Tot Tuesday

The other day, while I was working with J, Kaleb did an amazing thing. Kaleb is always around and wanting to be involved while J and I work on school. He is usually not far, spending time playing with his toys or on my lap, right in the middle of things. Today, he decided to participate while J was reading her sound cards.

He repeated everything J was saying.

I love this one, you can really tell he is saying the "o" sound.

J thought it was funny as well. He stayed to work through all of her sound cards and some of her word cards. Then he decided to go play. He had enough with the reading lesson but I am sure he will be back.

Wheel School - M is for Monster Truck

Recently, my DH and my kids went to the Monster Truck Rally. In honor of this, I created a new Wheel School Tot pack - M is for Monster Truck. This printable pack is based on the printable packs from Royal Baloo. She has been my inspiration for this tot pack - thank you.

I included the weekly plans for M is for Monster truck packed full of M activities.

There are monster truck tracer pages....

a clothespin activity card...

a monster truck sewing card...

and some monster truck puzzles. I hope your tot loves the M is for Monster Truck pack. If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. I would love to hear from you if you download this pack - a little comment goes a long way. Thanks.

Download M is for Monster Truck HERE.

Graphics are from:

Winter Promise - Week 24

This week brought us a freak snow storm where the public school kids received two days off from school. J, on the other hand, did not get a snow day. We worked all week amid doctor appointments, snow days, and sickness (Kaleb). We are preparing for a trip to Florida but we will be back in time for Easter. Hopefully the snowy weather will be done by then and we can have a warm Spring Break.

Because of the cold weather, we has school in the bedroom, complete with our lap desk. In Math, J learned about liquid measurement. I brought out all the items we were learning about and if it had been somewhat warmer, I would have allowed her to play with the items and water. Being in 'Merica, J was able to see what a gallon looked like - we use liters instead of gallons.

It is not often J gets to do art work during math. But I found this cute Super Gallon Man craft and figured it was a great time to make it. Super Gallon Man came from Amber Polk's TPT store. You can find it here.

Our story of the week was The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. For her reading, we are working through grade level textbook readers that I have found at thrift stores. But since the story in the textbook doesn't have all of the great cut-outs and such, we used a soft back book of the same story.

After reading the story, J worked through a number sequencing exercise which I turned into a story sequence activity. We used the pictures to make a step book of each day and what the caterpillar ate. This gave her practice in sequencing the story as well as practice writing her days of the week. The sequence activity can be found at Amy Buettner's TPT store.

J is sometimes still mixing up B's and D's. I was checking out pinterest and found a link for a B, D, and P online game for extra practice. The link for the game is HERE. She played this several times and asked for more. She loves when I incorporate any kind of technology into school days.

J practiced her sight words with a memory game that I bought a while ago. The sight words were really pre primer so the game was relatively easy. But she enjoyed it and we played it twice.

Snakes were the focus animal of the week - one of J's loves. We read all about them in various books, which we have read a thousand times before, and she worked through the animal fact sheet for her animal notebook.

Lastly, we had it on our list to make pipe cleaner flowers since last week's story - Flower Garden by Eve Bunting. We didn't get a chance to make them until this week. So, I finally purchased some pipe cleaners and let J go to town.

She made a whole vase of pipe cleaner flowers. They turned out super cute and now are gracing the top on her grandmother's bookshelf. Nothing like have fresh flowers in the middle of a freak snowstorm! I hope you had a great week and I will see you on Monday with a new printable Wheel School Pack. I am just putting the finishing touches on it and hope to have it published soon. Have a great weekend.

Wheel School - F is for Firetruck

I am so excited that I have finally been able to bring back Wheel School in action! It has been months since I have been able to get my plans together and work "school" with Kaleb. We picked up where we left off - with F is for Firetruck. Here are a few of the activities that we accomplished this week. If you would like a copy of my F is for Fire Truck Wheel School Plans, go HERE.

I started the week with the new fireman sensory bin. I just used black beans, foam letter f's, firetrucks, pom poms, fire stickers, and a fire fighter play kit that I got on clearance from Toys R Us.

