Tuesday, November 20, 2012

A Halloween wrap-up









Homemade pumpkin pie scented play dough!  I set it out with fall themed cookie cutters (leaves, acorns, pumpkins).  C loved rolling the dough out and cutting all the shapes.  It smells good too!


Monday, November 19, 2012

Thankful, Thanksgiving

Today when N went down for a nap, I said, "ok, C, let's sit at the kitchen and do some school activities together!" and he grumped big time about it- "But wait!  I'm hungry!  I want a snack!  I want to play!".  But, we sat down and started on our new program "All About Learning".  It's awesome!  We are doing the pre-reading program.  It has lesson plans all laid out for you, which makes it so easy for me (then I supplement on my own with things I find and make from the internet).  Everyday we point to the letter we are focusing on for the day on a big poster.  Then we read a poem from a book that has a lot of words with our letter.  Today it was about bears and bumble bees wearing bibs and eating berries.  We point to all the B's that we find.  Then we color our letter sheet for the day and practice writing the letter.  We also choose from a list of ways to creatively work with the letter- tactile things like making the letter shape out of play dough or popsicle sticks or pipe cleaners, and also tracing it in a salt box.  Then we do a learning activity from the book.  The first two days were rhyming.  Rhyming helps him to learn to listen for all the sounds in words.  C rocked it out!

We did some do-a-dot marker sheets for fall.

We also did some Thanksgiving patterns.

C loves to cut and paste, so he cut and pasted a Bible verse about being thankful.  Then he signed his name!  We talked about what it means to be thankful for everything we have, and how we are to always thank God for everything.

Then, when we were all done, "Mr. Grump About School" said "Mommy, can I please play that story game!"  (the Lauri Toys Sequencing Kit- in which he lays out picture tiles in order, for example- 4 tiles of a boy making lemonade from start to finish).  Ha ha!  He asked to play a learning game, after school was over!

So, sometimes they grump, but as long as you get them going and moving through it, they usually have fun, and they learn!  I love to see him progressing.

It's a fun week of singing Thanksgiving songs and talking about the Thanksgiving story.  Now we're ready to eat some yummy food!!


Sunday, November 11, 2012

Wooden pattern blocks

A cool educational toy!  Wooden pattern blocks (mine is from Learning Resources).  I printed off free shapes and patterns for my son to use.  It's a play manipulative that can teach patterns, but it also is just a cool toy for them to sit down and use some focus, concentration and attention to detail.




Thursday, November 1, 2012

Halloween theme and the letter E!

We read the book Pumpkin Cat, which talks about a cat who wants to grow a pumpkin but doesn't know how, and his friend the mouse teaches him, but it requires a lot of patience.  It grows from a seed to a sprout, plant, yellow flower, green pumpkin, then orange pumpkin.  It's fun to learn these simple things in life, how fruits and vegetables grow.  I found pumpkin life cycle sequence cards, and C cut all of them out and pasted them onto a paper in an effort to learn to re-tell the story we read and the sequence of what we learned.







 I also made a Halloween sensory bin!  Dried beans this time with halloween things added to it.  Let the scooping and pouring begin!



Here are a few other fall themed learning things I printed off the internet to do.  I like to put these things on trays I bought from Oriental Trading Co.  Putting the activities on trays helps give it an organizational feeling for both of us.  C knows that what is on the tray are activities for him to do that day.  It kind of sets expectations, like to say, here's your trays of things to do today!  I got the tray idea from:  http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/

This is a scarecrow picture with numbers 1-10 on the side, I cut them into strips and C put the "puzzle" back together.


Pumpkin pattern cards:



And here's an example of our week of "the letter E".  He can obviously recognize all the letters of the ABC's, but using each letter as the center of a theme each week is fun, then we go more in depth with things using that letter.  I blotted out their names next to the airplane and apple on our board, but C practices spelling their names everyday.  I like putting up positive affirmations (example: "I can do good deeds, I can be nice to people, I can help others, I can use good manners, I can try to be more like Jesus").  I change this board weekly.  I get most of my printables from :
http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/
http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/


These are neat worksheets from the websites I just addressed above.  On the left is a "letter hunt" in which C circles all the E's that he finds in the sentences.  Also a "sight word search" in which he circled all the words "is" placed among other words (a good skill for pre-reading).  We also print out pictures of things that start with the letter E and talk about the phonics, sound it makes.  And finally a print out of simple sentences that use the site word of the week (this on was "is") and he reads it by himself (mostly because he can understand by the pictures, but I point to each word to let him know that what he is saying, based on the picture, is actually printed words on the paper).


And an easy one, he lined up these elephants from small to large!