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!

J is for jellybeans

Graphing Jelly Beans. 
Hands down, best activity of the week. I don't generally bribe my kid with candy, but after this, I am rethinking my strategy! :)  She graphed jellybeans with a focus~ our first time we've ever done graphing, and she loved it. She carefully placed the beans on the graph by color, and then we counted them together.

We talked about "most" and "least". It was amazing to hear her form complete thoughts about the graph.  ( I taught third grade for 7 years, and reading a bar graph is HARD!) We removed the jelly beans and colored in the bars of the bar graph using a dry erase marker.  And of course, we munched on jelly beans. It rocked!

Another awesome letter identification game. I provided the JELLYBEAN card, along with lowercase letters and she got to work.

This is still challenging for Kenna- especially when the b is upside down. (looks like a q.)

 This was a simple tray that was very popular with Kenna, probably because she knew I would spend lots and lots of time with her when she pulled it out! In past weeks, we used a worksheet where each word was colored. (The word "red" was red).  That was waaaay too easy for Kenna. So this week,  I handwrote a new worksheet in black ink... and whoa- she still identified some! We said the color- Purple. Pppp-purple starts with ____?  Find the word that starts with P. (there are two- pink and purple). We sounded them out (P-ih and P-uh) and she matched them up. I can tell she is going to get really good at this! These might be her first sight words.  (Well, she can already sight-read her name, plus all of our family names...) You can see that she also thought it was fun to find colored pencils that matched each jellybean color.  :) Later in the week we placed real jelly beans on the color words. That was fun, and tasty!

We did a few more jellybean activities that I didn't get pictures of- we sorted a giant pile of jellybeans by color,  we lined jellybeans up in a long line and then measured our line, we weighed them, and we did ABAB patterns with them. Fun stuff!
*All printables came from www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com

I is for I do it!!

We finally moved onto I week activities. (We got stuck on H, learning about Hippos, then talking about hearts and being happy, and then we got on a huge horse kick.  I love it when we are so engaged!)  I is for Icecream at our house! This activity turned out to be very interesting. I gave Kenna some playdoh to form into the letter I. That didn't even hold her interest long enough to take the playdoh out of the bag. Instead- she went for some buttons.

I sat back and watched as she lined up the buttons and carefully chose which ones she wanted to place on the lowercase i.  She picked out a square button for the "dot" on the i, since it was a square shape.  After she did this, she and I made an uppercase I with buttons.  I hadn't pulled out the butons in a while- I'm so glad she thought of it!

The next day, the playdoh tray enticed her, and she rolled out a lower case i with playdoh, but she used the buttons as dots. It was really fun and not what I had planned at all!

Are you strict about your trays? I am starting to feel torn- I want her to do the work I've laid out, but I would have been so sad to stifle this creativty today.  Ah, Montessori, I always need to read and learn more.

Name Puzzle

Cutting and pasting is one of Kenna's favorite activities. I created this fun game quickly- I wrote her first and last name out, leaving a little space between each letter. She diced it up with her scissors, and I scrambled the letters.

Then one by one, she picked out the letters and glued them down in the correct order.

She purposefully glued the 'e' down wonky- she said it was "silly".  I am really proud of how well she did her first name- we definately need to keep working on her last name! (and also on glue restraint...)

Easy cutting, spelling, gluing, and fun!

Inchworm alphabet matching

I had mentioned last week that the uppercase and lowercase matching cards we've been using are too easy for Kenna. Soooo, today I provided Kenna with the Uppercase mat, but lowercase letters.  WHOA! I rocked her world. She sat, and stared, and puzzled over it. I had set the tiles out in a jar like usual, so when she pulled them out, she found an upside down w and matched it to the M.  then she found the real m and kinda panicked.

To avoid stress, I stepped in and we talked it out together. I set all the letters out again, and we found the easy ones first. (c, o, and i.) Then we studied the others, and she correctly matched them up.

I haven't seen her this focused on an activity in quite a while. I am glad that it was challenging for her! We will definately work on this activity again this week.

Ice Cream Texture Tub

 
This week we are doing the Letter I. We are knee deep in a celebration of all things Ice Cream. (Good timing, since temps have been in the high 90s!)

