I Can Do It!

One task that has been on my list for J to learn how to do is tying her shoes. I have had it on my mind since the beginning of the year but I have continuously put it off. Well, no more. As a new year's resolution, I decided it was time for J to learn how to tie her shoes. I told her as such and she informed me that she wasn't old enough to learn that. I finally had the chance to teach her on a day that DS stayed home from school and watched the tot while we worked on school. No interruptions - the tot wasn't happy about not joining us but it was just what we needed to get this task done.

We watched several videos and tried to use the shoe practice card that I found this summer. But we soon found out that a regular sneaker was the best way to learn.

Finally "getting it." See that smile, she knows she finally got it. Go, J! (Please excuse the jammies, J asked for a jammie school day and how could I resist?)

Art Appreciation - Grandma Moses

It has been awhile since our last artist study and I am glad to finally have Art Friday back in our schedule. I discontinued Art Friday due to all of the crafty projects we did over the holidays. But now, we are in a new month and we are moving on in our art study. Grandma Moses is our new artist and she came just in time for our snow storm! It was perfect since one of the projects was to actually create a snow landscape picture!

Week 1

(Sorry for the flash on Grandma) I made some art cards of Grandma Moses' work and we hung them on our art door. These cards will stay there while we study her.

J worked on a puzzle that I create using Grandma Moses' painting - The Country Wedding. I made this magnetic so it would be easier to complete. We also listened to our Grandma Moses song from the Hope Harris cd - Picasso...That's Who!

We played an art memory game that I also created using pictures of Grandma Moses' art work. I am planning on printing other works from the artists that we have studies to add to this memory game. I also added a photo of Grandma so we will be able to sort the art work by artists as well. If you would like the file, please leave me a message and I will send it to you. I don't want to share it because I do not own the images.

J loves it when she wins!

Our art project consisted of making our own snow scene. J cut hills from white paper and added two apartment buildings (her house as she knows it- is the one with the heart). She drew the details of the buildings and her pulling a sled with markers. Then comes the fun part - using an old toothbrush, she splattered white paint so it would look like it was snowing.  (Just a side note, our house is the one with the heart and anyone who knows our situation here, the other apartment belongs to the grumpy guy - her words. He looks kinda grumpy!)

We aslo had the privilege of having a friend over for our art time. J made a new friend who is older than her but also home schooled. She came over for some playtime and art (hence the reason there are no pictures of the art process). I will share with you, J's friend's picture. She did a good job too. She drew everything herself.

Week 2

Our nest Grandma Moses project is a sort of Jackson Pollock and Moses mix. I found this idea from First Palette about making a winter scene using a Starbucks cup. It was brilliant and not as messy as it sounds. I wish I would have found this project when I was doing Jackson Pollock. It takes marble painting to a safe level.

Using a Starbucks cup with a lid, you add pieces of colored paper and a marble dipped in paint.

Add the lid, tape over the hole, and shake to your content. Let your paper dry and get ready to piece it.

J cut rectangles and triangles from the painted paper after it had dried. Using the shapes, she created a snow scene. (Kaleb had to join in the fun as well.)

Here is J's finished night time snow scene complete with stars and a moon.

Week 3

Our final project was based on creating folk art. Grandma Moses was a folk artist, which means that she did not have any formal training in art. She taught herself to paint. She never mixed her colors - I thought that was interesting, she just used the colors from the tubes, never mixing or changing. The final project was to allow the kids to create their own piece of folk art by drawing an animal with crayon on white paper. Then, they were to draw some patterns and details using the crayons as well.

After the details were drawn with crayon, they used watercolor to paint over the picture. Here is J's "cobra getting ready to eat a rat" picture turned out. It wasn't quite was I was looking for but she seemed happy with it. Our study of Grandma Moses is finished, we will be moving onto a new artist plus adding in some Valentine art as well.

Links

Squidoo Lens this lens has a great video of Grandma Moses' art work.

Teaching Kids Art Appreciation has some ideas for recreating Moses' art work using beans.

Garden of Praise has an online Moses' puzzle to put together. She also has a page on Grandma Moses.

Our Journey Westward has a perspective lesson while learning about Moses.

Art Masterpiece Mom has a chicken painting project to try.

Kids Art Market has a tissue paper bird project to do for folk art.

The Art Student has some links to several different art lessons based on Grandma Moses.

Vivid Layers has a landscape project to try.

Dream Draw Create has another landscape project idea.

First Palette has the project with the Starbucks cup, love it.

Art Projects for Kids this is where I found the inspiration for the folk art project.

Tot Tuesday

Kaleb has recently found the Unifix cubes that we have. These Unifix cubes are great for math concepts and J uses them all most daily to complete her addition problems and such in math. They are a great tool to have for math.

I keep the blocks in our math bin and lately, everyday, he has pulled them out to play with them.

He is so intent on connecting them together in one great big row. He gets somewhat frustrated when he can't connect them all. Then he hands them to J who will connect them for him.  I have included some links if you are looking for activities for your cubes. Hope they help.

