Pete the Cat - Rocking my School Shoes (part1)

This week's book is the next installment of Pete the Cat and he is rocking in his school shoes! It is all good. We are still working with color words and our new rhyme is Jack and Jill. We also started our space unit which has J completely excited.

To start the week off, I made homemade play dough. I wanted an extra special play dough that had lots of glitter. I was really hoping for a deeper blue but this is what I ended up with. I added a whole container of silver glitter as well as little blue stars that I found in Ikea a couple of years ago.

I gave her a Space Ace badge and for every space related activity, she will earn a star on her badge. She though this was cool. She wanted to be a Space Ace.

She received a star for making this rocket. I found a printable astronaut and photo-shopped her picture on it. So she is riding in her rocket.

We made this rocket that had a rubber band underneath and J launched it into the air. While she was launching her rocket, we were practicing counting backwards towards blast off!

I printed some planets and astronauts for our felt board. After I laminated them, I added some velcro to the back so they would stick. She played with these for awhile. We are going to learn about the planets later, this week is for astronauts.

Our rhyme this week is Jack and Jill. J played doctor to Jack and glued bandaids to all of the "boo boo's" that Jack had after falling down the hill. She then proceeded to treat the rest of us (Kaleb, me, and her animals) as Doctor J.

Lastly, she started her Pete the Cat picture. I gave her several different blues and she painted on the cat outline that I printed out. We will add eyes and shoes later when he dries. Pete has to have shoes! We had a busy first day and I have tons of other fun stuff planned. Have a great day!

Monday's Discovery

He was a little too quiet while I was working on J's school stuff. I should have known he was up to something. What did he get into? A large package of markers. He grabbed them from the table when I wasn't looking and he went to town. He took all of the lids off. He colored the floor, he colored himself. What fun!

I should know by now that a quiet baby is trouble. At least it washes off!

Pete the Cat-I Love My White Shoes (part 2)

We continued our adventure with Pete the Cat. J worked on writing her color words, of course, her favorite word was pink. 

J colored a mini book using all of the colors for Pete the Cat.

We are working with the Nursery Rhyme Hickety Pickety, My Black Hen. So for our Science activity, we used our ears to listen to "eggs." The idea was to use plastic Easter eggs but we don't have those here, so I used some candy containers that I have been saving.

I filled each container with different items such as rice, lentils, dry noodles, sugar cube, etc... J shook each one and tried to guess what was inside. This was interesting since several sounded the same. Her guesses surprised me, she guessed rice. I didn't think she would get that one.

I wrote her guesses then we opened the containers to see if she was right. She was surprised that different items sounded the same. Next time I would put two of the same items so she could match the sounds.

I let her eat the chocolate. I love this picture. 

J then made a hen puppet that when the wings close, she hides her eggs. For another Science activity based on the rhyme, we grouped animals into two categories - those who lay eggs and those who have live babies. We have a good selection of plastic animals (J loves them) so we used those.

She did really good at this. She even knew that insects laid eggs. J has been asking to study space, so we are off to explore. We will still use a core book but our Science will be based on space. We found some space men in a toy store here to play with in the sand box. She is excited to begin her space learning. May your weekend be wonderful.

Pete the Cat-I Love My White Shoes

We have officially finished our FIAR units for the books that we own, so I have decided to do some fun units with special books. Pete the Cat was given to us by Grandma for Christmas along with the Pete the Cat stuffed animal. Grandma is always finding great books for J and Kaleb. We are lucky. This book is ultimately about having a great attitude no matter what happens. J loves this book along with the second Pete the Cat book - Rocking in My School Shoes. A new Pete the Cat book will be out in March, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.

I scoured the internet for Pete the Cat resources and found a few. I decided our focus would be color word recognition since J already knows her colors. We will also be working with the nursery rhyme, Hickety, Pickety My Black Hen so it kinda follows with our color theme.

After reading the book and watching the video on youtube, we practiced our color words. I made a show matching game that had the color on one and the color word on the other. We are using these for reference for other games this week that we will play.

J wrote about her favorite shoes - I love my pink shoes and colored pink sneakers. We worked a pocket chart where J put together sentences about different color shoes.

We played a Pete the Cat board game that I found, only the color cards were printed in black ink. J had to match the color words in order to find what space she could advance to.

We played color bingo to practice more color words.

