Clothespin wheels

We printed off the Color wheel, Shape Wheel and ABC Wheel that I found on 1+1+1+1. I pulled out the ABC clothespin wheel and it was harder than I thought it would be for Sophia. This is a good thing! :-) She has so many activities that she is a pro at, that its a good thing when I find an activity that uses the skills she needs to work on! For this reason we got about 9 letters on her first time and then took a break and we moved onto the color wheel. She flew threw that! We will be going back to the clothespin wheel today! It challenged her letter recognition and fine motor. Getting the clothespins open was hard for her. She did giggle as she called them alligators eating the letters. Maybe I'll make some green with teeth??:-)

We also worked on stringing fruit loops with patterns. We did one with two colors and then with three colors. She really enjoyed that!

I also have this tin and put some scrapbook letters in it. While I was setting up one of the activities I let her pull out the letters and make piles. Left side was letters she knew and right was the I need to work on pile.

She did that while I finished creating the winter counting sheets. My wonderful Mother in Law brought over a huge bag of scrapbook scraps, a circle punch and a snowflake punch and some other great additions to our school room! I used the punches to create a winter counting activity. I printed the numbers 1-5 onto paper and let her count out snowmen and snowflakes to match. She could use all of one or mix and match. She stuck with one, my little orderly lady! :-)

Liam

Since we have a theme of green this week Liam sorted some green stuff into our new muffin tins; here he sorted green pom-poms, green pony beads, and green fruit loops. He also started "beading" for the first time. I had him put fruit loops onto pipe cleaner and although he did need my assistance, he really enjoyed himself and looked quite proud. One of his new phrases is "good job!" and he said it A LOT! LOL

Some of the skills he used were sorting and this really helped with his fine motor skills. Picking up those pony beads was challenging to his little fingers. He also is learning/working on his colors. I would recommend only putting in 3 things to sort so they don't get overwhelmed at this age (14.5 months)

Tot School

While sitting around trying to recuperate from this KILLER cold, I have found some blogs that I have fallen in love with. They pretty much put a name and much more organized picture of what I have been doing with the kids. So I am going to link up and join "Tot school" and use some of the BRILLIANT ideas these women have posted! Check out Carissas blog to see more. From there you can link up with some other fantastic blogs, like Totally Tots and homeschool creations as well as one of my favorites Delightful Learning. Theres a lot more that you can find and get lost in.

We have been out of printer ink so I haven't been able to print out some things that will allow me to use a theme and lessons. Therefore today we just did some fun random things and will try a unit next week. So here was today's random Tator Tot School at our place.

We made a homemade skeeball game for girlie spud. This gave me the chance to give her several directions at once, "Pick up the green ball, take three steps back and put it into the number 2 hole."

This morning we did some tissue paper painting. We used some leftover tissue paper we had gotten in some birthday and Christmas gifts. Then we got a sponge wet and painted the peices onto the paper. Little spuds Man needed more help holding the pieces down while he sponged it. Girlie was able to figure it out pretty quickly.

We also have been collecting some bottles, caps, buttons, egg cartons ect from family and this morning we used a Nesquick bottle to play a sorting/stuffing game. It was mainly for Spuds Man but Big girl felt the need to help. He had a blast! He became a bit frustrated at first when things were too big but after a while would throw them to the wayside and find more to stuff in. By far his favorite part was dumping out everything once he was satisfied with its fullness and starting again. What a boy.

The buttons you see are from girlie and a random triangle that appeared. She spotted it and excitedly exclaimed "Mom! Its a button triangle!" I was proud of her shape recognition and so we worked on doing some more. I wanted to get to a rectangle and oval or diamond but she got distracted by some math blocks Grandma got them for Christmas.