First S'mores Experience!

Th

is summer, we fired up the fire pit and roasted marshmallows together. What a fun and special experience.

Long time, no blog! Three kids and an eco-friendly baby store will really bog a mama down. Despite lack of posting, we have still been doing school. Quinn turned two in June and now has her own learning trays each week, which she LOVES.

I decided to get back into blogging because people are always asking how I organize and present materials, which I love to share about but is hard to explain without pictures. Also, I am back because it kind of holds me accountable for staying on track and making sure my trays are awesome! :) We have officially started our school year and it is going to be a great one!

Here is some of what we are doing for D is for Dinos week. :) 

**There is much more on our trays this week, but I am just getting back into the groove, and I am easing into it. Plus, technology has changed soo much since I stopped blogging- I have a camera phone that can upload instant pics, and an iPad to take pictures and make movies. Whew, media overload!

 

 Simple dino flashcards I found at target dollar spot, along with a magnifying glass for closer inspection. There are facts on the back, but none of my three care much about that yet.

 4 year old- dino dig. Dig up bones and decide whether the word is a real word or a nonsense word. Found this great printable on TPT and I love it!

 Kenna got into this tray during nap and decided to fill in her own blanks. She clearly dug up words and tried to sort them. I am really proud of her! Real side- Fix, pot, jet and has are all real words! (she told me SEM was "seem" - so it makes sense she wrote it on that side.) Nonsense side- reg, pid, zem, yus, and ??not sure what she wrote!

 Dino two-part puzzles for the 2 year olds.

 Match dinos to our number line. (so really a just a number match, but it is tricky because the fonts are different so the1, 4, and the 9 are written differently.

 Sorting Big D and Little D (www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com)

My trio, all grown up and singing their days of the week. More to come soon, I hope!

Duck Wash

As part of our D unit, we set up a duck "car wash" outside in the backyard. Using shaving cream to get our ducks "dirty", we then ran them down the gutter into the water to be scrubbed with sponges and dried with towels. My kids LOVED this and happily played for over an hour.

D is for DINOS 2013

I think I've done a Dino post before, but this is a new year, with 2, 3 and 4 year old all LOVING dinosaurs! This was a short unit because we were super-busy this month, but our activities were very fun.

All of these items are hidden in the texture tub. Then Kenna has to find them and match them back to their word. For the babies, I simply printed this photo and they had to match the item to it's picture. 

Examining Dino cards with a magnifying glass. This turned out to be a HUGE hit this week. Those Dollar Tree flashcards were in use every.single.day!

Find real and "nonsense" words.

Copy them onto this chart. Kenna did this and got every single one right. I am pleased with her attempts to form letters on those tiny lines- usually her writing is neater but MUCH bigger.

Dino two part puzzle cards. They were grayscale, so that made it a challenge for everyone.

Power Magnets with our same sheet from last year, still printed badly, and still usable! Maybe I will remake it next year...but probably not.

Oh, now this was fun. I found a template for cardboard animals/planes etc, and we made a dino for our peg people to ride on!

Excellent fine motor, counting, adding/subtracting work, and just plain ole fun.

Place dinos in order on the number line.

Capital and lowercase D sort.

My sweet Trio, singing our morning songs. Three reasons I stay up late and get up early. :)

St. Patrick's Day Part 2 2012

Here are a few of the fun activities we did to go along with our St. Patrick's Day theme.

 I filled four green plastic eggs with these cool submersible LED lights. (Michaels for $7). 

 I turned off the lights and tossed them in the tub with the three amigos. :) They had so much fun!

 These egg-filled lights kept them busy for over an hour! They soon learned they could open the eggs and play with the lights, but they were so bright, I couldn't get a picture!

:Sensory:
 Rainbow Rice Texture tub. Contents- rice as a base. Gold coins, green eggs filled with LED lights, a rainbow wood piece, green shamrocks, and some scoops. I kept it simple at first, and we ended up making a boat for Kenna's Peg Einsteins to float around in.

