Ten, Nine, Eight, Letter T & Chicka Chicka 123

Grace is 18 months

Jonathan is 37 months

It's been a couple weeks since I've posted. We've managed to stay healthy and busy! Here's what we've been up to the past two weeks.


Valentine's Day Sensory Play

We celebrated Valentine's Day with a fun new sensory bin. I recently found some plastic heart-shaped "table sprinkle" in the dollar section at Target. It made for great  and easy sensory play! We sorted by color, made patterns, and practiced some fine motor pouring. The kids loved this!

RRSP


We've reviewed the letter T this unit, and did many activities Carisa provided in her free curriculum.

Our T verse, props, and words

Jonathan cut out and taped his verse

Tracing "T" -- we're still working on pencil grip!

Books

We read some books from our Sonlight P3/4 curriculum this past week as well as some other favorites:

Ten, Nine, Eight by Molly Bang-- this was sort of our "theme" for the week. We've read this book before, it's a cozy bedtime story.
Baby Says by John Stepcoe-- a story about a baby trying to get his big brother's attention. I think both Jonathan and Grace could relate to this story-- both kids requested it several times!
Busy Timmy from Eloise Wilken Golden Book treasury-- a charming vintage story about a little boy's activities during his day.
Chicka Chicka 123 by Bill Martin Jr. and Michael Sampson-- oh my, this is currently the story Jonathan requests every night. It reviews numbers 1-20 and then covers 30-100 by tens. It's really sparked a huge interest in numbers for Jonathan.




Math & Logic 


To go with our reading of Ten, Nine, Eight, we made a sticker book counting down from 10 to 1. We used Cars stickers, since Lightning McQueen is a favorite around here:

Jonathan made the book while Grace just had fun playing with stickers. We also practiced counting backwards, but this didn't click with Jonathan yet. At least reciting numbers. If he's counting down the number of "sleeps" until a desired activity, he has no problem knowing how many are left! :)

Reading 


We did a free trial of the website Reading Eggs. Overall, Jonathan liked it. We made it through the first eight lessons. It did help his word-building skills and he's read some words on his own. The only thing that frustrated him was that they would repeat an activity over-and-over again. For example, he would have to click on the letter "t" twenty times while it made the "t" sound. He got pretty bored with it and would want me to complete the activity so he could move on to the next one. But, he did enjoy it overall and has requested it several times. I haven't paid for access, I'm not entirely sure if it's worth it or not due to the level of frustration.


Art

We did a lot of coloring the past few weejs. I found some coloring books at the Target dollar spot and we had fun with those. Grace loves to color, but I have to watch her with the crayons!

Motor Skills 


We went to our park district's open gym time several times over the past few weeks. We also had a little bit of snow last week and had fun playing outside!

Linking this up to:

Tot School @ 1+1+1=1
Preschool Corner @ Homeschool Creations
Link & Learn @ No Time for Flashcards

Goodnight Moon Unit

Grace is 18 months

Jonathan is 37 months

A couple weeks ago we did a Goodnight Moon unit. Goodnight Moon is included as a book in Sonlight P3/4 as well as Before Five in a Row. We combined activities from several different sites (see links at bottom of post). 

Sensory Bin

I made the kids a Goodnight Moon themed sensory bin. I tried to get a good picture of what was inside, but all the pictures were blurry. The green "room" had black beans, silver stars, white "moon" (pom poms), three bears from our counting bears, a cow, red "balloons" (pom poms), and a cat. Both Jonathan and Grace had a lot of fun pouring, spooning, transferring the beans back and forth. 

Books 


We read Goodnight Moon several times as well as:

* Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes
* Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle
* The Three Bears illustrated by Byron Barton

All of the books were a hit with Jonathan. Grace liked Goodnight Moon the best, but also sat through the Three Bears.




Misc

We talked about balloons and reviewed colors, using a printable from Homeschool share. We also had fun playing volleyball with a red balloon. (And we listened to Nena's 99 Luftballoons while we played!)

We practiced beginning sounds, which he aced!

And worked on categorizing things into single or pair:

We counted stars:

Played with our shape clock:

And worked on putting mittens and socks on a clothesline for some fine motor work:

 Some things I didn't get pictures of include playing Volleyball with a red balloon, matching rhyming words, playing Teddy Mix & Match, eating teddy grahams and "full moon" cookies (Oreos)


We had a lot of fun with this unit-- be sure to check out these wonderful resources!