J made a mini book on the Nursery Rhyme, Hickety Pickety. She really likes these rhymes and I am going to try to keep it up for the rest of the school year to see how many she can remember. We practice the old ones every day as well as the new one.

We have more things planned for this great book. But you will have to wait....Because it is All Good.... (Pete the Cat).

Monday's Discovery

This week's Monday Discovery is snow. We recently had about 20 inches of snow and it seemed like it wasn't going to stop. Every time I looked out the window, it was snowing. It also happened during the winter break for school so even DH and DD did not get one snow day out of it. We spent our time indoors, mostly, playing Nancy Drew and chilling out. But one day, we decided to go outside. I got Kaleb dressed to the max and even he went out in the snow!

He wasn't too sure about it.

Here he is with J and their snowman. Isn't he cute? I like having the balcony, it holds just enough snow to keep J occupied and it is close enough to a bathroom when needed. On a side note, we also had a little excitement. An apartment caught fire during our snowstorm, not too far away from our house.

This happened in the morning hours but the fire fighters eventually came and got control of the fire before long. Always exciting-here in the city, huh?

Little Miss Muffet (part 2)

We finished off the week with plenty of activities. J really enjoyed the Little Miss Muffet rhyme. We conducted an experiment about curds and whey. What exactly are curds and whey? We started with some milk and pour some vinegar into it.

We waited overnight and this is what we saw.

You can't really tell but the milk separated into two parts - the chunky parts are the curds which cottage cheese and cheese are made from and the runny part was the whey which yogurt products come from. I asked J is she would drink it and she shook her head no.

J worked on writing numbers to 20 in the spiders.

Then we played a spider web game to practice her sight words. Each section had a sight word written in it and when she landed on the word, she had to read it.

Lastly, J made finger puppets to act out the story. She wasn't impressed with the yucky spider but she liked Miss Muffet. We finished our week out and we are moving on to another great book and nursery rhyme. See you then.

Little Miss Muffet

We are deviating some from FIAR books this week due to Valentine's Day. We did some heart stuff and I knew we wouldn't have time to finish the book activities. I began teaching J a new nursery rhyme each week. I usually try to have an art project, maybe some Science, writing, etc... This week, our rhyme is Little Miss Muffet. This is what we have done so far.

Working with our wooden numbers, I called a number to J and she created the number with them. I am really trying to encourage number recognition up to 100. We will be working on this until the end of the school year.

She colored her rhyme sheet so we could hang it up on our wall and review weekly each nursery rhyme we have learned. I love watching her color, she has really taken off, trying to stay in the lines.

We read Little Miss Muffet and circled/counted all of the f's in the rhyme.

J made a spider like in the rhyme. She chose to make it colorful. Then she cut it out.

She is doing well cutting thing out. She cut everyone of the legs of the spider herself. I was impressed.

We then used the spider to act out the rhyme. We found a tuffet (pillow), curds and whey, and the spider sat beside her.

She has several words this week. Here she is decorating the word he for our wall. I gave her stickers this time and she seemed to enjoy that.

J is still practicing her other words as well. She working with the word- the. Her work isn't just with sight words. We are also learning to read. She is learning to put letter sounds together to make words. We work our reading lessons together so there is no time to take pictures. I am not just focusing on sight words. We are working on all aspects of learning how to read. I am not pushing her though. I am following her lead. If she is having trouble, I back off and we review the previous lessons until she can get it. I want her to enjoy the process of reading and not have it become a chore. Hope your week isn't full of spiders - haha.

A Pair of Red Clogs

We are still working with our base book, A Pair of Red Clogs. We watched several videos on Youtube about Japan. In the book, there is a picture of the family having dinner on the floor using pillows and a short legged table. J had to have dinner on the floor so we did. We don't have a short legged table but we did eat on the floor in the living room.

Everyone felt like making a funny face. J also worked with her sight words. I pulled out the Scrabble Jr. tiles and found these sight word cards for her to practice.

J made a Japanese fish kite. We just had to add pink ribbons onto the bottom. We used all of the pink ribbon that we had.

We worked on our other sight word - and. She decorated the word for our hallway and then we played a graphing game. I put the sight words she knows into the dice I made. She rolled the die and graphed the words that she rolled.

We had fun learning about Japan and our next story also takes place in Japan. We finished out our week and are ready to move to the next book. Have fun!