Christmas Activity Trays

I wanted to share with you a peek at our Christmas trays for next week! Naomi saw me putting them together today, and we are both excited to try them out. Most of  these printable (unless otherwise stated) are from Walking By the Way's Kindergarten Winter Games Packs. Even though I made these trays with Naomi (4 yrs old) in mind, I have thought of modifications for Nathan (19 months) too.

Here is a look at the trays all set up and ready to go!

We are learning about tally marks. Using the Dry Erase crayons (which I like SO much better than dry erase markers), Naomi will decorate the snowman family with eyes, hats, noses, etc. Then we will count up each item, and record our tally marks on the recording sheet you see on the left. She's been very into drawing/coloring lately, which is a first, so I think she'll love this!

Nathan Modification: draw on the snowmen, with me. We can both draw and I will have him find the body parts like eyes, nose, feet, etc.

We have been doing lots with reading three letter words. For this tray I will say a word like "pig". Naomi will have to listen, figure out what the middle letter is in the word I say, and then flip the "cookie" with the matching letter. This is great practice for those middle letter sounds, which are always trickier for them.

Nathan Modification: I'm going to try to have him practice colors by finding the red stocking, yellow bell, etc, but most likely he will flip the cookies, toss the cookies, and be done. ;)

On this (cookie) tray the kids will use our magnetic pom-poms to make the picture. For whatever reason both kids LOVE this. You can find this printable here.

Find the Cookie (think Battleship). There are two copies of the grid. I will hide the cookie cutouts on my grid and Naomi will have to call out different squares to find the cookies (ie. C4) and mark off the squares that have nothing on them. Note the gummy treats on the left. This tray may be a bit hard for her because we've never done anything like this before, so I thought I might start off by hiding gummy treats instead of the paper cookies, and let her eat each one as she finds it. Nothing like a little bribery incentive!

Nathan Modification: "Nathan, go play with your trains".

Craft tray: On this tray I've been putting our supplies for our daily Advent ornament craft so they are ready to go. Sometimes both kids make an ornament, and sometimes just Naomi.

Smash the snowman! We will do this on our little picnic table over our vinyl flooring. I'll put down globs of shaving cream, and put the snowman word cards on top. As I call out the words Naomi has to find and read the word, then smash the snowman! I laminated the snowmen and wrote on them with dry erase makers so I can easily switch up the words.

Nathan Modification: I am going to erase the words and draw on shapes or colors and have him do the same thing!

Christmas themed pattern block mats. There is several sheets to choose from and I found them here. Both kids can do this tray in their own way.

There you have it! Our Christmas trays for this coming week! I will leave these trays out as long as they are interested in them, and then slowly rotate them out with new things. If you are looking for more Christmas theme ideas, checkout all the fun stuff I've found on my Christmas Pinterest Board or see what others are doing at Preschool Corner and 1+1+1=1.

Have a great week!

Karla

Advent Activities: Day 1, 2 and 3

Hello! This has been a crazy fall for us, and I haven't had the time to post the way I wanted to. We've been doing lots during our school time, I just haven't had time to take pictures or post about it! However, a dear friend of mine posted things she is thankful for every day in November on her blog, and inspired me! My goal for the month of December is to do a small post each day about our daily Advent activities.

We have been following The Truth in the Tinsel ebook, and it  has been wonderful! I thought by doing a post each day it would inspire me to keep up with our daily reading and craft, and share some of what we've been up to. I just thought of it today, so I will share what we've done the first three days in December! For each day we read a passage in the Bible covering one aspect of the Christmas story, and then make a craft that goes along with it.

Day 1: We read from Isaiah, how there will come a Christ, that is the light of the world. The candle represents the Light. :)

Day 2: We read from Isaiah again, this time how a king is coming to save the world. Of course we had to make a crown for a king!

Day 3: Hanging up her ornament for the day.

For day three we read the story in Luke about the angel telling Zechariah that he and Elizabeth were going to have a baby. Zechariah didn't believe the angle, and so God caused him not to be able to speak until John was born. You can't see it in the photo but we have a big bubble from a piece of bubble wrap for his mouth, to represent that Zechariah couldn't speak. Naomi thought that this was pretty funny.

Being that each craft is an ornament, I think they were meant to be hung on the tree. This wasn't going to work for us. Nathan is 18 months old, and doing a FANTASTIC job not bothering the tree, because he understands that it is NEVER to be touched. I thought hanging something on the tree each day would confuse him. Therefore, we are hanging our ornaments on the garland going up our stairs. You can see the ornaments we've made in between the stockings, and my cool boot stocking too (best stocking EVER!). ;)

Speaking of Nathan, I couldn't resist adding this picture of Mr. Handsome himself, eating dinner off of his Santa plate.

The kids' Great Grandma Shirley gave them these adorable stockings to use to count down to Christmas. I put our Advent word clue of the day in each stocking and we are using them on our calendar this month. The kids LOVE it!

