Friday, May 20, 2011

Tot School: Umbrellas, Weather, and Watermelon

We had a pretty full week here. As we're nearing toward the end of the alphabet I find myself getting anxious to be done with this and move onto something new. I have to breathe and remind myself that I can be just as excited about these next couple wrap up weeks as I can about the material I'm planning on starting in July. We are going to be using Hubbard's Cupboard as our main outline. It should be fun...it is a great guideline. First things first....we need to finish up this year!

Umbrella fun
Asa decorated coffee filters with markers and then sprayed them with water. We used the Uu for the handles.
The finished piece. Asa added glue dots and glitter to make raindrops. I think it turned out cute. (I have got to buy some white coffee filters...this would've turned out better if I had them).
Sorting uppercase and lowercase Us. These are from Confessions of a Homeschooler. He is very over these. He will do them to humor me, but it takes him all of 15sec. before he's done. He is ready to move onto something more difficult. He may just jump right in and learn how to read alongside Annabelle!
We talked about how umbrellas aren't only used in the rain, but can also keep the sun off of you. I made play-doh, left it the natural color and added in some vanilla extract. Then I gave him an umbrella and shells to create a beach scene. What a ham. :)
This is another fun activity from the Confessions link. Count the raindrops and match the number. This boy not only knows all his letters and their sounds....he also knows all his numbers 1-10! He is a sponge for knowledge and never ceases to amaze me.
He does really well with one-to-one correspondence too.
Fun with weather
One Tuesday we talked about clouds. I got some really cute ideas from a blog that I read and now can't remember. If these activities look familiar to you let me know so that I can link back to you! We read It Looked Like Spilt Milk. Afterwards we made our own cloud pictures with white paint and blue paper folded in half. I instructed Asa to only paint on the one side and then fold it in half and pound on it. Then when we opened it back up we tried to figure out what it looked like. This was really a lot of fun....even though most of our pictures resembled.....spilt milk.
This is one that we decided was a butterfly.
We then talked about how wind blows the clouds and had a cloud blowing race.
Poor Asa.....he could only blow his cloud backwards.
This says pre-writing, but I thought it would be more fun for Asa to practice cutting. You can print this out from 2 Teaching Mommies.

Toward the end of the week we got sidetracked by watermelon. I cut out a rough looking watermelon and laminated it. Set out some letters and black beans. Asa counted out the correct amount of 'seeds'.
Working on his watermelon for the letter Ww.
The finished masterpiece.
SILAS
Silas had a great time with this tray and played with it many times this week.

He also had a lot of fun drawing. I asked him, "Silas, what are you drawing?" And he said....
"CARS!" I couldn't believe he was actually practicing his still life drawings. lol
Putting beads into the container. Another activity that was played with a lot this week.

He also made a couple of 'spilt milk' pictures.
.....and participated in our cloud race.
We had extreme weather here in Michigan this week ranging from the upper 40s one day to the upper 60s the next....and I really hope that we get that 80 degree day tomorrow. So it was fun to talk about the different weather every day. I thought I would end with a few pictures of the different activities we did in different weather.

On our cold day we played Hungry Hippos (really, very, loud annoying game lol).
On our warm day we played outside. My little artist at work....
....he was practicing his still life again. He said, "Mommy....flower." He's a genius. ;) lol
Asa picking me a bouquet of flowers. (I rather like dandelions...they're so cheerful).
I hope that everyone else had a great week! Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Hop on over to 1+1+1=1 to see what other tots have been up to this week!
Tot School

3 comments:

  1. what a wonderful way to start my day :)

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  2. Lots of fun!! Love the watermelon counting.

    Just popping in from tot school.

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  3. ahh.. so many great activities! The cloud blowing race is awesome!! :)

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