Sonlight Bible Verse Tracers 1st 9 weeks

I have been slowly preparing for Sonlight Kindergarten (Core A) for the next school year. I wanted to give J some handwriting practice and I made some bible tracer sheets for the first nine weeks. Now, we are using Core A from a year ago, not the newly updated one. I am not sure that makes a difference but just in case. If you find any errors, please let me know so I can fix them. I made these late one night so it is possible. They are not perfect but I think they will do the job. How do I use these tracers? In order not to overwhelm J, I usually allow her to do one line a day or if there is  more than five lines, I break it up among the week.

I also created mini pocket chart printables for each of the bible verses. These should fit into the mini pocket charts that you can get from Target before school. I like the idea of having the verse visual so we can practice it often. Again, I used the Sonlight Kindergarten (Core A) and the verses written in the manual. Again, if you find mistakes, please let me know. I hope these can be helpful to you. I am working on the next nine weeks verses to be posted at a later date. I uploaded the documents into Google Docs - sorry each of the verses and charts are separate pdf's, I don't have a program that can combine them yet. I would love to know if these were helpful to you. Also, if you have any more ideas of printables that would be helpful for the Sonlight Kindergarten, please let me know, maybe I can work them out. Please visit my Sonlight page to find the files.

Sonlight Kindergarten

Hungry Caterpillar Tot Bag

This is another one of our favorite books around here. Although we don't have the board book version of this classic, I definitely want to share this with my toddler. I am preparing for the new school year, and I am working on activity bags for him. My first tot bag was Brown Bear, Brown Bear. These bags will hopefully help to keep him happily occupied while I work with J. Here is my Hungry Caterpillar Tot bag.

My goal with these tot bags is to use materials on hand to create them. This makes it easily accessible for other to recreate them as well. These are the activities I planned for the book.

I have caterpillar lacing. The caterpillar is two green pipe cleaners wrapped around each other. I cut out some fun foam fruit and punched a hole inside it. The caterpillar with eat "through" the fruit. We can use this to pattern the fruits eaten by the caterpillar and this is also a fine motor activity. I made fruit bean bags for some bean bag fun - gross motor activities. We will use these to play all sorts of games.

I have a butterfly magnetic activity. Kaleb will match the butterfly with the magnetic pom poms that I made. I also printed out a sizing activity - put the caterpillars in order from smallest to largest (or vice versa).

This is probably my favorite activity that I made. It is a hungry caterpillar clank can that I made from a large Ranch dressing bottle. I covered the bottle with green paper and created the face. I printed the foods the caterpillar ate and glued them to milk caps. Kaleb is going to love this, he just loves putting things inside things. (The antennas are probably not going to make it after the first play but he will still be cute.) The only thing I didn't make in the kit is the butterfly finger puppet that I bought at IKEA awhile ago. Everything else in the tot bag is made or printed. I am looking forward to sharing this great story with my son. Now, all of my activities fit into a ziplock bag and are awaiting for the day I pull them out.

Hungry Caterpillar links

The Great Green Room this is where I found the idea for caterpillar lacing.

Making Learning Fun the idea for the clank can came from here, this site also has tons of Hungry Caterpillar printables.

Enchanted School House the bean bags idea came from here, she has a great hungry caterpillar bean bag game, it was too big to fit into my tot bag but I may still create this.

1plus1plus1equals1 Hungry Caterpillar Tot book, free printable, her stuff is great and she always shares, this is where I found the caterpillar sizing activity.

All Join In another clank can idea using a pringles container, this is where I found the link for the food printable I glued to the milk caps.

Childcare Land there is an extreme amount of free stuff here, just keep scrolling, I found the butterfly magnet pages here. She has other versions of these as well as everything else you can think of.

Yellow Mums I truly wanted to make this but I have some other tot bag ideas that I wanted to get to before the summer starts, so it will have to wait. I love the idea of have a puppet or large caterpillar to act out the story.