I put some rice in our texture tub, along with these nifty ice cream erasers I found in the dollar bin at A.C. Moore. I also collected a few "I"s- a magnet, a foam letter, and later a couple Is from some puzzles.

Tools- I provided a funnel, a scoop from a can of infant formula, and a small metal cup. Let the fun begin! (And the hours of sweeping up rice...!)

Ice Cream Taste Test

Grab your spoons- it's time to decide once and for all- What's Your Favorite Ice Cream?

We did our taste test as a family, and it was really fun. First we scooped some tasting servings- chocolate, vanilla , strawberry, and peanut butter. (yup- our favorite babysitter told Kenna she loved peanut butter... so Daddy whipped some up!) The rest of the flavors were as easy as grabbing a pint of Neopolitan (which means it was really hard, because I forgot to buy it TWICE when I was at the grocery store!!) Just an FYI, tiny servings of ice cream melt incredibly fast- next time I would scoop one flavor at a time out of the freezer.

I made up some voting sheets so we could record our preferences. For each flavor, I drew a happy, sad and ehhh face. Then we colored in how we felt about each flavor. LOVE it, HATE it, or...Ehhhh. :)

Then we got to tasting! Look how seriously she is taking this whole process! We were laughing, joking, and generally having a great time. Miraculously, Quinn was sleeping and Little Man was happily eating some Os, so we could just enjoy some special time with Kenna. (She gets far too little special attention these days. Ah, the woes of being the oldest.)

Kenna didn't quite understand the voting process- she LOVED them all, but liked saying "ehhh"! :) She picked Vanilla as her favorite, and then asked for seconds of Peanut Butter.

We had a really fun evening doing this together. (and Daddy and Mommy ate a lot more ice cream once Kenna went to bed!)

H is for Hippo

I am so thrilled to share this picture with you! We have just started working on patterns in earnest, and this was Kenna's first attempt at this game. She matched the pattern with the little hippo cards completely on her own!! WOW! She's 31 months old, and I am certain that all the pre-pattern work we have done helped enormously. We got this matching game from here...

After we matched the hippo cards, I gave her blue and green pop cubes, and asked her to make the same pattern. She got right to work! Here you can see her carefully touching each cube ( I love these, because they have a tactile hole for her to count) and saying "blue, green..."

Her "tower" of blue and green grew and grew! She was talking aloud the entire time, "hmm, which one do I need next..." It was fantastic!

When she used up all the pop cubes, she declared herself, and her tower "AWESOME!"

I agree.

One other activity we did this morning was to spell out HIPPO with our capital letter discs. (Another confessionsofahomeschooler activity.)

This has become waaay too easy for Kenna. She knows all of her letters. I need to make this harder- I think I am going to provide the uppercase printout, and lowercase letter discs. That should be more challenging. We'll find out! She surprises me every day!

G is for Green, goldfish and glitter

So much fun with G this week. I didn't get a lot of pictures, nor do I have a lot of time to write, but here is a bit of what we did!

Glitter Glue Pens!! My mom found these in her closet, left over from when my youngest siblings( now 19 years old!!) were doing school projects. I pulled them out, since G is for GLITTER, and we had a blast. I have to say that they were a little hard for Kenna to squeeze out, but that just made it challenging, and prevented her from emptying an entire tube in 12 seconds. :)

I do have a picture of the final G art somewhere- I'll look!

Well, a week late- but here it is!

Kenna stamped the G stamp all over the Captial G outline, and then cut it out with scissors. I was very very impressed with how she used her left hand to turn the paper as she cut with her right. Her scissor skills are rockin! Here is the craft- Kenna hung it on the wall herself. :)

Simple activity- provide a lowercase g and every green writing utensil I could find. Tada! G is for green!! (as of this posting, Kenna has scribbled on this for a total of 4 seconds. She is simply not into coloring this week- it is all about the glueing, or the "gloofing" as she calls it.

