Will and Wesley are 41 months old.It made sense that after caterpillars come butterflies! There are so many fun B words though that we also used band-aids and lots of bears!
My favorite thing to do is something fun on our letter sheet to hang on our alphabet wall. For B we covered it with band-aids. I mean all kids love the chance to stick band-aids on something, anything. Plus, I got these at the dollar store! Of course, you can't have band-aids without sticking at least one on yourself, right...
I thought it really turned out fun:
This little monkey is, well a little monkey when the camera comes out:
It used to be that Wesley really got into the tot activites while Will was the more destractable one, but that really changed this week. Will wanted to do them all and worked for quite awhile. He did an amazing job on all of them too. Mommy was very pleasantly surprised. This was his first time to really do this size sort completely on his own. I got this from Confessions of a Homeschooler as well as the other butterfly pages.
This Melissa and Doug lacing shape we've had forever but it held his interest and he wanted to do it just right- a blanket stitch araound the edges. You'll notice a second grade workbook beside him as Mommy also teaches spelling and English at the same time. Oh, the joys of homeschooling multi-age kids :)
All of our favorite things to play with are these magnetic pompoms. I can't remember where I first saw this but they are just dollar store pompoms hot glued onto circle magnets. We have these hanging on our walls holding up memory verses, but they were really made for these letter magnet pages.
I've worked on counting forever with the boys but have never tried to teach them numers. I'm really trying to focus on teaching them the numbers 1-3 right now. This was the first time I've put out these pages where they put the number in the box and then count out that many objects (in this case butterflies). Wesley wasn't interested, but Will did wonderfully.
Wesley's favorite activity of late is writing. He wrote a W all on his own the other night. I'm so sad I didn't take a picture of his first letter, and of course it had to be on the Magna Doodle so was immediately erased. Jackson's was the same way 7 years ago :(He really likes doing these letter pages because I told him the dotted lines were roads so he loves to "drive" his car around. Hey, whatever it takes, right? I tell Will to make monster truck noise to blow his nose :) On a side note, I've taught Welsey 26 letters of the alphabet and he can play Wii like a pro but I can NOT get him to blow his nose!!! I think it is my greatest failure as an educator to date because I have tried silly thing after silly thing for nothing. Oh well.... but he writes well!
This was the HIT of the week. I joined Carissa's RRSP (an amazingly cheap value you really should do) and finally got around to printing out the vocabulary cards and putting them in baseball card holders. Then they took turns (a miracle in and of itself) using the big finger (love that thing- has saved many a lesson from being too terribly boring even for my 2nd and 4th grader). I'd call out a word emphasizing the beginning letter sound and they'd point to it. They loved, loved, loved it. We ended up doing the letters A-D over and over and over. My goal now is to make up some cards of my own with personal things that start with that letter like a picture of Daddy for D. I'll do that in my bonbon eating free time :)
Our letter B craft was tearing and crumbling tissue paper (which is great for fine motor skills) and gluing them onto the butterfly wings. I heart this picture of Will's sweet hands:
He did it perfectly. He and Ashton are my crafty, crafty kids.
I was hoping he would be interested long enough to go around the outside wings, but he wanted to keep going. It turned out B for beautiful and he was Beamingly proud of it :)
No craft goes by without this girl taking part whether it be a preschool or adult craft!
This was my favorite scene from the week:
Both boys asked if they could cut so I put bins under them hoping to catch the pieces. They have been really good cutters from a really early age, but I guess that comes from having older siblings who leave scissors laying about...
I think I should start a feature called "keeping it Real" or something. So many times I read blogs and think their homeschool day is so perfectly organized and runs so smoothly that something is wrong with me as a mommy because my kids have the pointer stuck up their nose instead of doing their work. I never want to give the impression that our days are picture perfect because that could not possibly be farther from the truth so here's my keeping it real picture this week. Between crafting and learning numbers and letters everyone took a break when mommy snuck away to do laundry to take turns tying the twins to the office chair, spinning them and seeing if they could catch a football while going around. As you can see from the picture Will was horrified by the disruption:
This was the HIT of the week. I joined Carissa's RRSP (an amazingly cheap value you really should do) and finally got around to printing out the vocabulary cards and putting them in baseball card holders. Then they took turns (a miracle in and of itself) using the big finger (love that thing- has saved many a lesson from being too terribly boring even for my 2nd and 4th grader). I'd call out a word emphasizing the beginning letter sound and they'd point to it. They loved, loved, loved it. We ended up doing the letters A-D over and over and over. My goal now is to make up some cards of my own with personal things that start with that letter like a picture of Daddy for D. I'll do that in my bonbon eating free time :)
Our letter B craft was tearing and crumbling tissue paper (which is great for fine motor skills) and gluing them onto the butterfly wings. I heart this picture of Will's sweet hands:
He did it perfectly. He and Ashton are my crafty, crafty kids.
I was hoping he would be interested long enough to go around the outside wings, but he wanted to keep going. It turned out B for beautiful and he was Beamingly proud of it :)
No craft goes by without this girl taking part whether it be a preschool or adult craft!
This was my favorite scene from the week:
Both boys asked if they could cut so I put bins under them hoping to catch the pieces. They have been really good cutters from a really early age, but I guess that comes from having older siblings who leave scissors laying about...
I think I should start a feature called "keeping it Real" or something. So many times I read blogs and think their homeschool day is so perfectly organized and runs so smoothly that something is wrong with me as a mommy because my kids have the pointer stuck up their nose instead of doing their work. I never want to give the impression that our days are picture perfect because that could not possibly be farther from the truth so here's my keeping it real picture this week. Between crafting and learning numbers and letters everyone took a break when mommy snuck away to do laundry to take turns tying the twins to the office chair, spinning them and seeing if they could catch a football while going around. As you can see from the picture Will was horrified by the disruption:We couldn't leave the letter B without doing what I hope is the first of many book units, Going on a Bear Hunt. I can't wait to share the fun we had hunting!
We had a wealth of B books and could've spent another few weeks doing fun activities!
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