Week One: Tot School

Letter of the Week: Aa

Shape of the Week: Oval

Color of the Week: Purple

Number of the Week: 1 

 Work Baskets for Week One: 

#1: Some Aa prewriting with dry erase markers. 

They love writing with these markers!

Marin is very proud of her work!

Hollis has to do it too! She LOVES markers!

 #2: Letter Aa I Spy Game 

I gathered a few items that begin with the letter Aa and photographed them. Marin first had to find all the letters in the picture. Then we sounded out each of the pictures saying the "a" sound with each one. Then she dumped out the objects and matched them up like a puzzle. 

She loved this one. Did it every single day. 

Hollis liked dumping everything out of the container :o). But she did also like pointing to the pictures I named. Good vocabulary for her! 

#3: Ten Apples Up on Top LEGOS! 

Big hit! I taped some small apples on their legos and they added them to their lego man's head. 

They both loved this one. Great counting practice and fine motor skills. 

 Showing off her ten apples!

 One afternoon I walked into the playroom and found Hollis sitting up at the table with her little lego work basket. So sweet. She really liked this basket!

#4: Animal puzzles/Animal lacing cards

 This basket was the least favorite of both girls. The lacing cards were just a little too hard for her. I may try letting her use pipe cleaners the next time. Hollis liked her puzzle but she wanted to do the other work baskets instead. But she would get real proud of herself for saying the animals or finding the animals. 

Activities for Week One:

They drew the shape and color of the week in their "handy dandy" notebook. Marin loves Blue's Clues so it was fun for her to have her own notebook. 

We painted apple prints on our Aa. 

 Marin did the capital A and Hollis did the lowercase a.

 Foam letter sort: A little water and these Dollar Tree foam letters stick. Marin loved it. Again, she is proud of her work. 

 And of course, Hollis had to have a turn. 

 Class clown. 

We read Ten Apples Up on Top. Marin loves apples so she thought it was pretty fun to count the apples. Her attention span for longer stories is...uh...not so great. But she did love this one. 

 Then the cut and glued apples on top of their heads! 

Marin loved cutting and I need to be sure and do this with her more often. 

 

And last we made an Easy Reader Animal Book. 

 Hard working student....

Our Tot School

I started doing a little Tot School with Marin last August. When all my teacher friends were going back to school and setting up classrooms, my teacher genes got motivated to set up a space for our girls as well. So this week we have started our 2nd year of Tot School here at Brednich Academy. :o) I steal all of my ideas from all the creative, smart mommas out there in cyber world. There are about a billion blogs with great curriculums and if you add Pinterest as a resource, I have more than enough ideas! But some of the online curriculums I refer to often are....

• Last year, I used Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler  quite a bit. We use bits and pieces of it now, but I do get quite a bit of ideas from her blog. 

• The Reading Mama also has a great Pre-K curriculum called Reading the Alphabet.  It's free and covers all the letters. She has lots of different activities for each letter. 

• And the Letter of the Week Preparatory Curriculum also has some great ideas and a great curriculum to follow. 

But my favorite place for ideas is Pinterest. I have a Letter of the Week board and a Tot School board. There are tons of ideas out there and I steal all of them! 

This year for our Tot School we will have a letter of the week, a number of the week, a shape of the week, and color of the week. Plus I have some fun themes that I think the girls will enjoy planned throughout the year. First up, BUTTERFLIES. Our caterpillars are on the way and we will get to watch every phase of its cycle. I have already started a butterfly board for ideas! Other themes we will explore are....

All About Me/Five Senses

Fall

Where the Wild Things Are/Monsters

Pumpkins

Halloween

Farm

Thanksgiving/Manners

Christmas

Animal Homes

Snow

Dental Health

Community Helpers

Transportation

Zoo 

Garden

Camping

The Three Bears

The Three Little Pigs

And a little tour of our playroom "school room"....

Here are our "work baskets". Some use Tot Trays but I don't have space for trays.
So I hung a pegboard we already have and hung baskets from them. Each basket will hold an activity for each or both girls that relate to the letter or theme. More on those later....

Our pocket chart and number line.
The pocket chart just holds any new words I want to introduce.
 (BTW, Marin saw a white van today and yelled "ambulance". Ha! Close....) It's
great language practice for Hollis as well.
The number line we use to count out to the number of the week. 

Our learning board...
I just changed this up a bit because my sweet neighbor friend gave me a set of color posters.
I love the big colors and now Marin can practice spelling the words. But the letter cards are tactile cards that I found at the Dollar Tree. Great for Hollis especially to touch the letters. And then theAlphabet Movement Cards (make circles with your Ankle), I found here. Shape and Number cards are just flashcards from the dollar tree. Although, the number will change soon because I found a really great number anchor chart idea! Can't wait to do it with the girls! 

Our weather chart and song board.
Marin LOVES to do the weather! We just use sunny and rainy cards now (since that's pretty much
all the weather we have here in Houston) but will add more later.

Our room is far from finished (or organized) but for now here is our back wall.

Our yard sale kitchen find and artwork gallery.
Our artwork is a little bare because I just weeded out for new projects coming. :o)
The "Y" in PLAY keeps falling down. Hollis LOVES to help hang it back up though.
Sorry for the blurred picture.

Our tangram puzzles and peg boards....

Magnet board (Hollis favorite!!) puzzles, legos, and books....

Games, all our cars, trains, play doh, and art supplies (up high out of little hands reach...).

I'm sure things will change up as we go along but for now here is the plan and our little space to play. 

Beach

We did some beach-y activities to get ready for our trip to the beach. (We just returned...it was a fabulous trip!) 

She put together beach popsicle puzzles.
Marin loves puzzles. 

Our "work baskets"... popsicle puzzles, fish I spy cards, fish measurement, and color  ocean animal match. 

We love castles around here. So I printed out some sand castle pictures.
We talked about them and then built a few with play doh and then later on the beach with sand. Marin loved these cards.
 

Hollis doing her color sort. She was/is HILARIOUS with this. Every once and a while she would do correctly. But most of the time, she would get a real stinker look on her face and put it on the wrong one just to see what I would do. If I corrected her, she would yell very strongly "NO!" and move it back to the wrong spot. Uh, yeah, this one beats to her own drum. 

Measuring with gems.

We used pieces from our  puzzles to put land animals on the land and ocean animals in the water.  The "land" was a little too colorful and Marin really just wanted to match animals to a color. Hey, that'll work. 

We played with seashells. 

Then...

painted seashells...

Rain Rain Go Away

This was one of our favorite nursery rhymes. We did some math, art, and science with this one. 

 I found some raindrops and cloud post it notes in the dollar section at Target so I made a quick little number game. They put blue gems on the raindrops and we counted together.

 Hollis liked putting the blue gem "raindrops" in the pink cups more. :o)

We did a little science experiment with shaving cream clouds....here Marin is playing in the clouds. ;o)

Hollis practicing pouring the rain water in the cup. LOVED this!

 And now for the science experiment found on Pinterest. We used a glass of water with shaving cream on the top for clouds. Then Marin squeezed a few drops of blue food coloring (rain) onto the cloud.

 She waited and waited....and then....

 IT RAINED!!!!!

 Marin loved it. Hollis wasn't so sure about it.

Then we used the rest of the clouds to make a rainstorm.