Sunday, August 17, 2014

A New Year!

So a new year is HERE and we are so excited for a few new things in our "school day"! Marin, especially, is so happy that Momma School has started. Each day when I announce it's time for school, she runs to our little rug and waits patiently for me to get there. It is very cute. 

But here are a few of our new activities for the year. 

First, here is a (really terrible) picture of our space. This room is our play room and our school room. I still want to make a banner to hang above our clothesline art gallery. It's empty now but it won't take long to fill it up with all of our new work of art! But the banner will hang above and read Brednich Academy. And another "To Do" project for this space is two benches for the table. I hope to get a plan for that soon. But cute fabric covered benches...can't wait!

This is our calendar. We do it every day and it is SUPER fast. We have short attention spans so we can't drag things out. But we turn the number over on the calendar and sing the Months of the Year song (Dr. Jean) and the Days of the Week song (Dr. Jean).  Right now our calendar numbers are shapes, but in September we will start a pattern with red and green apples. We also spell each of their names (long white strips) each day. I have finger pointers and they point to each dot under the letter and spell their names. The red strip at the top of the bulletin board is our schedule. It is a long strip of velcro and I put up our schedule each day. As we finish the activity, they remove the schedule card and place it in the clear finished container at the end of strip. Some of our schedule cards include math, reading, writing, Bible, project, cooking, field trip, and singing. 
This is our Sing Tin. The girls love to sing but when we sit down to sing songs my mind goes BLANK. Argh. So I made a Sing Tin....
Inside it is filled with popsicle sticks.
And on each stick, there is a song card. It is a fun surprise each time they pick a song.
Then we have "Bravo Books". Everytime the girls give a "performance" we all clap and say bravo, bravo. So these books are our very special themed books for the week. We are starting off with 'all about me' type books for our Bravo Books this week.
These are our Bible Boxes. This is probably their most favorite addition to school so far. They LOVE hearing the story and then acting it out with their story pieces. LOVE IT.
Inside our Bible Box this week...can you guess the story?
The story is Joshua and Jericho....blocks, TP horn, and Joshua and friends that march around the wall 7 times before it comes crashing down.

I will be using a lot of the free curriculum out there but also making a few things myself to fit the needs and interests of the girls. A few things we will start with are....

 Cute (and temporarily FREE) unit about all the numbers that make up ME. You can find it {HERE}.

 The girls love Pete the Cat and Dog's Colorful Day. So since Hollis is still learning some of her colors, I made this little unit for us to do. You can find it {HERE}.

And although, we won't be doing a "letter of the week" focused curriculum, we will add some of these letter identification activities throughout the year. You can find it {HERE}.

I am hoping to post our plans each week and show our little school in action. I haven't done the greatest job with this blog in the past but it is a big goal for me this year. Wish me luck.....

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

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....

  • 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. 


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.