We also did a bunch of the Gumball activities provided by COAH, but I have no pics to share. We've had a whirlwind week, and it seems like we've done our learning in tiny bursts, with a screaming baby and a teething toddler trying to intervene. Homeschooling with little ones is challenging, but this week has been worse than usual. I know that things will be better next week. I need to breathe. I want to be all things for all of my children, and it is so hard. How do you manage to entertain your littlest ones while you do school? I have a bunch of Tot Tray plans for when my 11month old is a bit older, but until then, I am struggling. I thought I would just take the week off, but Kenna BEGGED to do "learning". How can you say no to that? :)

F is for Fish!!

Go Fish!!

I have a confession- I am scared of fish. They freak me out, and I really don't like walking past fish tanks, or going to aquariums, or knowing that some of them can fly. That said, let us soldier on.

HOORAY for FISH week!! :)

:shudder:

The collage pictured above was a lot of work for Kenna. All that cutting of squares, dipping into glue, and sticking onto paper wears a girl out.

*note* I have no idea how this craft is supposed to be set up(Please someone tell me!) so I winged it. I cut out a black fishy frame and supplied tissue paper and watery glue. It was kind of nightmarish. Here are the gory details:

1. tissue paper is thin and once saturated with glue, gets sloppy fast.

2. Painting glue onto tissue paper just slid it around and mucked up the pieces we already laid down.

3. I put down wax paper to keep the mess at bay, and our tissue paper stuck to it.

He's adorable, as faux-stained glass fish go, but this was a very poorly executed craft (moreso than usual.) Someone please tell me how to do this better!

PICTURE

We drew water on the capital F and stamped orange fish with our handmade fish stamps.

(LINK)

Okay- this was the all-day, keep on going craft! First I drew a lower case f, and we painted it blue to represent water. While the paint was drying, we cut out ovals and triangles. (Kenna cut the triangles herself.)

Then we glued the ovals and triangles together to make little fish! Cute! After they dried, Kenna drew eyes and smileys on them. Cuter!

Finally, we glued the goldfish onto the blue water, and then STOOD at the front door waiting for daddy to come home to show it to him. The kid has endurance...

Fish sorting- We went to the grocery store and bought several kinds of goldfish crackers. The minis, the originals, and the rainbows. We sorted the fish by size, then we sorted the rainbow fish by color. I offered enough fish in the activity to make a nice snack when she was done with her work. She really likes Goldfish now!! :)

Other Tot Trays:

Fish 1:1 goldfish game We used number cards and piled goldfish crackers on each card to corrolate ( three goldfish crackers on the number 3). Easy and fun.

Dry Erase games- this week I pulled out the dry erase markers and some clear sheet protectors. I put Kumon mazes in some, F outlines in others, and a couple of other fun worksheets. The novelty of the dry erase markers, and a special "wiping cloth" made all our learning so much fun. She worked diligently on tracing, mazes, and finding F in a word search.

Do-A-Dot F- Kenna did this fast because she wanted to eat her pretzels. Surprisingly, she was pretty accurate for a toddler in a hurry.

E is for Elephant

Wheeeeeeee!!

We had a blast with the letter E this week. Kenna has an "E" in her name, so she knows the lowercase e really well. This made for a fun week. We did ELEPHANTS like crazy and I now know a TON of really cool/useless facts about the largest land animals in the world. :)

Red and black E Collage:

This was easy to set up and she really liked it. She can already identify lower-case e, so we worked more on upper-case E. I cut a bunch of different sized ones out of black construction paper, and left out a glue stick and a red piece of paper. After lunch, she wandered over to the table and got so excited! She spent a lot of time deciding where each E went, and hung it on her magnet wall as soon as she was done. I'm pretty proud that only one E was glued on completely backwards.

E Puzzle: Sorry for the sloppy game crafting- I should have made a nice pretty one for the photo, but honestly, I didn't have time! So here's what I did: I cut some foam to make the pieces of the E. Then I traced them, so it became a matching puzzle. (Make sure to make the top and bottom bars the exact same length, so as not to totally confuse and frustrate your toddler.) Simple, easy and a great "still waking up, don't talk to me, mommy" activity.


