Week 18 - Letter M

Last week was letter M and we went with a very YUMMY theme - M&Ms!!  :) I have a ton of pictures from this week, and believe it or not, we didn't even get through everything I wanted to do.  I guess maybe I planned a little too much.  :)

Jenna enjoying the Letter M with the Starfall app on my iPad.

Wikki Stix

Working hard on her lacing card

All done!

Size sort

Prewriting pages

Letter M Puzzle

Jenna had a little trouble making the M on her geoboard.  Making the two slants in the middle of the letter was confusing to her.  She kept wanting to make them straight.

Do-a-dot page

Color Puzzles

Poke page

More practice matching lowercase letters to the uppercase letters.

For her ABC book, she glued marshmallows to the letter M.  I actually cut the marshmallows in half so they wouldn't stick out as much.  It worked out well and Jenna did a good job gluing the sticky side down.

Sticking the sticky side of the marshmallows to her fingers - fun, fun!

Of course we had to have some fun with actual M&Ms.  I have an M&M counting book from when I taught that I thought would be fun.  It has you sort a certain number of M&Ms by color and line them up in specific designs.  We only did the first half of the book because the second half gets into making sets and since Grant was a part of this activity, I knew it would be too much for him and probably for Jenna too.  They both enjoyed it and did a good job of following directions.

Jenna picked out the stickers and completed the letter maze all on her own.

Patterning

Counting practice

Pattern Blocks

Another time I gave the kids a bowl of M&Ms and had them sort them by color.

He does a great job with his colors (minus the stray orange M&M on the yellow spot).  :)

Then we combined each color of M&Ms into clear cups, added some water to cover them all, and the kids got to paint.  I saw this idea online and thought it would be fun!

I was curious to see how well the dye was for painting and was really surprised at how vibrant the colors were.  They actually make for great paints!  Oh, and I didn't tell Jenna to write the letter M - she did that all on her own.  I thought that was cute!

Cutting practice

Letter writing - on the back of the paper I wrote the word "Mom" and tried to have her copy it.  Since we've already covered the O and are now doing M, I thought it would be pretty easy for her.  Nope...still challenging to copy letters without the aide of dotted lines.  It'll come...

Letter M tracing page

Letter Hunt

Number cards - she loves using the paper clips for these

We read the classic If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff.  I had planned on also making muffins with the kids, but that was one of the activities we just didn't get to.

Some more building practice.  Still challenging, especially when having to make a pyramid shape.

She colored her M&M paper when I wasn't around, but apparently she just likes to eat the pink M&Ms - perfect for the Valentine's season.  ;)

This was supposed to be her graphing practice and I had planned on using real M&Ms to graph, but we were running short on time, so I skipped the M&M part and just had her match the number cards. 

Letter M sort

My cousin had actually given me this puzzle (along with many other teaching resources) as a graduation gift upon graduating from Cedarville.  It's so much fun and fit in PERFECTLY with our theme this week! 

Lastly, we added the letter M to our coconut tree.

Week 17 - Letter H

For our first week back to school after Christmas break, we continued with the Letter H.  I had a few more activities planned for the week, but we ran out of time to squeeze everything in.  Jenna was very anxious to get back to school.  I'm glad to see she's enjoying it rather than me trying to force her to do something she doesn't want to do.  :) 

Since I got an iPad for Christmas, I'm able to use it now for school.  So instead of dragging the laptop downstairs for the kids to do their letter games on it, I can just use the iPad.  I LOVE it!

Jenna and Grant playing Starfall on the iPad.

Hippo lacing card

Wikki Stix

Size Sort

Since it's way too easy for Jenna to match uppercase letters with the uppercase words and vice versa, I decided to switch it up.  She now has to match the lowercase letters with the uppercase words.  At first she didn't want to do it I think because it's a bit more challenging for her, but with a little help and encouragement she figured it out. 

I love these building games!  It's actually quite challenging for her.  I cover up all but one row at a time, so she only has to focus on a few colors and patterns.  Then we move on to the next row.  I think when she just looks at the whole thing at once, it's very confusing and overwhelming for her. 

Number writing practice - Since she's four, I wanted her to try to write the number four by herself with the dotted lines.  Not too bad!

Grant will sometimes pull things off the shelves to work on while I'm working with Jenna.  Today he decided to sort the colored bears into the correct cups. 

I've been impressed with how well Jenna does with the letter sound pages.  I say the names of the pictures and then she sounds them out on her own to figure out which ones to circle.  For the most part, she is able to do this completely on her own.  It's so neat to hear her sounding out the beginning sounds in the words!

