Drawing Lines

One skill we've been working on is drawing lines. Our occupational therapist gave us a great suggestion that I thought I'd share here since it's been helpful to us. Use dot stickers as beginning and ending points. I always encourage starting on the left so we can work on left to right progression.

You could use this trick to work on diagonal lines as well. We also use chalk outside to practice drawing lines. 

Valentine's Day - Letters

Happy Saturday! While my littles aren't quite ready for this activity, I wanted to share three Valentine's activities I did with my son when he was around 3 1/2 - 4 years old! 

Activity #1:

I printed uppercase and lowercase letters on hearts. First, we lined up the uppercase letters in order. Then he matched the lowercase letter to the uppercase letter. 

Activity #2:
For this activity, we worked on finding the letter "V" within text! You can find this printable at Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Activity #3:
For this activity, we used dot stickers to form the letter "V" and did them in a pattern!

Christmas Books

Over the years we have built up our collection of Christmas books. We've always loved reading and reading special books during December is a favorite. I wanted to make sure we read all of our Christmas books, so mid-November I gathered them and took inventory of what we had. I counted thirty one books total. Many people wrap 24 books total to read one each day beginning December 1st through Christmas Eve. I didn't want to take away 7 books, so we are reading all 31. It worked out perfectly when we got back in town from Thanksgiving to begin reading them that night and read one per day until Christmas Eve. 

I wrapped them in this special paper so they wouldn't get mixed in with our Christmas presents. I thought this wrapping was fun and so child friendly!  

We are loving this tradition so much already! My son's favorites so far are the pop-up storybooks we were gifted years ago. Those are always fun!

What are your favorite Christmas books?

Halloween Picture Books

I know, I know. Halloween is over and we are full throttle into Thanksgiving and Christmas, but since my blog was under construction during the month of October I am just now getting time to sit down and share our favorite Halloween books! 

These books have been well loved by my son (who is now 8) for many years and now his sisters are enjoying them. 

One of my favorites is Little Goblins Ten by Pamela Jane. If you haven't gotten this book yet, go for it. It is a spooky twist to the nursery rhyme "Over in the Meadow". It is a fun and cute Halloween picture book. 

In Kindergarten my son read The Witch has an Itch by Donna Guthrie and instantly loved it so much we had to have it at home! 

Anything that involves Mickey and Minnie is a HIT with my two year old twins. We read this Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Haunted Clubhouse over and over and over this season. It was a definite favorite here!

What are your favorite Halloween picture books? What should we add to our collection?

Letter Bb - BEARS

Last week we finished our letter Bb for bears! I found these letter Bb puzzles online. They were good to see how the letter Bb is formed.

I also really liked this bear coloring page. For a non-reader, it was easy to see what color the bear should be - except for white and grey. Of course, the word "white" couldn't be in the color white since you wouldn't be able to see it. That confused E - the color it was written in was gray so naturally, he thought that two bears were supposed to be gray.

Even though this printable from Confessions of a Homeschooler uses butterfly for the letter Bb, we still used it to find letter Bb's.

We also worked on some basic bear addition! Note to self - work on writing numbers ... I had to help him with all of these.

Our last activity was too difficult so we made our own rules! At first, I called out #s for E to put a dot on. He got frustrated easily because there were lots of numbers he didn't know (20+). So we took turns calling out #s that he knew and then just put dots on the rest!

Letter Bb - BEARS!

Since I became a SAHM, I decided I would let E pick out our topics and not go in ABC order, but just do whatever "theme" each week that he wanted to do! So far, we have learned about:

Ee - elephant

Gg - giraffe

Ll - lion

Dd - dog

Vv - Valentine's

Aa - ant

Bb - bear

Last week we learned about Aa for ants and this week are continuing our learning of Bb for bears. E realized these two were in ABC order and now he says we HAVE to go in ABC order! He's all about having things in order, matching, or sorted correctly so I'm not too surprised. I told him we can go in ANY order and it doesn't matter if it's ABC, but he's set on going in ABC order so next week, the letter C it is!

Anyway, let's look at some more of our Letter Bb fun.  I ordered counting bears on Amazon and E has LOVED playing with them!

We used Do-a-Dot markers to mark the letter Bb on this chart! He did great with this activity.

We used the counting bears to play the game "Help the Bear get to his Cave". We each picked a bear and rolled the dice. The goal was to get to your bear to the cave first. E may or may not have had a complete meltdown when my bear got their first. Oops. He won one round, too!

We also used counting bears to add bears to the cave. Super simple - just roll the dice and add that number of bears to the cave.