Kaleb wasn't too sure about the sensory bin. He truly likes a sensory bin without all of the extras. He didn't go to the trouble of picking out all the stuff but he didn't really play with all of the items in the box either.

I brought out his vehicle counters which he has seen for a while. He enjoyed parking the fire trucks in the correct color.

He placed circle stickers onto the letter F from the printable F is for Fire Truck by Royal Baloo. 

He finished it - nice job!

I found these cute little fire men at a thrift store for a buck (love those thrift stores) and I added the shape parking lot game. He would roll the shape cube and then he would place a fire man on the shape he rolled. The parking lot game can be found HERE.

He worked with shapes on his fire truck puzzle from Melissa and Doug. These are great shape puzzles and I love that the pieces are made from wood.

Then, we set up his wooden block city complete with fire trucks. I printed some flames to tape on the building so he could "put the fires out" but he kept removing them. "Boo, boo, ouch," he would say as he handed me the fake flames. I guess he has been listening that he shouldn't be playing with fire - even fake fire.

I am so glad to bring back Wheel School for Kaleb. He had so much fun with school. I still have some activities that he didn't finish for F is for Fire Truck. I place these extra items in a ziplock bag for our Fire Truck revisit.

Tot Tuesday

Sometimes you just have to do something funny.....

Underwear Ninja - at least they were clean!

Winter Promise - Week 23

We are back on track with our learning as we work through our desert unit study. We finished reading A Day in the Desert by Jean Craighead George. We started reading Coyote Autumn by Bill Wallace. J began measuring with centimeters in Math and continued practicing with Magic E in reading. We are working on a letter writing unit (more to come soon) and she is writing every day.

J also began working with 3 number double digit adding, no regrouping yet.

J practicing her addition flash cards. I try to do this daily to improve her memory and skills. She works on simple addition cards, doubles, and doubles plus one. Anytime I can, I offer her several ways to solve a problem in math. I like giving her options so she can choose what she is comfortable using.

Her reading story for the week was Flower Garden by Eve Bunting.  A cute story about a birthday surprise flower garden in the city.

J played a reading game while practicing her Magic E words. This reading game came from All About Reading Level 2.

One fun activity that J did this week was create silly sentences. Recently, I have decided she needs to do more writing so I make her write every day. I found these sentence cards at the $1 Store a while back. She put the cards together to make silly sentences and then copied them into her notebook. When she was finished, I asked her to illustrate one of her favorites.

Some left over craft plans from last week - J learned how to draw a chameleon. The chameleon was the focus animal last week.

Then we made chameleons from pipe cleaners. Not sure they turned out but J liked them.

J's final craft project was a paper chameleon which was so easy to do. She carried it around this week like it was her pet. Busy week, as always, but we are working through it. Sorry about the jacket - these pics were not taken all in one day as it looks. We are currently homeschooling in my parents' basement which we converted to a playroom. It is a great space but it doesn't have any heat so it is really cold. We school down there in the morning and then come up to thaw out for lunch. I like having Kaleb in the playroom while we are working on school because it keeps him busy (somewhat).

Tot Tuesday

I have been enjoying the many thrift stores that our country has to offer. I love being able to find bargains and I especially love finding bargains on learning toys. My recent find at a Goodwill was some lacing beads in a plastic container. I think I paid 4 bucks for them but it came with the lacing strings, different shapes of beads, and a container to store them in. I like these beads, I only wish they were wood instead of plastic. (I love wooden toys) Today, I pulled out the beads for Kaleb to explore.

I offered Kaleb some pipe cleaners but at first, all he wanted to do was make a necklace. He threaded blue and purple beads onto a shoelace. Somewhat frustrating at first, but he eventually got the hang of it. I thought the pipe cleaners would have been easier.

Then the fun came - he began stacking the beads into towers, square beads with square beads, oval with oval. Slowly he was making towers with the beads like they were blocks.

He made several towers with the same type of beads. I waited for him to branch out...

Then he began to mix the types of beads he was using for the towers. He discovered that the round ball-type beads weren't good for stacking but they were good for rolling.

This was the best, though, I love his expression when the towers fell. He would say, "Oh, No!" and laugh. A simple learning toy that is perfect for free play. Sometimes it is better when it isn't planned. These are a keeper.