Monday's Discovery

Kaleb has a new friend. This friend of his has been chewed, licked, and even bit without the friend even protesting!

Over the past few weeks, we have noticed a reoccurring friend in Kaleb's arms. It is the little mouse from If You Take a Mouse to the....books. My mom bought it for J because of a "mouse" incident one summer. Kaleb had taken this mouse over. He loves this thing, hugging it, biting it. If you ask him, "Where's your mouse?" He will go look for it. Isn't he cute?

Brown Bear Tot Bag

For the past few weeks, my toddler son has been carrying around his favorite board book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle. He loves this book so much that I put the art work by his changing table. Every time we change a diaper, we talk about the animals and the sounds they make. I am preparing for next school year for my older daughter and I really wanted to gather some activities for Kaleb to do while we were working. I like the busy bag idea found on pinterest.com. Children's lit is one of my passions and it seemed only natural to create a busy bag based on a book. Here is my creation....

My Brown Bear tot bag. By no means do I plan to do "school" with my toddler. I just wanted to include some fine motor activities and fun things to keep him pleasantly occupied. He may or may not be able to do all of the activities provided but I am sure he will grow into them.

First, my pride and joy - Brown Bear finger puppets. I had this idea swimming in my head for a long time. I searched and searched the internet for patterns and ideas. I struggled with the fish until I just traced the art work from the two part puzzles. All my links will be at the bottom of the post if you are interested in making these.

I found these in a Brown Bear printable pack from 1plus1plus1equals1. They are two part puzzles. I printed them, laminated them, and glued magnets on the back. The cookie sheet makes a portable magnet board. Kaleb loves playing with magnets - taking them off, putting them on.

I also found this color wheel activity from homeschool share. Will he be able to match the colors? Maybe. I really just wanted to give him some practice with the clothespins - fine motor activity. I added paper strips with the some of the characters from the book. This could be used two different ways. I would let him color them and then, we would work with scissors to cut them. I love the toddler scissors that only cut paper - no hair or fabric. Scissors may be hard for him but I wanted to give him a diverse selection of activities to do. I wanted to add an eye spy bottle but I didn't have all of the animals to put inside. This one uses printed paper animals to find but I really wanted to use small play animals (maybe let J paint them). So that will have to wait until I get back from 'Merica.

I plan on making more tot bags based on board books that we own. They will have several activities in each bag. Just choosing the next book I will work on is the hardest part for me.....Chicka Chicka Boom Boom....Goodnight Moon.... More to come. Hope you enjoyed my creation. If you have any ideas that would be great to add, please let me know. I am always looking for new ideas.

Brown Bear Links

http://www.homeschoolshare.com/brown_bear_brown_bear.php  this file has the color wheel activity and the strips for cutting

http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/BrowBearBrownBear.html  this file has the two part puzzles as well as so much more for an older child, I traced the fish from the puzzles. I just couldn't find a good fish finger puppet pattern.

http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/BrownBearEyeSpyBottle.htm here is the eye spy bottle idea with the paper animals and a pre reader checklist, and tons more activities

http://sebastiandiaries.blogspot.com/2011/11/felt-fun.html this blogger made a puppet glove based on Brown Bear

http://brightappleblossom.blogspot.com/2010/12/felt-finger-puppets.html most of my finger puppets came from here, she even has a printable pattern!

Feathers for Lunch

Recently J asked to learn more about birds. She has gone a bird craze about the house, pretending we are all birds, making a nest full of eggs that I must sit on, flapping her wings. This book was perfect for learning about birds. Feathers for Lunch is written by Lois Ehlert. The pictures and story are just fun. It is about a cat who gets out and is trying to catch a bird for lunch but all he ends of eating are feathers. What I love about this book is that each page has a different bird as well as a different plant and the birds pictures are life size. Each bird and plant are labeled making it easy to research them. Here are some of the activities we worked on this week.