One of our favorite activity was working with gummy bears!! First, we did this Great Gummy Bear Sort, which was SUPER cute and fun! Then, we graphed our gummy bears and talked about which one we had the most of, the least of, etc.

We also did a bear alphabet recognition activity where I would call out a letter and E would color the bear with that letter. What a great way to assess alphabet recognition. 

We also practiced tracing the letter Bb!

Letter Bb - BEAR!

This week we are working on the letter Bb for BEARS! E picked out this theme last week so we were able to go to the library and get a few bear books (the two in the back of this photo). We couldn't find any nonfiction bear books in the kids section so most of our bear books are fiction, but we are still enjoying them!

We started off with one of E's favorite activities: Do-a-Dot markers!

I cut out the letter Bb's and E glued them and sorted them by uppercase and lowercase.

We have watched a YouTube video of the "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" book. We don't have this book, but I am adding it to a list for us to buy and/or check out from the library! What I love about this one is that it's not scary. We've watched other bear hunt videos on YouTube that have scared E. Like him hiding when it got to the bear part. This one was super cute, though.

I found these picture story sequence cards that we used while watching the video. I loved these cards! Super cute. I put the words with the pictures ahead of time (scattered at first) so although E can't read, he can easily place the phrase with the picture card.

We also matched shapes and talked about what they were. Each shape had a bear picture on it.

For our last activity, I put pictures of different types of bears out and would call out a type of bear (such as "polar bear") and would give E that card to place under the bear picture. I'll be totally honest - I had to Google some of these! Oops!

Stay tuned for more Letter Bb - BEARS fun we will do this week, plus a review of a book whose main character is a bear! 

Letter Aa - ANTS {Five for Friday}

This week I have posted all about our Letter Aa for ANTS fun we have been having! If you missed my first two posts, you can click here and here. Today we have wrapped up our ANT fun!

I created this Bugs in the Grass activity after seeing an awesome post on Teach Preschool Facebook page. They linked back to a blog called Share and Remember, where this activity comes from! Hers looks a lot better with more realistic grass and little colored bins to sort the bugs. But, I am happy how mine turned out considering I threw it together in minutes!

I love how she had colored cups that they used to sort the bugs with!

{TWO}

We continued to practice the letter A and colored an ant, while talking about the parts of the ant!

{THREE}

We made the letter Aa using pattern blocks! We love using patterns blocks for all sorts of things. I wish more moms knew how easy these are and how much fun kids have playing with them. I purchased these on Amazon a long time ago and they are perfect! We'll even be able to use them when E studies fractions a long time from now!

{FOUR}

We went on a letter Aa hunt with this ant passage! E really likes to do this activity.

{FIVE}

E was not a fan of this activity because it posed some difficulty, but I loved it! These ant counting cards reinforce counting objects, matching them to a number, AND fine motor skills by having children use clothespins with numbers on them to show how many ants there are! E has trouble with clothespins and gets frustrated easily with them.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish more parents knew how easy it is to incorporate "school" things at home and you don't have to spend a lot of money to do so!  I hope to post a list of things parents can do at home to help their children one day! BUT, today I wanted to share these shape puzzles....

I picked these up at the Dollar General for only $1.00! I loved that the are puzzles, they have lots of different shapes (we've never talked about trapezoids before!), they show real life objects that are that shape, AND they were only $1.00!

Happy Friday, y'all! 

Letter Aa - Ants!

We have continued to have fun learning about ANTS! I'll be honest - when E first said he wanted to learn about ants, I thought, "What? Ants?" But, from the get-go, I decided I would let E pick every topic and we would just go-with-the-flow. I am so glad that I did because I've loved our ant learning!!

We have continued to practice writing the letter A.

We sorted ants with the letter Aa on them, uppercase and lowercase letters. 

We also worked on this "Which Ant is Different?" activity. This activity posed some difficulty. E was, for the most part, able to pick out which ants were different, but he had a hard time telling me why they were different. This is a skill we will continue to work on!

We worked on an ant puzzle and an ant maze!

We played an ant game where we rolled a dice and put that # of ants on the ant hill, until all of the ants were on the ant hill. Such a simple game, but it reinforced counting and E loved it!

Another skill we will continue working on is cutting with scissors. I had photos of ants and I drew lines between them and had E cut along the lines.

We played another game where we rolled a dice and built an ant.

We also did this ant parts activity. Of course, I had to say the words and help him with that, but he did good with it!

We read more of his Zootles magazine and learned about different types of ants. I just love these Zootles magazines!

We also used different colored ants to make different patterns.