Links

A Child's Place has free printable pages to practice patterning with the cubes. She also has 4 seasons counting mats for the cubes as well.

Erin Special Education also has some free printable cube patterns.

Diving Into Learning has free printable cube ten frames.

Kindergarten Crayons has a free printable penguin math mat to use with your cubes.

Home Grown Learners has a great idea of using the cubes with flash cards.

Smart First Graders has a list of math activities for the cubes.

PreKinders has printable cube cards to teach more or less.

Confessions of a Homeschooler uses her cubes to cover letters from the alphabet.

Tot School - Yellow

Following the rainbow, our next color is yellow. I started Kaleb with a bin full of yellow items that I collected around the house. I also found a yellow ice cream scoop which just seemed to encourage play.

I gave him two bowls and the ice cream scoop and waited to see what he would do.

He scooped, of course.

He played with yellow play dough - more like ripping/tearing it and putting it into cups.

He cut and glued yellow paper. This is a new favorite activity - glue. It ranks up there with coloring with markers.

He played a lot with the chalkboard - drawing and erasing with his shirt sleeve. What fun!

I brought out a new toy that I had hidden among my shelves. I found these years ago, marked down in a toy store here and used them in my classroom. They are mini magnetic  construction pieces, not sure of the product name. They are extremely magnetic and he had fun creating different things with them. When J wanted to play, he got extremely possessive of them, so I had to limit the time. I will definitely bring these out again.

Sonlight Week 17

We are still working our way through Sonlight Core A. J loves the chapter books but I believe her favorite Core book is Living Long Ago. She asks daily if we are going to read from it. (We won't be reading from it for a few weeks - I checked) This week, we continued our adventure with Dr. Dolittle, we read about flowers and butterflies. We started a new math book - Horizons book 2 for Kindergarten. We even started working with blends in our reading program! It was a big week.

We reviewed the characteristics of shapes - how many sides, corners and such.

I brought out the Boggle Jr. game to see how she would do. We played with the words covered. She did very well with figuring out the words and spelling them.

I want J to have more experience writing her own sentences. I gave her a clipboard and asked her to use the words from her word wall to create her own sentence. She actually wrote two! Then I had her illustrate it.

Here is her finished product. It says, "I am a dog and I like to dig. Hi it is Sunday and I am yellow." She omitted am in her second sentence but not too bad for her first time. We are still working on handwriting. I will be working on this weekly.

Our letter of the week is O.

She learned how to draw an owl.

J is working on her writing, using her word wall.

I pulled out another word sort page. J worked on og, ot, and op words. She read the cards and sorting them into their word families.

Since we were learning about plants in our Science, we planted some seeds in mini egg terrariums that Grandma and Grandpa sent us for Christmas. J was excited to finally plant the seeds.

J asked to play a game during her break time. We played Chutes and Ladders - this is a great way to review numbers to 100. If you aren't careful, you can end up going the wrong way, you have to keep your eye on the numbers. Kaleb is always in the middle of things - here he is, on my lap, spinning for me. Another full week of Sonlight, we are still moving along. Hope your week was full of discoveries.

The Mitten Tot Bag

Finally, I have a new literature based tot bag! This one has been in the works for months.  A new tot bag based on The Mitten by Jan Brett. The Mitten is about a young boy, Nicki, who asks his Grandma to make white mittens. She is hesitant because white mittens can get easily lost in the snow. Nicki does lose one and it becomes a temporary home to several animals. Let me tell you about my tot bag.

First, I made the animal characters in the story. I rarely ever sew without a pattern and I searched high and low for a pattern for the animals. But I could not find anything to make my life easier. So I used the clipart from KPM Doodles as my pattern for our softies. They came out cute and I am happy with them.

Then I had to create a mitten for the animals to fit but when I considered felt, I figured that it would be too unforgiving when the tot tries to fit the animals in. So I made a mitten shaped drawstring bag. This was hastily hand drawn and sewn using knit fabric that I had left-over from another project. All of the animals easily fit into the bag for storage. The animals will be used for retelling the story and such. We will probably do a hide-n-seek game where the tot has to find the animals. Also, a game where the tot has to toss the animal onto the mitten could be played.

Next, I added some mittens that I cut from felt that I had. I used every color of the rainbow and added pink for my girl. This is a two-fold game. Since I am working on colors with the tot, we will play where is the snowball? I will hide the snowball under a mitten and we will use our color words to find it. Secondly, the mittens will be used for a practical life application. Kaleb will hang them on a clothesline with clothespins (fine motor practice). He can also match them as well. The idea for the mitten game came from Kiwi Crate.

Kaleb loves magnetic activities, so I could not disappoint. After much searching, I could not find a simple mitten 2 part puzzle for the tot bag. So I created my own using clip art from My Cute Graphics. Her graphics are so cute and they are free! If you would like the pdf file, click here.