Resources 


Goodnight Moon Printables @ Homeschool Share
Goodnight Moon Printables @ Homeschool Creations
Goodnight Moon Activities @ Delightful Learning
My Goodnight Moon Pinterest board

Linking this up to:

Tot School @ 1+1+1=1
Preschool Corner @ Homeschool Creations
Link & Learn @ No Time for Flashcards


Have a great week!

Letter Ll Adventures

We recently covered several themes as we learned about the Letter Ll. For the majority of the lesson, we used Carisa's awesome (free!) Raising Rockstars curriculum. Since Jonathan knows all his letters at this point, I wanted to use the program to help him prepare for writing as well as hiding more of God's Word in his heart...

Here are some highlights of our "L" week

Light- Our memory verse for this week was Let your light shine before men so that they may see your good good works and glorify your father in heaven. We made Popsicle stick props and both Jonathan and Grace had fun waving them around to our song: This Little Light of Mine. I was so excited that even Grace got some of the memory verse down. She would say "shine!" when I would repeat the first half of the verse. We also complemented each other when we would catch our lights "shining" such as by sharing toys.

We did some pre-writing exercises using our Crayola Dry Erase Activity Center-- I love that it saves me the cost of laminating pages!

Jonathan pasted our "L" words to a piece of scrapbook paper:

We learned a rhyme about lemons and made lemon pudding:

For fine motor work, Jonathan practiced opening and closing a lock:

We played The Ladybug Game:

and finger/sponge-painted leaves:

Jonathan loves vehicles of every kind, so we learned about limousines and played with our Hotwheels Limousine .


Long Limousines (Extreme Machines)
Limousines (Roaring Rides) 

We had a lot of fun with our "L" adventures. We did some pages from Go for the Code and Jonathan did quite well with them. He actually surprised me! I knew he had letter recognition and the phonetic sound down, but he did an awesome job with identifying beginning sounds.

Math & Logic 


We did a couple pages from our math and logic workbooks. These ones were super easy for him (counting and color identification), but he enjoyed them a lot and wanted to do more. For a non worksheet kid, that's saying something!

So that summarizes our "Ll" adventures. It took about two weeks for us to complete the unit due to sickness and life. Thanks for visiting!

Linking up to:

Tot School @ 1+1+1=1
Preschool Corner @ Homeschool Creations

January In Review-- Homemade BeanBags, Cinnamon Rolls, First Art Experiences,

Jonathan is 36 Months
Grace is 17 Months

Well, I need to get caught up on posting! Hoped to start last week, but a round of illness hit us (high fevers, respiratory infections, ear infections, pinkeye...). My poor Jonathan was miserable! He's finally feeling better so I'm excited to start some more activities with him this coming week. :) 

Here are some highlights of the last couple weeks (what little we did):

Colors- Grace and I have been trying to work on colors. Here are a few activities we've done:

•   I made pairs of beanbags out of fat quarters ($1 per color at Walmart). I got a new sewing machine for Christmas and they were so easy to make (I'm a sewing newbie). We work on identifying colors and matching colors with these. They're also a lot of fun to throw!

Homemade beanbags

• I've also been making her "color baskets". We put several toys of the same color in one basket and talk about the colors.

Our red basket.

Books & Vocabulary- Grace is talking quite a bit. Right now she loves finding books and curling up in our laps. She especially likes the books with pictures of everyday objects (such as Roger Priddy books). She likes pointing to the items and trying to say or repeat the names.

Cooking- Jonathan and Grace enjoy standing in the learning tower and watching us cook. They had fun watching daddy make homemade cinnamon rolls the other day:

Art-

Grace tried fingerpainting for the first time, as well as dot painting with our Do-A-Dot Markers. They also love coloring on our new easel they got for Christmas. Grace is a sneaky one though-- she likes to walk off with the crayons and color on other objects.

Jonathan got a paint with water book for Christmas, and he has fun painting the cars:

Motor Skills- After being cooped up, we went to our park district's open gym time. We were nearly the only ones there! It was fun and it let them get some of that energy out:

Grace was so tired by the end of the hour that she just laid down:

Thanks for visiting!

I'm linking this post up to:

Tot School at 1+1+1=1
Link & Learn at No Time for Flashcards
Sunday Showcase @ Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas