Tot School

Kayleigh is 32 months

Literacy Activities

We read lots of books about the fall and focused on the letter G this week.

We finally got around to completing our F page for our ABC book.  Kayleigh painted the F with a feather and then we glued a feather on.   She wasn't much interested in doing the craft.  She does spend a lot of time looking at the book in her "spare time."   She loves it!

Kayleigh did her first poke page, from COAH.  She loved it!  

We'll be doing more of these.

G is for Gumball letter sort, also from COAH.  She had no problem

sorting "mommy" and "baby" Ggs.  She also used a pointer to teach her critters about Gg.

So cute!

Of course we had to do Gumball Spelling, from COAH.

Kayleigh always likes those.

Math Activities

We played the Roll-A-Tree Game from 2 Teaching Mommies.



I got this adorable Fall Pattern and Sequencing Card set.  It came with these fall animal counters
that Kayleigh just loves.  We did a couple of different acctivities with them.  We used some of the cards that came with the set.  Kayleigh hasn't totally grasped the concept of patterns yet but she showing progress.  If you can get her to say the pattern with you then she can usually tell you what comes next.

I also made a Fall Grid Game, modeled after the ones over at PreKinders.  You just roll a die and then cover the grid with the appropriate number of markers.  Kayleigh surprised me by recognizing some of the numbers on her own.

Of course her favorite activity was just to play pretend with the critters. LOL



The favorite of the week was Candy Corn Math.  I made four activities that we played using Autumn Candy Mix.  Sorting, graphing (for my older daughter), patterns, and a grid game.  Both girls loved it.  Especially eating some of the game pieces.

Download the printables here.

We did another visual discrimination game, also from PreKinders.  

 Motor Skills

I was excited to find my missing Music and Movement in the Classroom  cd.  I used to use it all the time as a classroom teacher and when I did a brief stint as a dance teacher.  Kayleigh had a blast dancing to "Body Rock."  The top photo is her signature move. LOL

We used halloween colored pipe cleaners for a small spaces activity.
Kayleigh said it was lemonade. LOL

She did some tonging with halloween colored pom poms and our pumpkin ice tray.

She asked to do "work" like Mackenzie so I finally broke out the Kumon Let's Color!  book
I'd bought forever ago.  I wasn't too sure how she'd do, as it involves following directions,
but she surprised me.  She even did two pages.

The girls did autumn leaf prints using toilet paper tubes that were bent into a leaf shape.  Simple and fun!   And the paintings came out adorable.  I got the idea from The Frugal Family Fun blog.

Learning Toys and other fun Stuff

We got a new toy, Alex Little Hands Button Art.  It first came across our radar when we read about it over at Caeden's Corner.  Kayleigh loves to play with it.  She just doesn't like to match the colors. LOL

Our Melissa and Doug Chalk Board made an appearance this week.

And of course, the Magneatos  came out.  She made a crown, a baby rattle, and discovered that they stick to the chalkboard.

And what could be more fun than kicking down the Melissa and Doug Nesting Blocks?

And out came this month's sensory bin.  She loves the stretchy
skeletons, which she calls scarecrows.

Check out what other tots are up to by clicking the Tot School button at the top of the page.

Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where We Bawled Like Babies

It was an interesting week here at the Beach.  I forgot to schedule science, so we didn’t do it.  We watched Beauty and the Beast at a local theater.  It was hand-down the best play they’ve ever put on.  And our history this week had us crying like babies.  LOL

We are currently studying the Civil War and reading Lincoln: A Photobiography .  (Which is absolutely FABULOUS by the way.  One of my favorite Sonlight picks ever.) 

We were reading about Lincoln’s first visit to the war-torn South after Lee’s surrender.  He was visiting the Confederacy’s capital with his son, Tad.    When they stepped off the ship the people in the streets, liberated slaves and black Union troops,  just flocked around him, filled with joy.  They were cheering, laughing, trying to shake his hand.  I was having a hard time getting though the paragraph because I was so choked up.  I, who knew what his future was,  was happy that he got to really see how he made a profound difference.

I stopped reading to see what Mackenzie thought and she said, “Wow!  He really did something amazing for those people Mommy!  Just one guy who wouldn’t give up.”   And then she burst into tears. 

And that, my friends, was all she wrote.   Can you say hysterical sobbing?

We lost it again, 3 paragraphs later, when we learned the total death toll.  Which was more than all other U.S. wars combined.  That’s just sad.

Mackenzie finished her Life of a Soldier pocket in Civil War History Pockets.   This one was jam-packed.  She learned about the MANY different styles of uniforms, what they ate, different jobs, what they slept in, the importance of letters and what they used to write them.  She was a busy girl.

She has been working on a special missions project started by Sonlight and Mission India, called My Passport to India.  It’s a fabulously easy way to get your child more “mission-minded”  and have them participate in The Great Commission.

The goal is to collect loose change that will be used to send Indian children to Bible Clubs, thus using them to touch their families lives for Christ.

Sonlight sends you a free Welcome Kit that includes a “passport” for each child and a collection bank.  For every dollar raised, Sonlight will match it, up to $167,000.

Twice a week we watch a video of  happenings in India and there is a ton of supplemental material available as well.  And you don’t have to be a Sonlight-user to participate.

Mackenzie looks forward to the videos every week and I can see how they are impacting her spiritually through her prayer-life.  They both enjoy digging through the couch cushions for loose change to put in the box.  Mackenzie has even donated quite a bit of her own money for the cause and has been doing extra chores to earn more.

I haven’t talked about math in a while.  It’s just math.  She tends to do really well despite her negative “I can’t do it” attitude before each new lesson.  This week she learned to find the area of a triangle and she was excited to learn her first math formula.  She felt cool.

For fun, we did some “Candy Corn Math”.  It was mainly for the toddler but I knew Mackenzie wouldn’t want to be left out so I developed a graphing activity for her.  So go buy a bag of Autumn Mix candy and download the printables and have some fun with your crew.

 

 

We’re just about finished with our artist study on Mary Cassatt.  Just one more week left.  Then we’ll be moving on to a composer study on Tchaikovsky.  Just in time for our yearly stint to see the Moscow Ballet perform The Great Russian Nutcracker.  (Those tickets are burning a hole in my purse.  I want to go NOW! lol)

This week for art she made Curved-Line Bookmarks.  She had to cut strips of construction paper in a curve and layer the strips to create a bookmark.   That was a good assignment because homeschoolers can never have too many bookmarks. =o)

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Be sure to visit the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and see what everyone else has been up too. 

Fall Printables

Kayleigh has been enjoying our fall theme and I thought I'd share a couple of her favorite activities a little early this week. In case your tot might like to use them too.

First is a series of printable games involving Kayleigh's favorite veggie, candy corn. Grab a bag of the Autumn candy mix and have at it. We've got patterning, graphing, sorting, and a grid game. Lots of fun, as long as you can keep the kiddies from eating the pieces before they play.

Next up is a fall grid game. All you need is to print the grid (click the picture), a die, and some markers.

 

Enjoy!

Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months old

Since it’s officially fall it was time to starting working in some of those favorite fall themes. So we did apples this week. We also took a break from introducing a new letter.

Literacy Activities

She did these cute little apple puzzles from 2 Teaching Mommies apple unit. We only did letters A-F, as those are the letters we’ve covered so far.

She did really well considering she hadn’t really worked with lowercase letters much. ( My only goal with any letter activities at this point is exposure to the uppercase.) But I told her what the lowercase letter was and she matched it to it’s “mommy” and she got them all correct. That was a nice surprise!

She made this apple collage, also from 2 Teaching Mommies. There was a lot of gluing involved so she was THRILLED!

She really likes these bottle cap 1:1 correspondance activities from COAH, so we did the one from her Apple unit.

As you might of guessed, we read a lot of apple books. Her favorite was Apple-Picking Day (Clifford's Puppy Days) so we read that one a few times. Not enough for me to want to hide it though. LOL

Math & Science Activities

I got out Hi Ho Cherry-Ofor the first time. I thought that’d I’d be able to convince her they were apples but she didn’t even give me a chance. “Oooo cherries!” Oh well!

She liked it a lot. Just not as a counting game. We each took one spin and after that she just wanted me to put all the apples on the trees so she could knock them off. When she tried to sneek it into the living room, I had to put it away. We’d never see those cherries again. LOL

We played an Apple Roll & Count game from 2 Teaching Mommies. She did not want to color the apples after she rolled so we switched to putting on dot stickers instead. She was happy with that.

Our FOAM DICE had dots on them so I covered one of them with numbers so we could work on recognition too.

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We played with real apples. This was Kayleigh’s favorite activity of the week. She loved them so much she was willing to count them, sort them, line them up. She drew the line at making a pattern with them though. LOL

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She did a great job with this apple shape puzzle from COAH.

We worked on visual discrimination with these same/different apple cards from Prekinders. I didn’t demonstrate and just gave her verbal instruction and she did it quickly and correctly. On the ONE card that she was willing to do. LOL I think I’m going to leave this activity out for next week and see if I can’t get her to do some of the more difficult cards that she ignored. It’s a good skill to work on.

We talked about the parts of an apple using this adorable felt activity from 2 Teaching Mommies.

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Life Skills and

Other Fun Stuff

She practiced cutting with this cut and paste activity from COAH. I cut the apple pictures into strips and she just had to cut between each apple. Scissors and glue…what more could she ask for?

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We have a new sensory bin for the month of October. Black beans, mini-pumpkin erasers, stretchy skeletons, mini-pumpkins, rubber bats, and halloween buckets. Both girls love it!

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We did a little cooking this week and made Cutie Pies from My Montessori Journey. They’re just cute, little apple pies. Kayleigh helped with the cutting, the mixing, and the seasoning. Mackenzie did that plus handled the crust.

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Be sure to click the Tot School button at the top of the page to see what other tots have been up to this week.