So there you have some of what we've been doing for the first three days! We have been doing a lot of other things behind the scenes, but we'll see if I get around to sharing our other stuff or not! Come back and see what we're doing each day for our Advent activities though! I am also linking up with Preschool Corner and Tot School over at 1+1+1=1.

Karla

Apples, Apples!

Our first theme this year was apples. Now you may think, apples, how much is there to learn about apples?? TONS!! We covered everything from science to history, geography, math and language arts. In addition, we got tons of great apple themed story books from the library, and enjoyed reading all of them. Apples was our theme for the whole month of September (yes, I found THAT much stuff to do!) so I will just share some of our apple highlights. In addition to the thematic things we do each week, we work on the Bible aspect from RRSP, and do readings/activities daily from our Sonlight program (that we love!).  All ideas for the apple activities that we did can be found here and here so I will not be sharing individual links for each one.

The kids painting the trunk of our apple tree. I LOVE that they both can participate in these types of activities now.

You can see the end product of our apple tree in the background. We talked about how apples came in many different colors, and tried to represent that on our tree! Here Naomi was dot painting the "apples" on the tree. The apples were actually letters that she would find and stamp as I called them out. This was a little beginning of the year assessmen,t for me to ensure she had completely mastered all her letter and letter sounds. She had!

 

Making a torn paper apple. Both kids enjoyed this but Nathan in particular really got into the ripping of the paper and gluing it down.

 

The finished product!

 

Here the kids were learning about the life cycle of an apple through some fantastic videos on YouTube. I found the most amazing apple videos on YouTube that we adored! We learned about the apple life cycle, songs about apples, apple facts, and about all the different types of apples. I just typed in "apple life cycle" and there they were! These were all things we read about too, but I love exposing them to the same information via different types of media. And yes, I know, eating and watching the iPad, bad, bad, but it bought me a couple extra minutes to unload the dishwasher, so what can I say. ;)

 

Naomi did this apple puzzle by ordering the numbers 11 - 20.

 

These nomenclature cards were great and we used them in a ton of ways! First we just matched the pictures, then she put them in order of the apple life cycle.

 

Later, using the same cards, she matched the words to the words, and last the words to the pictures.

 

Last, she glued the pictures down in the order of an apple's life cycle, and labeled them with the words. She was very proud of the finished product!

 

Since Nathan can't always participate in what Naomi is doing, I give him little things to work on that are appropriate for him. Here he is making a picture using some of our jumbo stamps.

 

I'm very proud of the number of crafty things we did with this theme! Crafts are not my strong point, but the kids love it, and I'm getting better and doing things that work for us. To make these trees I painted their hand and arm and they stamped it on the paper. Then we used a sponge to dab the green on for leaves. Lastly we used our fingers dipped in red to paint on the apples. The finished product turned out really cute, but I didn't take any pictures during the process. There was way too much paint on hands for my personal comfort level, so I didn't dare turn my head for even a second to grab the camera! I found this project highly stressful, but the kids liked it. ;)

 

Here we were learning about the parts of the apple, and labeling them on our sheet.

 

We used the cut apples to make stamps and paint pictures. This was really fun!

Thank goodness we have an area in front of our door in the basement that is vinyl! I keep our craft supplies downstairs with our school stuff, and it's nice not to have to move it up to the kitchen to do a messy project.

 

Here we were tying history and geography into our apple theme. Did you know that the Golden Delicious apple first originated here in West Virginia??  I didn't until we read this story (Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story)! One of the things I love about homeschooling is that most of the time, I learn as much as the kids!

Here we were cutting up different types of apples to perform our taste test on. The kids only used butter knives and were closely supervised. ;)

Naomi liked all the different kinds of apples and we recorded her findings.

 

Nathan wasn't as impressed with all the apples, but he was darn cute anyway!

 Here we were working on number order by putting the missing numbers on the apples.

We talked about how bees are attracted to the sweet blossoms on apple trees and Naomi wanted me to make her a bee activity. I would call out one of the letters on her apple tree, and she would find it, tweeze the bee, and put it on that letter. She loved it!

Nathan wanted to use tongs too, so I had him transfer these little erasers into another container.

After he was done transferring with tongs, he found a new way to move the erasers around!

Cooking time! I've been making a concerted effort to do more cooking projects with the kids. I don't love to bake, but they do, so we've been making more things together! Naomi got an adorable cookbook for her birthday and we've made some really cute things from that.

Karla

School Set Up and Calendar

I can't believe it is the beginning of October already! I have been meaning to do this post for a month now! We got right into the swing of doing school again after Labor Day weekend, and it made the month of September fly by. I did a lot of thinking and planning for this school year over the summer. With Nathan down to one nap a day now, I knew I would have to restructure how we did things. Also, I wanted to introduce the calendar, and get into the routine of doing it every day. This is what I came up with, and it's been working out great so far!