She LOVES these letter mazes.  They're rather easy, but since she enjoys it so much, I don't mind her doing them each week.  It's nice having fun, easy activities mixed in with some more challenging ones.  Plus, she gets to pick out the stickers to use, which she thoroughly enjoys!

Do-a-dot markers

Grant wanted me to take his picture after he decorated his geoboard with some rubber bands.  :)

Color matching game - I figured she'd be able to do this activity just fine since the color words are the actual colors of the words.  I was just impressed with  how neatly she lined it all up.  Usually when she does these puzzles, they're scattered all over.

Jenna came up with this idea for making the letter H.  She grabbed the stick and had Grant lay down next to her.  Very creative!

Jenna's letter  H on her geoboard

Coloring page using a marker

We pulled out the playdough to make the letter Hh.  I originally wanted her to work on rolling the playdough out like a snake, but she was working really hard at just covering the letters (and doing some rolling), so I let her do it her own way.

She made the letter H using her paint bag.  I probably need to add more paint.  The lines don't show up too well and it doesn't seem to hold her interest for long.  :)

Patterning

For her ABC book, she filled the letter H with heart stickers.

Poke page - she did a great job and was very meticulous about poking lots of holes on the black lines.

For Christmas we got her a dot-to-dot book for numbers 1-10.  This was her first experience with doing dot-to-dot, so it took some practice and explaining, but she did it. 

Letter H puzzle

Cutting practice - she got a little sloppy with this page, trying to rush through it to get to the next activity.

A new app I downloaded on my iPad that I LOVE for the kids is called Letter School.  It gives you practice writing capital and lowercase letters and numbers 1-10.  There are three "rounds" for each letter.  The first round, dots appear at specific points on the letter to show you where to start and end.  You just touch the dot and either bubbles, train tracks, chain links, or some other fun image scrolls through how to write the letter.  Then the second round you have to use your finger to trace over the white line and another fun image follows your finger as you go.  If you go off the line, it slides back to the beginning and you have to start again.  This can be very frustrating for Jenna, but it's good practice for her to slow down and to try again.  Then the third round the white line disappears and you have to trace the letter from memory.  It gives you a few tries before the line pops back up to remind you of how it goes.  It's very fun, interactive, and great practice for her!  Did I say how much I love this app??  ;)

Letter writing

Roommates

We've gone back-and-forth about how to rearrange rooms with the baby soon arriving.  We bought bunk beds last year, but have kept them unbunked, so our options have been:

1. Keep the kids in their separate rooms and just keep the baby in our room;
2. Put the kids in one room and bunk their beds,
OR
3. Put the kids in one room and don't bunk their beds.

There were pros and cons to both, which made it tough.  I have learned that for me it's best to move the baby into his/her own room after a few weeks, otherwise I hear every little peep and squeak it makes, which not only wakes me up, but I in turn tend to then wake the baby up.  So we ruled out the first option.

We strongly considered moving the kids into one room and bunking their beds; however, with Jenna just having turned four-years old, we were still wary of having her on a top bunk.  Plus, we just knew despite our best efforts, Grant would climb to the top and that all spells DISASTER.  So no bunked beds...yet.

So we landed on putting the kids in one room and keeping their beds unbunked.  Of course it really takes up quite a bit of space, but at least we got everything to fit!  We were really concerned with how the transition to sharing a room would go, especially come nap time and bedtime.  Plus I wondered if Grant would feel like he was "kicked out" of his room or that Jenna lost her room, but both were really excited to become roommates.  I think it will create a special bond between them. 

We've had to make some adjustments to our nap time and bedtime routine in the process and we're still trying to work out some issues, such as whether to drop Jenna's nap, but we'll get it figured out.  Hopefully we can establish a good routine before the baby arrives.  Although, then we'll probably have to adjust that routine some to make way for a new routine with the baby.  Ha! 

Since we decided not to find out the gender of the baby, I'm in limbo with painting any rooms.  With Grant being in Jenna's room, I'd like to paint over the pink; however, if we have a girl we might decide to move the baby in Jenna's room once she's a little older.  And I'd hate to paint over the blue in Grant's room and take down the airplanes in case we do have a boy.  So in the meantime Grant gets to enjoy the pink.  :)

The view from the doorway

We moved Grant's bookcase in Jenna's room so we could have more room for storage.  It works great!

We're happy with the current set-up and ready to meet baby #3!!  Now if we could only figure out a boy and girl name....maybe we should start working on that.  ;)