We are still working on number recognition and skip counting. Homeschool Share has a great kindergarten bird kit. Here, J is working on skip counting by 5's. I hid a smaller bird under one of the numbers and she had to guess where the bird was. She wasn't allowed to look until she said the number correctly. We took turns playing this.

I found a bird graphing sheet. J had to cut out the birds and place them in the correct column. We talked about what bird had the least and which one had the most.

We discussed the differences between birds and cats. I read the sentences and she choose where they belonged. We worked on an animal classification app called Montessori Vertebrates. It went through the differences between mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, and amphibians. After listening to the differences, J had to determine what the animal was based on the characteristics that she learn. This was a good game for her.

Our rhyme this week is Sing a Song of Sixpence. Here, J is coloring the cover sheet for her nursery rhyme notebook pages. I can't say I love this rhyme, we changed a few of the words to make it more friendly.

Another project for our nursery rhyme book. She is coloring her blackbird blue. She is doing well remembering all of the rhymes that we have done so far. She is always asking to review them. We are still learning about birds this week. We aren't done. I wanted to add one more picture...J is loving two movies right now. She is always asking to watch either one every day. Her favorites are Gnomeo and Juliet and The Wild. It was such a nice day yesterday that the kids were playing in their sandbox on the balcony. Keke took this funny picture.

J is playing Juliet with her feet stuck to the tower (you have to see the movie), holding up her flower. Kaleb is mimicking her. Isn't that cute? Hope your day is warm and sunny.

Monday's Discovery

This week's discovery - no pants! I went to get Kaleb up after a nap and this is what I found - a half naked baby! He figured out to get his pants off. How funny. I asked him where his pants were and he promptly showed me...

on the floor. Pants - who needs them? Have a wonderful day.

The Carrot Seed

This week J and I are participating in a virtual book club and the selected book is The Carrot Seed by Ruth Kraus. This is a Before Five in a Row selection so we actually had this book on hand. It is a book about a child who plants a carrot seed and waits for it to grow. He patiently waits even though his family tells him that it isn't going to grow. He is rewarded in the end though. After we read the book, I gave J a bucket full of carrots and asked her to arrange them in order from small to large.

J then guessed how long they would be and I wrote her answers on pieces of paper. We pulled out our Inchimals and measured the carrots to see if her estimations were correct. 

She wasn't too far off from her estimates.

We read another book about what things grow underground and we talked about roots. J made a positional word book that I found (sorry, don't have the website) named Where is the Carrot? She colored the pages and attached the moveable carrot piece to the back of the book. It turned out cute.

Where is the carrot - between the other carrots...

in the bowl...it is cute.

J worked a number maze to help the rabbit get to the carrots. She used our pom pom magnets that I made.

We then reviewed the alphabet using carrots programmed with letters. She first placed them in order.

Then, played a game with them.

We took turns writing letters and finding the missing carrots. She liked this game especially because she was trying to trick me.

We used pictures of carrots and wheelbarrows to work with patterning. We worked ABAB patterns, AAB, and ABB. We will use these pictures to work math problems as well.

We discussed vegetables that we liked and disliked. J drew smiley faces for the ones she liked and sad faces for the ones she didn't on the chart.

J worked through the life cycle of a carrot by sequencing the pictures.

We reviewed the needs of plants to survive and made a little carrot book.

This was probably J's favorite part. We set up a Farmer's Market and went shopping. I made shopping lists and price tags to work with money. J would shop for the vegetables on the list and we would add up the total price. She would then pay the correct amount.

We played this over and over, each taking turns being the shop keeper and the shopper. She would introduce me to her kids and her mother. It was fun. I need to remember to do this more often. The fruit and veggies were a combination of felt one that I sewed and plastic ones that came with her kitchen set. We had a jammed packed couple of days for The Carrot Seed and we aren't done. We still have to try different dishes with carrots, make some carrot muffins, paint with carrots, and plant a carrot. Whew, that's a lot, huh? 

Well, I have to get back to the store, my customers are waiting.....