Twin Tot School #21...

Will and Wesley are 39 Months Old

I fell in love with all of Erica's letter curriculum at Confessions of a Homeschooler and was so excited to begin using it with the boys. After lots of printing, cutting and laminating (and loving every minute of it) we were ready to jump in. I'd like to give her a plug here. At first I just printed them from her website where she offers them for free, but you have to download each thing separately. Then I decided to just go ahead and buy it. I mean it's only $10. Let me tell you it is worth every penny. Downloading it all at once is so much faster. Besides I was happy to support her and give something back since she so generously shares all she makes.

I don't think it matters what order you teach the alphabet (believe me that is hard for me to admit because I am very into going in order). Therefore, I decided to start with D is for dinosaur since my boys are so into dinosaurs. I got our trays all set up with all our activities.

Their favorite activity was sorting capital and lower case D's. This is the first time we'd done anything like this, and they did great!

I also got lots of great stuff from 1+1+1=1's dinosaur tot book. I love how Wesley is really thinking about this size sequencing!

Often, they want to do the same activity at the same time which means I get to referee. As soon as they saw the Dinosaur Train color matching from 1+1+1=1 they both wanted it. We all LOVE that show (thanks to that show my Ashton is always coming up with a hypothesis about something!). I held up a color and they had to decided which one of them had the character that matched that color.

Confessions of a Homeschooler also has these uppercase letter printables that are perfect for decorating. We chose to decorate them with dino tracks! The boys walked their plastic dinos in paint and tracked on their D.

I'd just bought a book of paper plate crafts (see widgit below) and was thrilled to see it had the cutest dino you could make out of those cheap-o paper plates. The boys did a great job painting them. They are getting so big!
I printed off a dinosaur from Making Learning Fun. I gave them paint trays with Q-tips for each color. They used the Q-tips to carefully paint in each circle. This was hands down their favorite thing we did. Mommy loved it because it was pretty mess free. We have got to do some more of these.
Another blog I enjoy is Tired, Need Sleep. She has tons more dinosaur activities that I can't wait to try next time around. I'm kind of figuring we'll go through these letters now that they are 3 then repeat them with more in depth activities the next year.

Of course, school always includes playing with big sissy. She teaches them to use their imagination and I absolutely love to listen to them. Watching how well she interacts with them makes me so glad we homeschool and they get to spend all day together and not just a few hours (well, most days any way :)

I can't wait to show off my new school room (as soon as hubbie paints that last wall-grrrr). By far my favorite part are my gutter book shelves. I always use one of them to house the twins' Tot School books. So, this week it showcased our favorite dino books:It's so surreal to me to be reading these next 2 dino books to my TWIN boys because I used to have to read them EVERY night to their big brother back when I just had one child. In fact, I still have these books memorized! I highly recommend Dinosaur Roar. When you read each page in a different voice it makes it even that much more fun!

Sandra Boynton is one of our all time favorite authors so of course we would love her dinosaur book. Again, funny voices are a must.

An hour doesn't go by that these two aren't playing trains. Mommy was proud of this track. Why is building those things like the hardest geometry puzzle ever?

And why can't I be rich enough to have an entire room devoted to train track......

We even took some time to watch Dinosaur Train on PBS Kids. Sissy helped them play the games. They thought they were big boys getting to be on the laptop!

Another great part of our new school room is a place on the wall to hang their work. They were so excited to see their work hung and tripped over each other to be the first to show Daddy when he got home!

I made up a silly little song for them to sing, but they ate it up. It especially seem to really help Will who sang it for everyone he met! Ignore my singing and focus on their cuteness!

Aren't they cute?

You're probably thinking my children are perfect little genius angels (haha-sarcasm here!).

So, in order to keep it real, here's my absolute favorite picture of the week:

Yeah, he gets that from his Daddy- hee hee!

Make sure to go over to Carissa's blog to see what others are up to.

Here are all the bookds we used. Hopefully, this will help me remember what we have when we revisit D next year!