Theme: Pete the Cat

Pete the Cat

O and E: 4.75 years old

June 10-14, 2013

In our book basket this week:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We did a lot of writing this week, which I have realized is Owen's least favorite thing to do. I've had to get really creative about how I present the activity. We played Rainbow Roll while writing words from Pete the Cat (Pete, cat, song, love, good, along, what, all, white, etc). Basically anything that turns writing into a game is a winner. We made a sequence strip of Pete's trip down the street and drew pictures for each of the activity. The paper I found on Pinterest didn't seem to have enough boxes though, so we had to consolidate some of the pages. They both picked a color and wrote a story about how Pete's shoes changed colors and then cut and taped together their own Pete's. I love these! They each wrote two pages to go in our own Pete book - Owen's pages turned Pete's shoes Green (from grass) and Pink, Blue, Purple and Green (from gummi bears). Eli's turned wet (from ocean water) and brown and white (from oreos). We practiced writing color sight words and reading number sight words (the color by number page), and telling the difference between real and nonsense words. So much to do!

MATH:

After reading Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons we did a sorting activity based on shape, color and size of our buttons. The boys made up their own color patterns for Pete's shoes too by following the instructions for the type of pattern (AB, ABC, etc)

SCIENCE:
With all this talk about colors, we had a playdough color mixing afternoon. They loved watching the colors turn into a new color. We've done this before with water, but this seemed a little more magical to them. After that I drew venn diagram type circles on their page and they colored the combinations that they had mixed.

I can see why so many people love Pete the Cat! Next week we're starting a two week theme on Dinosaurs!

Thankful in November: Day 7 to 10

Day 7: Scarecrow dice game (not pictured). 1+1+1=1 has a great Fall Tot Pack with tons of cute scarecrow and leaf activities. We had already done many of her coloring games a couple days ago so we tried out the dice-and-graphing game and they loved it.

Day 8: Paint StripTurkeys (idea from here)! How cute are these little guys?! I was at Walmart and grabbed a selection of paint strips for the boys to choose from, rounded the tops, cut out a beak and a gobble and let them go to work creating their turkey heads. After that part was finished we asked them what they are thankful for and wrote each person/thing on a strip and drew a little picture to go along with it. It's held together with a brad and a bent in half pipecleaner is the legs. These might be my favorite craft so far : )

Day 9: Number puzzles. These are from here, here and here. I cut all the strips out and mixed them up, then the boys had to find their pieces and put them in the right order. I helped with the glue, but the big boys did the rest and I helped Garrett to finish.

Day 10: Filling Thanksgiving bags for families at our church (not pictured). We wrote a little note and filled the bags with all the goodies needed for a yummy Thanksgiving meal!

The fun continues!

Tot School - Nn

Tot School - Letter Nn is for Nest and Numbers

Owen and Eli: 41 months old

We were short on 'feeling good' days this week so we went at a slower pace and I'm still happy with what we accomplished. Our big focus was on numbers and our craft was a paper plate nest with baby birds in it. I found the boys searching through our alphabet magnets finding all the numbers and putting them in order!

The number sheets (from here) were a much bigger hit than I had expected. I let the boys choose the page that they wanted to write and the marker color to use, then we filled in the dots on each pages with sweet tart hearts - my secret weapon! I couldn't believe we got through all ten pages with no tears and full attention the whole time. Score!

Using up all the pages in our Numbers sticker book (from Walmart for $1!)...

Handwriting practice from here...

Stringing Noodles to make Necklaces - food for fine motor skills and fashion : )

Painting baby birds to add to our paper plate nests. We added googly eyes and beaks, then fit them in the pocket of the nest. I got the original idea from here. We read The Best Nest and Are You My Mother? to go along with the nest theme.

We're moving on to Letter O next week. They have been really interested in the Ocean lately, so I'm planning some really fun activities for them. Have any other O ideas to share?

To see what others did this week in Tot School, click here.

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.

Tot School - Nn

Owen & Eli: 32 Months

This week we worked on Nn is for Numbers. Lots of potential, kind of a bust on execution. The boys were pretty good with number recognition but not very good or interested in actually counting. By the end of the week, Eli was counting from 1-10 outloud (but saying 10 instead of 6 every time) and Owen, when asked to count, would say 'no, not count, Eli do it.' I'm not going to push them, they'll get it eventually!

They used Cheerios to cover up the number that I would call out, and then used the same page to match number magnets. They put bean bags on their Sesame Street flashcards and used their number magnets on the number review sheet from Confessions of a Homeschooler. We practiced counting using 1:1 ratio with pompoms on the same sheet, glass beads in an ice cube tray with number stickers, and buttons on pipe cleaners. Hit or miss, but the repetition was helpful, I'm sure.

We're on to Oo next week, but I'm planning on keeping numbers a part of our weekly activities from now on. To see what other Tot Schoolers did this week, check out 1+1+1=1

Tomorrow is the last day to enter my felt food pattern giveaway! You can't win if you don't enter : )