Wheel School - F is for Firetruck

Week 6 of Wheel School is ready for download. F for firetruck is complete with several games, chants, rhymes, and fun things to do.

Download F is for Firetruck HERE

This week's plans contains several free printable games. The first is number game. Print and laminate the fire houses and your child can use counters to practice his numbers/counting for each house. I love these homemade dalmatian counters from Little Learners Lounge.

The next game is a target practice game. I have included both the alphabet and numbers up to 20. You can laminate the flames or just place them into plastic baggies. Give your child a spray bottle and have him "put out" the fires with water. If water play is not in the cards this week, attach them to paper cups and use bean bags to knock them down.

The last game is a fire station with an upper and lower case F's. I would cut out the garage doors, add a stand (attach it to some blocks or cups), and label some firetrucks or cars with the letters. Have your child "park" the vehicle in the correct door of the station. Enjoy week six of Wheel School. 

Winter Promise Week 6

This week was a whirlwind of activity and fun places to go. We were able to visit the local museum of Science and Industry as a free benefit from being aquarium members. So, for an impromptu school trip, we headed to the museum for some fun. J also studied owls this week and dissected an owl pellet, after much begging on her part. She worked on time and word problems in Math and action words for grammar.

J is playing a reading game with printable eggs. I love this photo with Kaleb in the background. He is never too far away from what we are trying to do.

Her independent story of the week was I Went Walking. We work through a story a week from an old school reader.

We finished our forest/woodlands unit for Winter Promise and ended it by making a diorama of spring and autumn in the forest. Here she is coloring the diorama pieces.

J's finished diorama of the forest. We will be working through the wetlands next.

J is working on her owl page for her animal notebook.

I always try to add items to her notebook. We listened to different sounds that owls make and J drew an owl on her notebook page.

This was the activity that J was so excited about - dissecting an owl pellet. She begged to do this all week. A small note about the owl pellet - this pellet is actually a fake owl pellet that contains only one skeleton of a bird. I know some of you may not think this was a great learning experience but I think it was. A real pellet would have had too many bones for her to process as well as the gross factor of it being kinda smelly (done this before). I will wait a few more years before we actually dissect a real pellet.

Last activity of the week, an owl bead project to finish it off. Not too bad for a busy week, I think. I hope your school week went well.

D is for Dump Truck

We are slowly working through the alphabet and the many vehicles that we can work with. Kaleb is having a blast with a new truck or car to play with/learn with every week. I have not been able to accomplish EVERY activity that I have planned for each letter so I can definitely see re-visiting each vehicle in the near future. Any activity that I have planned for but didn't accomplish gets placed in a ziplock bag (one for each letter) and then filed away for later. I can get pretty bummed about not finishing the unit I schedule but I have to learn to be flexible. There are just times when he wants to focus on one thing and I am okay with that. I am following his lead, not forcing the activities on him. He just gets so excited to see a new set up for each letter and possibly a new car or truck to go along with it. School sometimes gets put to the wayside so he can play with his new treasure. So don't be discouraged if you are not finishing what you planned. Just know that your child is having fun and still learning in the process. Here are a few activities that we did get to this week....

As you can see, I am still using the black beans in our sensory bin. He loves scooping them and pouring them that I just don't have the heart to replace them yet. This week, I added a toy dump truck, D letters, and, as a surprise, plastic pumpkins that I found in Michael's. That was pretty much it - something new to load and dump. He played with those all afternoon...well, pretty much all week.

I found this dump truck at a thrift store and added some number/shape blocks. He would dump them out and start all over again. This was another hit for the week.

The only crafty thing that I could get Kaleb to do was to color the dump truck with markers. He really just wanted to play with the new items in his sensory bin and his new dump truck. That pretty much made him happy. So, I packed the letter D items into a ziplock and will pull them out at a later date. We are off to Excavators and the letter E. Have a great week.

