was making cows - so cute!

Camping, Clouds and Colors
We made C and c using cotton balls to make them look like clouds and made a rainbow out of all the boys' cars. We had a great time pretend camping this week and doing all the camping activities from Homeschool Creations and 2 Teaching Mommies. They have great stuff! We used the felt counting fish (originally from Counting Coconuts) to go pretend fishing at our campsite and practiced counting and number recognition too.

Dd for Dinosaurs, Dogs and Dr. Seuss next week! Linking up to Tot School at 1+1+1=1.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Tot School - Bb

Tot School - Bb is for Bears and Bees
Owen & Eli: 36 months
The Letter B
I'm going to use the animal letters from education.com for all of the capital letters in the alphabet. I also love the alphabet tracing pages from Money Saving Mom that include the capital and lowercase letters and super cute graphics that go with the letters. As you can see, as of Week 2, they aren't that great at coloring with a purpose or tracing! : )

BEARS
I picked a ton of great books from the library this week to go with our Bear and Bee theme, and I think many of them will need to become permanents is our home library. The Bear Snores On series (Bears New Friend, Bear Wants More...) is awesome and we read them probably 20 times each. We read Bears, Bears, Bears! and ate bear pancakes and made grizzly bears and panda bears. That was probably their favorite day!

I printed off these two handouts from Making Learning Fun under their Brown Bear category. I think they are supposed to be used to graph M&Ms, but I painted a wooden cube all six colors in the graph and we played a dice game with it. They loved it! Every time they rolled, they would use that dot color to mark that column. When we finished, we counted to determine which animal had the most dots. Then we rolled a number die to color-by-number the brown bear animals. I loved that they had to count the dots on the die and then find the corresponding numeral on each animal to figure out who to color.

BEES (& other misc B words!)
Our other B word books from the library are shown in the first picture. We used several of the activities from the Bees unit on 2 Teaching Mommies this week too. The dot pages and tracing pages were nice, but a little too quick of an activity for the boys. They got some practice with upper and lowercase letters on the Beehive spelling page (even though I had to get creative since there were so many Es!) They were pretty good with the matching, but I wonder if it's because their odds were pretty good at getting it right with six Es!

Here we're playing our version of the clothespin counting game. I turned all 10 images face down and the boys took turns choosing one, turning it over, counting the bees and then dotting the right numeral for the number of bees. Then we put all 10 cards in order using the stamped answer. I thought it was a nice way to turn it more into a game... and aren't my lion and Spiderman super cute? : )

I've said it before that footprint crafts are always my favorite, but this one might be at the top. The stamped their feet and thumbs (the tiny bees) and then after they dried, glued the stripes and drew the smiles to finish them off. *Love*

We read Jamberry and had a berry snack... including feeding it to each other : )

I used this template (I think from Confessions of a Homeschooler?) to practice counting and 1:1 correspondance. They turned over a number (we just used 1-5 this time) and then matched the card to the right row, then chose the Ball stickers to stick in each box. When all five were filled, we matched the right equipment for each ball too. Stickers are always a hit over here!

Cc is next week - come on back to see what we're up to!

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Tot School - Aa

Tot School - Aa is for Apples, Acorns and Astronauts!
Owen & Eli: 36 months

We took a long break from Tot School for the summer to make room for travelling and visitors, but now we're back and better than ever! I thought a lot about how I wanted to teach the boys now that they are three, and what I thought would be important to incorporate, and I'm happy with how much we were able to accomplish this week. Last year the focus was mostly on letter identification, crafts and cooking (when applicable), but this year there will be a much stronger focus on letter sounds, math, science and reading.

We started the week at the library, getting books about our theme words and going to story time - the theme at story time was Apples (how appropriate!). Here are the books we read all week, but the biggest hits were I Saw an Ant on the Railroad Track and Zoom Zoom Zoom I'm Off to the Moon.

The Letter A
We started off by reviewing capital A and lowercase a and the sounds they both make. We said lots of words with the long A and short A sounds and created As out of crayons and playdoh just to get the shape down. Education.com has a different animal printable for every letter of the alphabet.

Apples
We did some simple and really fun apple activities this week. I drew a simple tree for the boys to color and then decorate with apple stickers. We talked about when apples grow and what you can make with apples. We also talked about the colors of different apples and how the different colors taste different (sweet vs. sour). To follow that up, we had an apple taste test! I found the apple core activity on Pinterest (my new addiction!) and the seeds are the boys' fingerprints. Mama Jenn's blog had an apple chart printable that I created a dice game to go along with. When a color apple was rolled, a penny was placed over that color apple on the chart. They loved it!

Astronauts
We read a lot of books about astronauts this week and what they do while in space. They learned about rocket ships and that astronauts float in space. We made an adorable astronaut out of paper plates and rocket ships using their footprints that were decorated with alien stickers. Super fun!

Acorns
Science this week was in the form of acorns. We learned about how they grow on trees and start off green, but when they are fully grown or on the ground they turn brown. We also talked about how squirrels eat acorns and looked at them through magnifying glasses. The acorn activity is a slight variation of this one, using do-a-dots instead of just torn paper.

Next week is Bb for Bears, Boats and Bees. Join us! To see what other Tot Schoolers did this week, click here!

Friday, September 9, 2011

The Silver Lining

After the few days that we've had around here, I think a version of 'The Glad Game' from Pollyanna is in order.

Bad News: I got a stomach virus on Wednesday that lasted through Thursday night
Silver Lining: Charlie's parent's were visiting and could take care of the boys while I was sick
2nd Silver Lining: Charlie didn't catch it!

Bad News: Eli caught a bit of the virus and threw up all over me and all over himself
Silver Lining: Owen and Garrett haven't thrown up
2nd Silver Lining: Everything in the line of fire of Eli was washable and came out of the laundry no worse for the wear

Bad News: Most of our sippy cups melted in the dishwasher : (
Silver Lining: I've secretly wanted to buy new cups for awhile now and most of the cups at Babies R Us are on sale right now!

Bad News: All three boys are pretty out of sorts and just want to lay around and watch tv
Silver Lining: They are all taking fantastic naps and going to bed earlier than usual

Bad News: I meant to start school back up with Owen and Eli this week... but didn't
Silver Lining: I didn't because Charlie's parents were here for a visit and we loved seeing them!

Bad News: It's been more than two months since I've posted to this blog!?
Silver Lining: We had a summer full of family, vacation and fun, which didn't leave much time for blogging.

Next week is going to be busy, full and fun! My mom's group is kicking off on Monday and my women's bible study on Tuesday. I need to get in the groove with a schedule for teaching the boys while trying to get Garrett used to missing his morning nap Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It's going to be a great week - stop back to see how it goes!