Bye Bye Blog

This blog is no longer our school blog. It was too much trying to document both family and school activities on two blogs...can't do it. So we are back over at our family blog doing both. If you want to check us out...click below...

Thanks!

Some of March....

This may be the most random post ever. Beware...no clear thoughts or organization to any of these activities. Sorry. 

There have been several "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of days in our school lately. 

 First, Hollis is doing so great in school! She is usually the first one to ask for it or the first one to the school room when I call for them. It is so fun to watch. But here are two of her little math activities: Pattern Puzzles (Melissa and Doug) and a Shape Clothespin Matching Game. She has mastered them both which boosts this girls confidence so much! 

Both girls love to CUT! So here Marin is doing a cut and glue puzzle. She cut out the pieces, matched the numbers, glued them in place and revealed a picture. An apple. She loved the mystery puzzle. Hollis cut her numbers 1-5 and glued them in order. 

I'm trying to get my alphabet activities organized (which is almost impossible). But I have had these ABC play dough mats for a long time but they showed no interest in them. I pulled them out this past week and they were a hit. They both did a great job filling in their letters! 

While they played, it gave me a chance to assess them a little or it let me play too.
But I just stamped a few letters and numbers into my playdough and asked them to point to certain ones. It gave me a quick idea of what letters and number they know, need to work on, difference between a letter or a number, etc. Quick and easy and NO INK involved. ;o)

 Again....I'm getting my ABC work organized. They found my stash and did some pre-writing practice. 

I'm working on our spring sensory bin right now.
I am pretty excited about it and can't wait to get it all finished! 

 This week we are talking about the Letter Pp. We have really taken a break from letter of  the week curriculum this year. After 2 years, they were done with it. But I'm picking it back up for Hollis. They both seem to be happy with their break from it and happy to start it again. So Pp for St. Patrick's Day. 

Pot of gold counting!
The gold coins were leftover from Hollis' pirate party. But they read the number on the pot and place that amount of coins on it. 

 Marin has become VERY interested in drawing and art lately. So we tried a little directed drawing activity. She loved it and her bunny turned out pretty darn cute! She used pastels for the bunny face, marker for outline, and watercolors for background. 

Well, hello blog.

So I am a weeeee bit behind over here on this blog. Yikes. Although I have not been blogging, we have been doing preschool and it has been so fun. We did move our schoolroom upstairs. Previously, it was in our playroom which was distracting and any play date we had with buddies school stuff got misplaced every single time. So upstairs we went. Our guests have lost their room. We never have guests so it works. But a few pictures of our February....

We have been doing some Reading Lessons from "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". We go VERY slowly and sometimes I break the lessons up into two parts. But here she is sounding out the words and matching them to the picture. A little heart puzzle....

Hollis mastered her colors and now we have moved on to shapes. We go slow and have been learning and sorting triangles, squares, and circles. 

I have started making some monthly math centers for our preschool. This one is measuring. Here she is measuring the toothbrush with her tooth ruler. In this set, there are Valentine monsters to measure and President Lincoln to measure. We also do Count the Room. It is a favorite. Both are available in my store. 

Sorting the mail with those shapes!!! 

Learning about different presidents from our flashcards found in the Dollar Spot at Target. This surprisingly held their attention for a long time?!?!

Roll and Race.....another monthly math center I have started creating. They love it. Roll the cube, graph the picture rolled, and see which picture wins. It is also found in my store. 

A little Valentine Craft: Love Bugs.
They are so not into crafts anymore. Tear. Tear. But they did want to do this one. 

Reviewing her alphabet. Pointy fingers always help. This chart came from the Dollar Tree and had been torn in a few places. I also didn't like some of the pictures they paired with each letter (giraffe for Gg). So I made a new set. It is a freebie in my store. I will try and post a picture of it in the schoolroom! 

Shape Mazes!
This was hard for her but she loves anything to do with writing, drawing, and pens/markers.
She ended up just finding the shapes without actually doing the mazes. Marin loved the mazes as well!! 

Leaf Frog Letter Factory!
We love this little letters. Hollis just uses whatever letters she wants and plugs them in and listens to the songs. 

 Name Writing practice....Marin hates writing and Hollis loves it. Of course. But we practice writing our names every day. 

I made some little sight word books for Marin to practice reading the sight words she is learning. They aren't up in my store yet but hope to finish them soon. 

Play Doh!!! They were making letter cookies. 

 Our little artist!! 

A little peek at the new alphabet chart. 

Scrolling through Pinterest. Ha!
Not school related...but funny.  

Spot It! is a part of my Rhyme Time pack. But she looks at the big picture and then decides with of the smaller pictures rhymes. She put a heart marker on the correct rhyme. 

Hollis used the number charts from 1+1+1 and counted hearts. 

Her first dot to dot. She made a groundhog and was pretty proud of it! 

 

 We read a groundhog's day book and then make a cute little puppet. This puppet still makes appearances in our puppet shows. 

Picture Dictionaries and Mystery Letter Fun!

Last week we looked at picture dictionaries and played Mystery Letter Bag to learn about things that begin with the letter Bb. First, I had made this little flip book for each letter a while back ago and thought maybe the girls would enjoy having a little "book" of their own.  We said the letter and the sound it makes then we flipped through the picture dictionary (from my childhood) and read some of the words that begin with /B/.  They loved the picture dictionary and of course wanted to draw the impossible b words....like belong. :o) We settled for birthday and ball.  Balloon and bee were already a part of the flip book. So we added our two for a total of 4 words in our book.

 

This girl loves some markers.

 Reading her Bb flip book to Elsa the Zebra.

 

If you would like a copy of the alphabet flip book you can find it in this pack....

 just click on the picture.

Then we sang and played Mystery Letter Bag. I threw a lot of /b/ objects into a bag. We would sing our song and reach into the bag and say the objects emphasizing the /b/sound.

Tune: Farmer in the Dell

What starts with Bb?
What starts with Bb?
Reach into the letter bag.
Let's see what starts with Bb!

Then for little bit, we played point to the Bb word. Where is the /b/, /b/, brush. She loved using the pointer.

Are you ready for some football?

In honor of football season beginning, we did some early counting fun with our Football Guys. I found these at a thrift store for nearly nothing. Even though I have girls, I figured they may have some fun with them. And they do.

 

I first game was "Touchdown". Simple, simple. We each had one football guy standing at our end of the field. We took turns rolling the die, counting the dots, then moving our player down the field. Whoever reached the other side first, scored a Touchdown and won. Easy, easy but lots of counting practice.

Our second game was a football counting game. First she lined up her footballs in order from #1-5.

Then she counted out her football men to correspond with each number on the footballs.

Again, very, very simple but great counting practice.

Speaking of football, we met up with Daddy-O for lunch and he and Marin had this conversation.

Marin: Daddy, we played a football game in school today.
Daddy: You did. Do you like football?
Marin: No.
            I like Peppa Pig.