Tot School

Kaleb loves any type of construction vehicle, really any kind of vehicle. Recently, he has been asking for sand to play with his vehicles. He called it "Big Sand." He begged for "Big Sand" for a week and I finally broke down. Because of our living arrangements, I choose to use a plastic under-the-bed container for our new sandbox. It was a hit!

I bought him some construction vehicles at Target.

He loved playing with the "Big Sand." It made his week.

Wheel School - E is for Excavator

Wheel School Week 5 is now available for download. This week is all about E and excavators.

Download E is for Excavator HERE.

The free printable for the week is a tic-tac-toe game using street/highway signs. This would be great laminated and possibly made magnetic. The clip art for the signs is from Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah.

I would love to hear from you if you are finding these plans useful and if you have any ideas or questions. Enjoy the week. See you soon.

 

Winter Promise Week 5

This week, we finished reading Ereth's Birthday, we learned about beavers, and even went to the aquarium. Here are a few activities we accomplished.

Every day, after we read our animal devotional book. We research the animal that the lesson was about and watch a few short videos about them. J has truly enjoyed this.

I added the + 2 flashcard family this week and J is working on remembering the math facts in her head.

J also worked on reviewing telling time to the hour.

J is writing sentences each week with "spelling words" that I give her. This helps her in so many ways.

J is practicing her upper and lower case letters in her handwriting book.

Because of Shark Week, I have a totally shark obsessed child. I found this great shark shirt on clearance the day before we went to the aquarium. She just had to have it.

Even Kaleb enjoyed seeing all of the fish, sharks, and turtles at the aquarium.

J's favorite animal - the sharks of course!

It was nice to take this time and enjoy a learning day out. I truly miss stuff like this when we are overseas and, if I am able, I am planning on providing many more of these learning opportunities while we are here. Hope your week was shark-tastic!

C is for Cement Truck

This week, Kaleb worked through C is for Cement Truck. Here are a few of the activities that he completed. (Looking through these pics, I noticed Kaleb has the same shirt on. He loves his McQueen shirt and begs to wear it. I do wash it, believe it or not. But as soon as it comes out of the dryer, he begs to wear it again.)

 Because cement mixer activities were hard to find, I chose a theme of tools for the week. I found some plastic tools and added them to the play dough toys. Kaleb was somewhat unsure but soon got into the hang of using the tools to pound away at the play dough.

Next, I gave Kaleb some floral foam, golf tees, and a plastic hammer to hammer away.

I found a sandbox toy cement mixer and added letter beads (A,B, and C) in the drum. He had fun dumping the beads out and putting them back in.

In the sensory bin, I added letter C's, some cement mixer toys, and some erasers in the shapes of tools to follow the tool theme. He liked the tool erasers. Actually he liked taking them apart. Kaleb has been construction vehicle crazy lately. Everywhere we go, he watches out the car window and gets excited every time he sees a digger or dump truck. We are on to dump truck week. don't forget to check back for your new printable of the week. See you soon.

Book Suggestions

Roadwork by Sally Sutton

love this one

Big Machines by Karen Wallace

Construction Countdown by K.C. Olsen

love this book

Tools by Taro Miura

The Construction Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallotta

Toot Toot Beep Beep by Emma Garcia

Construction Trucks by Jennifer Dussling

Road Construction Ahead DVD

All About Big Machines DVD 

Tot Tuesday

We have been so blessed to be living near a public library. I have truly enjoyed taking the kids once a week to check out books, participate in toddler time, and feed the ducks. Our library has a wonderful lake beside it full of many kinds of birds.

This lake was one of my favorite spots when my older kids were growing up. I have some great memories taking them to feed the ducks.

But the warm memories are gone. On this particular day, the ducks/birds were especially aggressive, chasing after the kids to get at the bread. J is in distress over this duck chasing her down.

Kaleb is throwing the bread in order to keep the ducks away. Not sure what happened. Maybe the ducks missed breakfast (and lunch) or maybe we were on the wrong side of the pond. But J requested that we NOT do that again. Oh well, no cute pics here. Just aggressive ducks and distressed kids. I definitely won't be trying that again, at least not for a while.