 (cardboard boat with peg people is in Kenna's hand.) Quinn LOVED the texture of the rice.

 She's almost 9 months. She loved watching the rice run through her fingers. She loved squishing it around in the bin. She was completely enamored by this bin!  She also loved the glowing eggs.  She carried one around with her all morning!

 :Color Mixing:
The setup- coffee filters, eye droppers, and four colors of food coloring. I used about 5 drops of color, and then filled the rest of the way with water. This made a nice, watery color that ran beautifully on the cofee filter.

I also provided a misting bottle, which Kenna enjoyed immensely, to the point of soaking her filters into oblivion. Happiness is a squirty bottle!

 This was a different technique we tried- turn the filter over and let the color run down. It would have been pretty, but by this point, Kenna had mixed our colors to a murky brown. :)

 My attempt at a rainbow.

 Drying. We are a paperless household, so I used a dishrag to dry the filters- needless to say, some bleach will be in order if you do this to your towels.

 My rainbow shamrock!

They came out so pretty!! We are going to hang them in the window for the sunlight to stream through.

 :Cooking:
For our Social Studies connection, we have been studying Ireland. Kenna can now find Ireland on the map, identifies it as an island, and knows the colors of the flag! We baked some sugar cookies and used some almond glaze (Grammie's secret recipes) to decorate the flags.

 They really came out great, and tasty too! We also tried to make some freehand cookies in the shape of Ireland, but I'll spare you the gory result. :)

Lastly, we made some GREEN popcorn! (don't adjust your screen... I can't find the pic of our green popcorn, so I'll reshare our pic of pink popcorn from Valentine's day. LOL)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

St. Patrick's Day

Brace yourself for Rainbows! And GREEN!  And fun! This poor post has been in draft for two weeks, while my family has been visiting.  I figured I'd better post it before March ends!

Kumon coloring page.  ROY.G.BIV, baby! And I have to say that explaining the difference between indigo and violet kind of tried Kenna's patience today. Especially since both are purple. :)

:Transferring:
Kenna is 37 mos.

Use tongs to move pom poms to the small sectioned tray.

:Toddler Transferring:

Little Man is 18 mos.

I set up larger pom poms and a mini-muffin pan (which he walked away with the moment I picked up the camera!) so that he can do the same work as Kenna. She is so excited that he is doing trays now, she can't stand it!

:Matching:

Felt Clover Puzzle.  (not my idea, sadly. It's so cute! **Need link**) I cut hearts out of felt to mimic the leaves of clovers.  I made 6 flashcards by taking pictures of different color combinations. Kenna has to build the clovers to match. She is seriously into anything puzzle right now, so I know she is going to love this.  I didn't get pics of the whole stack of cards, but here is one card example. She looks at the picture and recreates it with her felt pieces. I glued down the stem on the felt "paper" so she has a starting point.

:Science- Plants:

 Hunting for four leaf clovers! We took our magnifying glass and headed to the front yard, where there are patches of clover everywhere! We brought some inside to study. The laminated clover is an actual four leaf clover I found in 1997 on the lawn of my college Freshman dorm. 

 It has been pressed in a dictionary for years, and I got it out this week and laminated it, so that Kenna can study it and check it out without destroying it.

On the hunt!

 :Small Spaces:

Put the Leprechaun gold in the pot! I saw this great idea **needs link** to take a mason jar and replace the metal inset lid with cardboard. I drew a cute pot and cut a slit in the cardboard to fit the coins. I deliberately made the coin slot as small as possible- I wanted Kenna to have to really work at this one.

 :Fingerprint Clovers:

Use your fingers or the Q tips to make clovers. Use the green marker to add stems.  If Kenna allows, we may circle sets of two, since we are working on counting by two's.  (She's a little touchy about her artwork at the moment. If she draws even one line on a paper, I am not allowed anywhere near it.)

More fun to come! Gotta get some pictures off my camera!!