We started this project with some fun color mixing. I didn't have any gray paint (and with three kids, we just weren't rushing out to Hobby Lobby this morning...) so I decided to let Kenna mix some blue, green and white to see what we could come up with. We ended up with a really nice khaki green that actually suits our Elephant well! :)

I drew the Elephant with a sharpie and let her go to town with the paint and a nice soft brush. After it dried, I cut it out (with her guidance) and added some eyes. He is so easy and cute. After defending my "tusk" to my husband, I'll let you decide whether you can draw a better one, or just skip it.And yes, his ear is ugly- what can I say? Kenna was hurrying me!!

The Letter D

D is for Dinosaurs!

This week was a lot of fun. Kenna thinks dinosaurs are neat. We liked roaring and stomping around, and pretending we had spikes and horns.

I realized that Kenna is very confused about the difference between D and B, especially when looking at the lowercase letters. (Makes sense... they are the same shape, flipped.) So we spent a whole lot of time trying to convince her "d" said Duh, not Buh. :) I'm still not sure she's convinced, but I'm moving on for my own sanity.

Here are some of the fun things we did with the letter D. We watched our very first episodes of Dinosaur Train this week, and we also attempted to watch Dino Dan, but it didn't hold Kenna's interest. The dinosaur books we checked out from the library were a HUGE hit, and even my husband enjoyed reading them! There are lots and lots of great picture books about dinosaurs- fiction and non-fiction. Check them out at your local library.

Dino Shape ArtLet me first say that I didn't name this guy, Kenna did. "Angar". Hilarious.
Anyhoo, we cut out shapes together, picking different colors, and talking about how many sides each shape has. She helped me decide what shape his body and head should be. (apparently "oval" is her fav. this week!)
Then I gave her the glue and walked away. (screaming baby...) When I came back, this is what I found. Impressive, I think. She's 29 months old.

Dino Shape Art

Lowercase d dinosaur was simple to set up. I drew a d and extended the top and bottom to create a head and tail. Kenna couldn't bear to color it until I added an eye, a mouth and some feet. I let her use colored pencils today, and she reveled in making squiggly lines all down the dino's back. Then she diligently colored in the "hole" in the d with a pen, and finished off with some purple trees for the dino to eat. (she also tried to give him a hat, but it kinda looks like an ear! Love it!) Finally, I provided glue and foam triangles for her to add spikes to the dinosaur. We looked at an illustration in one of our books so that she could see the spikes sticking UP (at first she was gluing them point down, if that makes sense...)


Dinosaur jewels- I printed this off of www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com and we used some green "gems" to cover the blanks. I really like this activity- Kenna, not so much. It was like pulling teeth to accomplish this today. (Forgive my poor printout- my ink was dying and I didn't notice until I had printed everything for the WHOLE week. sigh.) We did some other activities from COAH- dino sequencing and dino clothespin matching. Check em out here!

We had a dino texture tub and a few other fun things, but alas, I didn't get pics!

C is for Circles, Cats and Cupcakes

Here are some of the activities and Tot Trays we did this week. We did a ton of Letter C activities, and read a lot of books about cats (Kenna's favorite C word!) We also spent hours playing with coins, a zippered change purse and a little bank. Doing activities with a toddler while nursing a 2 week old and comforting a teething 9 month old has been interesting, but totally worth it! Kenna is learning and is engaged, and I don't feel so guilty about the half-hour of Little Einsteins that we watch late in the day.

This first activity tray was fun and easy... some circle stickers and the outline of the letter C. Fine motor skills are required to peel each little sticker off the sheet, and Kenna loved the bright colors. She took a LOT of time and care placing each circle... I tried to convince her to only put them inside the C outline, but that was not her plan. :)


Cat Can and Cupcakes- I found this activity (and printables) online during my search for C activities. I used an empty formula can and some black paper for the body. I simply cut out and taped on the cat body parts, and made a little slot in the top of the lid. The cupcakes were included in the printable, along with a sweet poem. We fed the cat, counting as we did. This encouraged her to count up to twenty! Also, the small slot for feeding the cat is good for fine motor and coordination, and of course it was fun to fill and dump the can over and over. (We also ended up feeding the cat coins. I had mixed feelings about that, which is why we pulled out another can and made a money bank. Poor cat is going to have serious tummy troubles...)

