Preschool Homeschool Week 3: All About Me

We're doubling up on some of our letter activities this week.  We're running a bit behind.

This precious face:

is getting a mouthful of teeth all at once.  A week ago, he had two bottom teeth and a gummy grin.  Now, he's sporting all four top teeth.  Within a week. So, you can guess how the last week has been at our house.

We continued our discussion of apples this week, and spent some time practicing Toodles' name and the names in our family.

We finished up letter A by bingo stamping around the letter...

...and completing a coloring activity.
The idea behind this activity is to color each section with a capital A in one color, and each section containing a lowercase a in a contrasting color.  When you've finished, it creates the outline of a capital A.  It all started out fine until Squish woke up wailing in the middle of tot tray time.  While I was tending to Squish, Toodles finished the activity with his own interpretation.

And, you know what?  That's fine.  He's three.  We'll try this activity again but the bottom line is that he spent some time looking at and thinking about the letter a, and building his fine motor and coloring skills.

I don't have many photos for you this week, because I've chosen not to post the children's real names.  It would be difficult to show you activities in which we practice his name without showing you his name.

We kept our apples book basket out as we were enjoying the books and they are rich with science that Toodles is still learning.  We also added a few "All About Me" books, including



Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes


When Sophie Gets Angry...Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang
This book is great for helping young children identify and assign vocabulary to their feelings.  It is a touch over Toodles' head, but we still took some time to read it and talk about what was going on with Sophie.  In another 2-3 months, I'm sure he will be ready to really appreciate this book.


Owen by Kevin Henkes

Toodles and I made a family names album this week.  We had a 4"x6" photo album lying around, so we filled it with photos of our family.  On the left hand page is a photo, and on the right hand page is an index card containing that person's name.  We've started reading this book together in the evenings, and my hope is that it will help him learn to read and write the names of those important to him.

Our tot trays this week:
1.  I placed magnet letters spelling Toodles' name in his rice bin.  He was to find the letters and place them on his magnadoodle, in order, then write his name below that.  He enjoyed this tremendously.  He enjoys anything that's a bit messy.
2.  Practicing our letter J sound by placing things that begin with the letter J into a jar (jump, jellybean, jar, jet, jersey, etc).  For this I used a clean peanut butter jar.
3.  Fine motor skills and sorting: Toodles used our sugar tongs to sort different colored pom poms into cups of matching colors.  He is quite skilled at picking up pom poms with the tongs.  I'll need to find a new challenge for him!
4.  As always, our fourth tot tray was our thematic book basket.