These are Naomi and Nathan's "Learning Tables". Last year we did school upstairs either in the office or in Naomi's room while Nathan napped. This year I knew we would be doing the bulk of our schooling when Nathan was awake since both kids take afternoon naps. Therefore, I set up these tables, moved supplies, and got us all ready to do school in the basement. It has been wonderful! It gives Naomi  her own space to work, where Nathan can't reach and destroy what she's doing, but she's not secluded in a room by herself. By being in the basement, there are tons of toys for Nathan to play with, while I work with Naomi. Nathan loves to be a part of everything we're doing, so I set up a little table for him too! By having a little table for him to sit at, he can work on some of his own age appropriate projects, and feel like he's a big boy too.

I put this cork board up to the left of Naomi's table to display some of her favorite pieces of work. Hanging that took me back to my teaching days!

Here is a view of our calendar, basket of things we use for calendar time, and the supplemental learning board I made.

A close up of our calendar. I LOVE this calendar as it includes most of the elements I wanted to cover each day. I purchased it on Amazon.

Here is a close up of our learning board. Last year I started Carisa's RRSP program from 1+1+1=1. It's a WONDERFUL program, and we had a lot of fun with the units we did, but Naomi is ready for the next step in the reading department now. We have moved on to different things for reading (which I will share later), but I wanted to continue with the Bible aspect of RRSP. That is what the top three printables on this foam board are from. I switch them out every week. The first on the left is our memory verse, the middle sheet is the life application of the verse, and the top right is our song for the week. I love how I can pick the RRSP unit that goes along with our letter of the week, and how nicely it all ties in with the verse and song. The bottom left of the board is our letter of the week. The bottom middle of the board is our weekly weather graph from Homeschool Creations. The bottom right section is a pocket where I keep our singing prop that goes with the verse and song, and also small cards that have past memory verses on them for review. We review all elements of the board daily. The best part is that Naomi asks to do this, and really enjoys it!

Naomi singing the days of the week song. We also sing a weather song for each day but I didn't manage to get a video of it.

Here she is singing the date song. We will be adding in the months of the year song soon, but I just introduced it. I don't move on to something new until Naomi has completely mastered what we are currently working on.  She is a perfectionist to the extreme, and I don't like to frustrate her!

I had to add a picture of my two cuties for fun! This was taken on our first day of "school".

There you have an overview of how we are set up for this school year, and some of our daily routines. I feel very prepared for the year, and so far things are going smoothly. It's always a bit of a juggling act balancing what I want to do with the kids individually, together, and then all the things that need to be done around the house, but I don't imagine that will ever change! Hopefully I will be able to continually grow and adapt with the kids, and learn more strategies as we go along.

Karla

Apple Picking

I'm back! Well, I'm trying to work my way back into the habit of blogging. I really enjoyed blogging last winter, but got out of the habit over the summer. We had such a crazy busy summer that I had very little time for anything other than enjoying and surviving it! As much fun as the summer was, I'm glad that it is fall, and that things have taken on a less insane pace. I enjoy routine and structure, and so do the kids. In order to get back into blogging, I thought I'd start with something simple, and share what we did over the weekend.

We started up with our homeschool preschool/tot school in the beginning of September, and our theme for the month has been apples.  It sounds like a simple theme, but there are a TON of things to do and learn centered around apples! I will share more about what we have been doing for school in a later post. In honor of our apple unit, we went apple picking this weekend!

We went on a hayride to the apple orchard.

Naomi was thrilled and got right into picking.

They were dwarf apple trees, which was PERFECT for the kids. The apples were all so low that even Nathan had no problems reaching them. He loved picking the apples too! He was so excited he kept running from tree to tree.

I liked posed pictures. So sue me!

Daddy had to pose for me too!

After we picked apples the hayride picked us up at the orchard, took us on a tour of the farm, and then dropped us off at the pumpkin patch! It was a huge field and the kids had a blast running through all the pumpkins, and trying to decide which was the perfect one for them.

You can see Nathan's little finger pointing that this was HIS pumpkin. He was dead set on it too!

Both kids also went on a pony ride.

We also went through the "mini" corn maze. Here I am smiling. I was not smiling for long. The "mini" maze was freaking huge and we quickly got lost. Nathan was heavy and only wanted me to carry him, and both kids were whining and thirsty. Stupid corn mazes! We FINALLY found our way out. Naomi kept crying and saying, "I'm so sorry, this is ALL MY FAULT!". I couldn't figure out why she thought it was her fault that we were lost. It turns out she was sorry because she was the one who wanted to go in the maze in the first place. I couldn't help but laugh!

The bouncy house was a big hit!

Nathan was so brave and even went down the huge slide in the bouncy house by himself!

Of course my boys couldn't resist checking out the tractor.

There was more at the farm than we were even able to see, but suffice it to say that we had an amazing day! One of the best parts was that they had a little store and restaurant that sold food, donuts and apple cider. One of Naomi's favorite books from our apple unit was called "Cider Making Days". In the book the little girl got to pick apples, eat donuts, and drink apple cider. Naomi had it in her mind that she wanted to do exactly that too. I was so happy that I could make the picture she had in her mind come true. This was the perfect way to celebrate the beginning of fall and our apple unit.