I really like that there are several different "varieties" of cupcakes... we used the little pieces to play matching games, Memory, sorting by color, and make patterns- blue, white, blue... Okay, we played with these silly cupcakes A LOT!! :) I am going to look for a small donut image to go with the letter D so we can keep the fun going next week, for sure!


Okay, you are going to have to use your imagination here... I printed off Kenna's name onto cat clipart to make letter cards, but of course as soon as I found the camera and a clear space on the table, the K and the N disappeared. I suspect a toddler is to blame...

Anyhow, I put the cards into name badge protectors, which just happen to be the perfect size to fit into Kenna's Schylling Mailbox mail slot. We play a game where we scramble the letters of her name, and then put them into the mailbox in correct order. Fun!

Uppercase C

C is for Cereal!

And Circles, and cupcakes, and cats, and coins. And cookies and cake, and caterpillars. Okay, we went a little crazy with C words this week. Partly because C is pretty easy (since it looks the same uppercase and lowercase), but mostly because I found lots of fun C activities to do, and couldn't pick a theme.
We started the week by gluing cereal to the letter C outline. Kenna LOVED this, and carefully placed each cheerio into the glue and then onto the paper. For about two minutes. Then it was a glue-dipping, cereal sprinkling free-for-all. Ah, well. Cool thing is that cheerios apparently don't take a lot of glue to stick, and every single one she put on the paper stayed glued down! Please notice that Kenna kept all the cereal inside the outline of the C. (later in the week she had no interest in staying in the lines, so I'm gonna take this one as a victory!)

We had taken a week off of "learning" since baby Quinn was born June 19th. My husband and I are full of joy and happiness to add this little darling to our family.

*I'm in love!*

Kenna was really interested in everything we did this week. She was really cooperative and excited to work. We got a TON done, and then I added a few more activities since she was so receptive. We did many of the games several days in a row, and she mastered all of them.



1:1 correlation- we used mini-clothespins to show "how many" on each cupcake (printed from www.FileFolderGames.com). The 1 cupcake got one clothespin, the 2 cupcake got two clothespins, etc. This is really hard for Kenna, especially because she really loves clipping clothespins to everything! Showing restraint and just clipping one clothespin on a cupcake was really challenging. (We did 1-5 one day, and 6-10 another.)

This game is also good for fine motor skills (all that pinching and squeezing.)

Chocolate Chip Cookie Craft- This was a game I cam up with on the fly. It had a lot of learning components, and you can let your toddler do as many or as little of them as you want.
1. Let toddler trace around a small glass 6 times.
2. Toddler tells you what number to write on each cookie. (we did six cookies)
3. Toddler colors/watercolors the cookies, trying to stay in the lines.
4. Toddler cuts up strips of black paper to make "chocolate chips" (toddler could also rip paper)


5. You and your toddler do 1:1 corrolation with the chocolote chips, allowing her to place the dots of elmer's glue and place the choc. chips. One on the number 1, two on the number 2, etc.
Here's Kenna, cutting just a few more chocolate chips to finish up our cookies.
I thought this was a great activity, and hung it on the wall. While I was switching laundry, Kenna took it down and decided to cut the cookies apart so she could sequence them. WOW!!! Another level to this game!

Now remember, you could have skipped toddler participation all the way to the last step, where you do the actual chocolate chip counting. And you definately don't need to glue the choc. chips down... if you just lay them on the right cookies, you could play this game over and over. Like I said, Kenna was just super-interested in working this week- had she been less cooperative, I would have prepped the whole activity for her. (I'm glad that she was up for more, though- it was so fun!)

*brag alert* I just have to mention how much I loved that Kenna was really careful not to cover up any of the numbers... she kept the choc. chips to the outside. So awesome!

Sequencing- We read Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I found these sized caterpillars to do some sequencing. Amazingly, Kenna noticed that there was one for each person in our family, and found great joy in introducing each family member to their caterpillar counterpart. :)

Lots more C activities coming soon! We had a busy week!