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.

Homeschool Week 2: All About Apples

This week, we focused on the letter A and apples!

We read some wonderful apple themed books, including...



The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall



The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons



Apple Picking Time by Michele B Slawson



and Up, Up, Up!  It's Apple Picking Time by Jody Fickes Shapiro.

We made a paint and thumbprint apple craft from a paper plate.

We also identified capital and lower case A.  Toodles used a bingo marker to dot the capital A's and drew a circle around the lowercase a's.

Our other art project was apple printing on a lowercase "a."  This page will go into a binder where we will have one artistic representation for each letter as we learn it.

Our tot trays this week were...

An "apple picking game."  (Disclaimer: yes, a lot of my stuff is hand-drawn.  I'm channeling my inner Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Actually, I just don't have a working PC at the moment to make these things all fancy-like, so I draw them myself.  It turns out, I'm not spectacular with technology.  I blame my mother.  And someday, my children will blame me).

So, the apple picking game.

We have these super cool little sugar tongs from Sur La Table.  They are the perfect size for Toodles' hands and, um, $2.95.  We placed red, yellow and green pom pom "apples" on the tree.  Then, we rolled a number cube, and practiced "picking" that number of apples from the tree.  Toodles transferred them from the tree to the grid below using the sugar tongs.  This game was a HUGE hit.  He absolutely loved transferring.

Our second tot tray was a set of sequencing cards.  Again, these were hand made.  I even pressed the ink from wild berries.  Ok, not really.
Toodles sequenced pictures of an apple being eaten...

and of an apple tree growing.

Our third tot tray was our rice bin.  Toodles found letters in the rice, then placed them into the appropriate letter frame.

Our fourth tot tray, as always, was Toodles' book bag filled with apple-themed books.

Homeschool Week 1: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

This week was a sort of introductory week to our new preschool schedule.  We've done "Tot School" since Toodles was about 18 months old, but our preschool is more involved and a bit more structured.

We didn't focus on a specific letter this week, we treated this more as a review week for all of the letters.

Toodles was thrilled to discover that big preschool kids get a Daily Learning Notebook.  I've chosen to use the free printable notebook from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  This saves me a lot of time engineering my own notebook pages.  Toodles loves tracing the letters and coloring in a square on the 100 Day countdown grid.

We took  a moment each day this week to name each of the shapes in our notebook, and to trace the number one with our fingers.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is one of Toodles' favorite books.  I knew that he would be thrilled to spend an entire week talking about it.  Each day we read the story, and he enjoyed retelling it with magnet letters on his magnet board.  His favorite part was when they all fall down, and he could swipe the letters from the magnet board onto the floor.

We also put a couple of lines from the story in our poetry pocket chart and practiced reading it.  This provided a great opportunity for practicing one-to-one correspondence, tracking, and differentiating words.  I wrote each word of "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, will there be enough room?  Here comes ____ up the coconut tree!" on an index card, and we enjoyed putting in various letter cards and reading it over and over again.  It only took Toodles two or three times of reading it with my help to learn that "enough" and "coconut," were each a single word.  He did great, and he was so excited to show Daddy his poem!


For our Tot Trays/Centers we used a puzzle, a game, and some artwork.

The first tray was simply an alphabet puzzle we had on hand.  

The second tray was a "Counting Coconuts" game.  I made a coconut tree and several coconuts from construction paper.  Toodles was to roll a number cube (I have these amazing foam ones that don't make noise when they land!!), then place that many coconuts on the tree.  He absolutely loved this game and wanted to play it again and again.

Our final tray was an art project for each day.  On Tuesday, Toodles colored a picture of a coconut tree.  On Wednesday, we found the letters in his name in a magazine and glued them onto the trunk of a coconut tree.  On Thursday, we made a coconut tree from construction paper and a recycled cardboard tube.

We discovered that we could retell the story by having magnet letters "climb" the tree and drop down through the top of the tube.  After a few letters did this, the tree would topple over and the letters would spill out just like in the story!  Toodles had a ball with this!

On Friday, our plan was to make lemon and coconut bread but that had to be postponed because.....we ran out of coconut.
We eat a lot of coconut.

All in all, week one was a success, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom  remains a family favorite.  I plan to revisit this one in a couple of months as a springboard for learning about the moon ("Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, look!  There's a full moon!")