Tot School

Little man needs more than hand/eye coordination and fine motor skill games now so we have started introducing letters. Pretty much one every two weeks. When he gets bored with his other games we bring out his own notebook of "school" stuff! In his notebook are items like these.


He loved glueing those alligators on the A so much it wasn't funny luckily this site I found has this activity for every letter, YAY! We also play with our letters, as in drive our cars on them.


And if all else fails I pull that handy dandy table out of the bathroom, top it with some oil cloth and have him poke straws into the imprint of a letter!


Can you tell which letter he is working on? He is loving his new activities and feels like quite a big boy! We also added this to our wall just for Little Man!



It is below the white board just at his height. He is having lots of fun and his big brothers are super excited for him every time he gets to do his school work. Isn't it strange what kids get excited for, never what I expect but always awesome!

Place Value

Lately I have felt the need to drill some basics in for the boys and one of those, I guess the biggest one is 10's. yes that simple thing of 10 and how many are in any given number and how many ones and so on. PLACE VALUE people! I finally feel I am making headway with both boys and they are really understanding it. It is so important since our entire math system is based off of it. Here is what we worked on today and a cute pic from last week at the end of our habitat unit.


Yes they are dressed as pirates!





Here is a little preview of what I am planning for little man... I got a lot of these from the Totally Tots blog which is awesome

Shipley Nature Center

Last week we had our habitat field trip to end our month of habitats! This field trip was Amazing! The staff were very knowledgable and great with the kids.


My Big Guy got to be the leader!


"Eyes on the side, I like to hide"
"Eyes in front, I like to Hunt" an awesome lesson about prey and predators that included getting to see lots of real animal skulls.


SCAT! In this hut we learned about animal scat (poo)! The boys got to see several samples of scat from different animals and see what they had been eating...eeewww....and awesome.





Snakes!





Yes, we got to pet the snake and tickle his underside, no really he was ticklish!


Furs! Mammals have Fur!


Little Man lost interest at the end but loved climbing the trees.





And last but not least insects!





Petting a Beetle!


I would do this one again any time!

A New Year of Fun!

Well it's a new year with new field trips! We got a membership to the Discovery Science Museum and a new amazing telescope for Christmas this year. These items have me excited with all the things we can do to make learning exciting! We are definitely going to have to make a trip to the Griffith Park Observatory and lots of trips to the 'Cube'. Our first planned trip for the new year, though, is to the Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Beach. This is a Chep Field Trip. This means it is guided and I love those because the kiddos love listening to someone other than me sometimes. Also they give us awesome packets of materials to do units in conjunction with the field trip. Check out all of this fun information.



So you may have figured out we are talking about Habitats this month. This is where I say, I love YouTube! We have been learning about all the animals that live in specific habitats. On YouTube you can then see each animal in its habitat moving around. We have yet to come across one with out a video and this includes chuckwallas and peccaries.
Also we have been doing a new thing with Adam of plotting stories. I read him a story and he retells it from memory with pictures. He loves this activity which I thought he would find tedious but once again a child's need for knowledge has amazed me.
Here is some of his recent work.

Kevin has been working on spelling! He loves writing words on the board so that is the most fun way for him to memorize spelling words.

I love this job!

Back to School

Yesterday was our first day back to school. We had Spanish class and did school at home when we returned. I felt good about the day. Today is day two and the boys have school at the site today which is fun for everyone especially since my dad was awesome enough to do the middle switch for me. This is a huge time and hassle saver for me. It also allows me a full hour and half with just Isaac while the baby sleeps. He and I both love this time. He gets to play all the things he wants to play with mom all by himself. One of those things is the geometric shapes!


Adam got these for Christmas but Isaac has adopted them as his own and loves them!

The Polar Express

Today we had classes at the site all morning but since naps were non existent for some reason we decided to do a little more "fun school" stuff. We decided to watch The Polar Express. I decided that since the advent calendar said we were going to make hot cocoa with hot cocoa stirrers maybe we could just make it an all afternoon activity. So we watched the movie and I made hot cocoa using this recipe. It was so yummy! And I made some marshmallow candy cane stirrers to make it Christmas like! I decided I could probably find some writing work online for this movie and was excited to find some freebies that were perfect. Here is our afternoon in pictures!








Watching the movie with their giant pillow pets!
















The boys did awesome on their work!





Isaac actually put the glue on and outlined the bell himself on this. I have to say I was shocked at how well he did at this!

Pirate Math

Okay so I will start by saying, I love Teachers Pay Teachers. It is a website that allows teachers to sell their ideas and cute centers and all that kind of stuff online. These people are amazing! I have purchased a couple things but there are also a lot of free stuff on the site . I printed out, cut out and laminated a couple things for the boys that would help with some hard concepts like find the missing number for Kevin and adding past 10 for Adam. The boys had so much fun that they did Math twice as long as their patience usually allows.

Pirates help Kevin as he fills the treasure chest with parts of the whole to find the missing numbers in both addition and subtraction problems. Particularly funny, Kevin spoke like a pirate through this entire activity!


Doubles! We are working on memorizing our doubles addition facts to 10.


Adding to make 10 plus some.



Here Adam is making words with the sunflower letters! He was told to make 10 words and write them down.


We are having fun finding exciting ways to learn!