Bunny week/Easter 2014

Bunny week followed Easter Week and ended up with a lot of hopping, counting bunny stuffed animals, and dressing up as bunnies. We did have a pile of bunny-themed trays, but I only managed a picture of a few of them.

 Bunny tongs to tweeze sparkly eggs.

Sorting Bunnies by size.

Nest Week/Spring activities

We started with E for Easter trays, which bled into Nest and Bunny trays, so the whole month was very spring themed! These were our trays dedicated to N for Nest.

 www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com has a great N for Nest week. We used this great letter match- I provided uppercase and lowercase letter tiles- matching capitals is too easy for them, so now they have to do the lowercase, too!

 Pattern block printable which they are loving. Next time I set out this activity, I will cut up the patterns into three strips. It was a little overwhelming with all three on one page. Plus, they kept trying to do work all three patterns at once, which meant blocks sliding around and them feeling frustrated.

Put the eggs in ABC order. We played a game where I laid out a-g and then pulled out two letters from the line, and they had to "fill in the blanks". This was soo good for mastering abc order!

 This sweet tray was for my 5year. She is very into writing prompts, so I found a "bird in nest" type picture from a book I LOVE (Bee &Bird) and she had to write a sentence to tell what is happening in the picture.

 Forming the letter N with playdough.

 Clip cards with eggs!

 I put out this tray again and got a little more interest this week. Someone matched up the 1 and the 2 and left it in a corner... :)

These crazily cute cards are color matching- too easy for my crew, but they LOVED it!

Easter "e" week 2014

We are officially doing FIAR now, so along with our E trays, we also rowed Reshenka's Eggs and did some beautiful artwork and a lapbook. Look for a separate post.

All of these trays were geared for my two and three year olds.


 I made a quick game by taking photos of a bunch of objects that start with E and printing it, and then burying the objects in rice. (I had originally buried them in "easter basket grass" but that was a disastrous mess, and the objects would not really "hide" and that was frustrating for my 2 yr, soooo we swapped it for rice.

 Easter goes nicely with butterflies, and this sweet little matching game was just their speed!

 I FINALLY made the popsicle shapes that I have been wanting to make forever. It took ten minutes once I sat down to do it. sigh.  (also, this is way more advanced than it appears at first- my kids reallllly struggled to make the shapes. After a whole week, they are finally catching on. We have never done an activity like this, and I am so glad I introduced it.)

 E is for elephants- great printable from COAH. My 3 still struggles with this skill, so we have some version of it on our trays every week.

 

 Some sparkly eggs and cute egg tongs made for a simple transferring activity. My 2yr chose this every.single.day.

 This went over much better than I anticipated. I thought that it would be way too difficult- but they totally got the idea of "small, med, large" and ran with it. I need to do more of this type of work!

 Number eggs. Put the correct number of lilies (foam beads) on the egg numbers. I only set out 1-5 eggs, because 1:1 correspondence goes out the window after 5 with my kids. I need to see more mastery of 1-5 before I move them up to bigger numbers.

 Using magnets to fill in E for Elephant.

 Egg tops match to egg bottoms in this fun game. (okay, fine. The kids did NOT think it was fun. The dots were kind of small and there was no control of error, so they just matched up all the halves and called it done.) oops.

 Cutting with easter stickers. Both of them are getting really good with scissors. Quinn likes to cut fast and furious- which makes everyone nervous! Chop, chop, chop!

 Bryce struggled with this puzzle for two days- it was required work and he cried and whined and did it wrong on purpose. Day three- he grabbed it off the shelf, plopped the pieces in place, and screamed, "I did it!" 

This was super-fun. I wrote the letters of their names on eggs- capital letters on one half, and lower case letters on the other half. (colored eggs provided control of error). Then, as a second step, they had to line up the eggs in the order of their name, using the cards I made. they liked this a lot.
E week sort of bled into nest week which bled into bunny week. It was a spring filled month of trays. I will put the rest of the trays in separate posts, but often they were on the shelves together!

St. Patrick's Day 2014

I am sure I have more pictures somewhere, but for now, these are a few of our trays from St. Patrick's Day week!

 Sort green and yellow balls by color, using tongs.

 Cutting up shamrock strips.

Build a shamrock. Use the cards in the upper left to build a shamrock with felt petals. Great color matching!
If I find more pictures, I will add them!

T is for Trucks

Truck week is a must when you have a vehicle addicted 3 year old!

 FOund this set of traffic sign wooden dominoes at a yard sale. I wasn't sure why I was buying them at the time, but I knew I had to have them!

 Using our Alex Button Board to match colors.

 Practicing fine motor skills by peeling stickers.

 Driving wooden cars up and down a number line. We played several games with this. Our favorite was when I named a number and they drove the car to "park" on it.

 The cars helped us count up the number line, and then back down. It helped us to "add one more" as well.

  Truck number clipping cards.  I just wrote numbers 1-5, since I didn't want to frustrate them. (they don't love this activity.)

 How inviting it looked on the tray!

 Alex truck lacing beads.

 Studying animals and bugs that start with T. My 4 year old and I took it a step further and she wrote their names as writing work, and then she matched the cards back up. I also read her all the facts on the back of the cards, which were so interesting!

 I need to do separate posts for my kindergarten work! Here is a 50-80 maze for Kenna, using dry erase. She LOVES this.

 Back to the toddlers. Different colored cars (link coming soon!) and matching colored pattern blocks to the cars.

Using power magnets in a truck color sort. I had a little pack of these truck silhouettes, and we used them for everything this week! We made shadow puppets by gluing them to popsicle sticks! We wrote out our names, one letter per truck, and lined them up.  We did relief painting where we stamped all over them and then peeled them up!

We had a fun time with these trays! These were for my 2 and 3 year old. My oldest enjoyed trying them once, but even she acknowledged that they were too easy for her. Instead, she decided to "teach" her brother his colors, which was precious to watch, and annoyed him to no end.

Citi Blocks are awesome!

So this isn't a real post. But we LOVE CitiBlocks (Kapla also makes them).
Happy New Year!

Backyard Renovations

 Mud Kitchen

 Hill with Slide built into the back of it!

 Arbor for squash and bird house gourds, with room for children to play in, and tunnel through.

 Moveable balance beams

 Lots of stumps! They are placed for climbing, jumping, using as tables and chairs, or obstacles.

 Huge, ten foot across sand pit!! Dug out the grass, planted logs (reclaimed from a neighbor's fallen tree) and filled with a ton (literally) of sand!

 Another view of the mud kitchen, water combo, after a morning of active play.

This summer was the year of the backyard. We had a blank canvas to work with, and I knew I wanted it to encourage play and be able to grow with the children. Kids are 2, 2 and 4 this summer.