I Dream of an Elephant...

E is for Elephant

Have I mentioned that we go to the Library on Thursdays to pick up thematic books for the following week? Well, we do. We have a great, small-town library, and always find cute books and enjoy reading them all week long.

This week, for the letter E, I focused on fiction and non-fiction books about Elephants. The fiction books were cute, but by far our favorite was I Dream of an Elephant by Ami Rubinger. The subdued pastels are so beautiful, it made me want to frame these images and design a nursery around them! Kenna and I read this book about ten thousand times this week. Each page has a rhyme for a color, so it was the perfectchance for me to introduce kenna to rhyming. bShs still a little young, but this book was a nice and simple anf the rhymws were based on color words, with visual clues. awesome!

The non-fiction books we checked out were mostly used to look at pictures, since a lot of the info was way over kenna's head. It didn't stop my husband and I from learning a ton, though. Here's a few facts you should definately add to your list of "useless facts about elephants".

1. elephants walk on their tippy-toes.

2. Elephant skulls, with a large central "nose" hole, probably started the myths about Cyclops.

3. Elephants can only digest half of what they eat, so they eat ginormous quantities of food each year.

4.And the saddest fact I learned- elephants have no known predators except humans, and yet all species of elephants are endangered.

Kenna and I focused on elephant body parts- trunk, tusk, and ears, and them we talked about how their skin feels (texture), and what they might use their trunk for. She especially liked the images of elephants squirting themselves with water, and of the babies holding their mommy's tail with their trunks.

** my computer won't let me hyperlink at the moment. Elephant skull pic-

source is http://listoffigures.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/reconstruction-of-mythical-creatures/

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!

The Letter B

B is for butterflies and beans! This week is our second week of summer, and we're working our way through the alphabet. I wanted to share some of the highlights of our crafts and activities.

Toddler learning is so much fun! Our capital letter B Collage craft was a hit! First we stamped the letter B all over the place on the outline of a B that I drew, and then we got to work gluing.

I gave Kenna a foam brush and some watery glue and let her get to work. The end result was a bit messier than I anticipated, since the ink from the stamp pad sort of ran all over the place, and the dye from the butterflies we made ran everywhere, and the beans were too small for her to "paint" with glue so she ended up painting her entire hand. Lots of mommy lessons learned today. :) Also, about half-way through she decided "sprinkling" (her word) the beans over the paper was a good idea, but there was no glue on the paper so they wouldn't stick... seriously infuriating my toddler.

Beading and Bracelets!

Amusingly, at 2 years old my child LOVES to string bracelets! We use pipe cleaners and little pony beads. We actually did blue and brown beads today on a blue pipe cleaner, with the color words spelled out on cards for her to look at. (That pic was blurry, so use your imagination!)

Buttons!

Buttons start with B! I gave Kenna buttons to sort by shape(2 of each shape). She used a mini-muffin tin to do her sorting. She loves to sort, she loves to pile up her I buttons, and she loves to dump them back out. I presented this activity on the floor on a small hand towel, to keep her in a defined area. I also chose to only provide a few buttons, as opposed to our whole stash. Can you guess what may or may not have happened last time we tried this? LOL!

A is for Alligator

So we've been focusing on apples and the letter Aa this week, but today we went wild and pulled out some Alligator activities! :) In our Kumon Let's Fold book, I found an alligator.That was super-fun. I love watching her little fingers crease the folds!

Our alligator turned into a frog when we folded it up. Magic!

We made alligator "Mail" and used ASL to sign alligator. We also sang Five Little Monkeys and SNAPPED those monkeys off the tree! We crawled on the ground like an alligator, and then we googled swamp to see where alligators live. While we were on the computer, we did the Letter A activities on www.StarFall.com.

After nap, we worked on the rest of our Kumon books.
We worked on Let's Color (not an alligator page, since we are going in order in that book).

Then we did Let's Cut- cut out a spider web- (Kenna's choice)

We also started Let's Trace- It was Animals at the zoo (hooray for letter A) but she got angry because her green crayon broke so we put it away for another day. Oh, and we would have done
Let's Sticker and Paste but we skipped it because our glue was in "time out" from some misuse earlier...

While I was making lunch, Kenna worked on this Alligator activity. All you need is this printout from www.homeschoolcreations.com (love this site! I borrow/ steal ideas from it all the time.) and some manipulatives. (Pom poms with magnets, glass floral marbles, or Do-A-Dot Markers are our go-to manipulatives.) We could have saved apple seeds for this activity, or cut some out of black foam. I gave her green floral marbles. I only provide enough manipulatives to exactly cover the missing spots, or it gets too overwhelming for my toddler. Sometimes I put them in a little bowl. Sometimes I give her tongs.

I don't have the time/money to laminate most of our activities, so I just put the worksheets in a sheet protector and lay it on a cookie sheet (great when you are need to contain rolling objects, or when you need magnets to stick).


Thursday is usually our Library Day, so we read all of our current books one last time (all focused on apples and gardening this week) and then get books for next week. This serves to keep our book selection fresh, and to allow me to start pre-teaching the next week's theme/letter over the weekend. At 2 years old, we only check out 5 books a week. That gives us lots of time to read each one multiple times. We have gabillions of books here at the house for free reading, so the books we get from the library are always theme based. (unless kenna grips a book tightly and declares "my love it!". :) Today we'll probably also find an Alligator book or two to reinforce our learning.

*I'd love to go to the library on Fridays, but that just doesn't work with our schedule, so Thursday it is!

Mail Time!

**MAIL**

Kenna and I have been making "mail" for over a year. It started when I wanted to make some simple flashcards to practice signing. I wrote a word on an index card and drew a small illustration. Then I let her color the card, and we put it in her wallet-an old coupon organizer from the dollar store.
Even at 14 months old, Kenna loved looking at her cards, asking what was on them, and pretending to read them. Then she began requesting words on her own, and I would make new cards all the time for her. We added all the names of the people in our family.

We made cards for each month of the year.

In January we started making letter and number cards. As we added to our sign language vocabulary, I would make a card with the new words so we could practice them.



We love mail! We stack our mail, we paint our mail, we sort it, we recolor it, we take it in and out of our wallet, and we occasionally use them as flashcards! Kenna's newest thing is to quiz me about what the word is, and then tell me "good girl". :)