Next, I enlarged mitten clipart and made a sewing card for more fine motor practice. I could not help myself but I had to print and laminate the characters for the book. These are adorable and can be used on our felt board. I will also make some games to go with them. I may add them to our salt tray and have the tot uncover them with a paintbrush.

I added some mittens for practical life - teaching the tot to put on his mittens. They can also be used for matching. I totally love the sparkly white mittens that my mom made for J. We will have fun with these. One game will be to place a small item inside and have the tot guess what it is just by feeling the mitten.

I will be adding sparkle white play dough as soon as I make it. The recipe comes from My Small Potatoes. We will be working on some simple mitten art projects as well as making mitten cookies! I have a fun tot week planned (sprinkled with kindergarten activities), please come back and see my tot bag in action.

Tot Tuesday

I always get that sinking feeling when someone asks, "Where's Kaleb?" First thought, he has gotten into something that I will have to clean up. Is he in the markers or the laundry detergent? Is he unfolding the clothes that I just folded? That question was asked recently and my heart sank. I hadn't seen Kaleb for some time - long enough for some trouble. As I ran around the apartment, looking for him, I was pleasantly surprised when I found this...

He was on my bed, playing with his little matchbox cars. He had dumped every single one that he owned on my bed.

And if you look carefully, my laundry was still folded! Go Kaleb! He wasn't getting into anything, he was just playing quietly, as nice as can be.

Tot School - Orange

Our next color of the week was orange. This was a difficult color to collect items for. It seems everything has the primary colors but orange seems to be left out. Here are a few activities that we worked on this week.

I started him with orange play dough. I gave up play dough after he ate it but that has been awhile, so I brought it back out.

He rolled and squashed it. J asked for a mini break from her school work so she could play as well.

They made orange cookies and such. You'll notice that Kaleb now has a work space of his own. I brought up the IKEA play table that we had so he could have his own space to work. He seems to like this although he still ends up on my lap for part of our school day.

I gave Kaleb red and orange paper as well as red and orange paper clips. The goal was to clip the paper clips onto the color paper. This was a bit too much for him, he wanted to just take them off.

I gave Kaleb some stickers and orange paper. He likes sticking stickers onto things and this is a great fine motor activity.

This is a new addition to our tot school. I taped a piece of orange paper to the bottom of a container and added a layer of salt. I gave Kaleb a paint brush so he could paint away. The idea for the salt tray came from Learning 4 Kids. After we work with the other colors, I will change this to a rainbow color bin. He really liked this. I had to remind him several times to keep the salt in the bin but this is a new activity. I can see later adding pictures to the colored paper to have him uncover them - such as shapes or trucks.

We worked on a color sorting activity with building bricks (like legos). He was really only interested in building with the blocks but it did keep his attention.

Lastly, he "painted" with J and this time he couldn't drink the water! J wouldn't let him. We are moving on to the color yellow and I will have a new tot bag soon. Have a great day.

Sonlight Week 16

We are still working on The Story of Dr. Dolittle this week. We read about inventions such as the tin can and the ice box and we learned about plants. We read about Ida Scudder, a medical missionary to India.

We read about Daniel and his friends in bible.

In Math, I showed J how to use unifix cubes to solve addition problems. She uses one color for the top addend and another color for the bottom, then counts the blocks together. This will be an activity that she will work and check by herself for more math practice. I am trying to put together work items that she can self start so I can work more with the tot. I will create a math sheet for her to record her answers so I can make sure she is understanding.

In her math book, we are learning about perimeter. I showed J how to solve for the perimeter using our blocks. She would add the blocks to each side and then count them together. Using the blocks helps her to add the four digits.

We practiced telling time. One thing I have noticed about Horizons Math is that they tend to forgo reviewing concepts learned earlier. I try to review with her as much as I can remember. We are getting ready to start her new math book and I noticed time was coming up again, so we reviewed what she already knew.

 

J is her mystery letter of the week. That's her favorite letter, of course. She added her name to the letter page.

She worked on drawing a jellyfish for her letter.

This was a new way to review her sight words. It is called Roll, Say and Keep Gingie. I added six of her sight word cards and J would roll a die. If she could read the word in the numbered slot, she could keep the card. We worked through all of her sight words like this. It was much better than just reading the cards. (I just use the game board and not the gingerbread cards.) I love playing learning games to reinforce learning.

J used our new salt bin to practice writing her J's.

J practicing her J's as well as sentence writing.

I printed J's sight words on yellow paper and we added them to our word wall. This is a project that I had been wanting to do for awhile but I was limited on wall space. I took down the map and charts that I had and replaced them with letter. I then added her words that we had been working on from her reading program. I feel that this would be a better use for the wall.

Then I had her write a sentence using any of the words on her wall. I am hoping this will be a good resource for her writing as well as for reviewing her reading. We are moving on...week 17 on its way. I hope that your week went well, see you soon.

Links

Differentiated Kindergarten  Roll, Say, and Keep game, freebie.

Oceans of First Grade Fun has a free Roll and Read Word game based on short A words.

Over the Hills has another free Roll and Read Sight Word Game.