Tot School: Farm Frenzy

We had a couple of short weeks so we made our Farms theme last for 2 weeks instead of just 1. If you missed the farm tray post you can find it here for more details about the trays (and other trays that might not be included in this recap).

Asa working on the vegetable garden activity.
How Many Spots counting tray.
On the farm/Not on the farm tray sort. Apparently I only took pictures Asa one day this theme. lol
Working with the farm patterning animals.
Outlining the letter Gg with stickers. This boy is obsessed with stickers.
We also started Saxon Math K this last week. He has really enjoyed it. He is always begging me for more school work to do.
It's a trap....for the boy and girl that keep stealing the kids toys. Explanation: When the kids can't find one of their toys (because they misplaced them) they blame it on a little boy and girl that come to our house when they aren't looking and take all their things. :)
The next lesson we worked with exploring counting bears.
Silas really enjoyed the color sorting tray this week.
The magnets were another one of his favorites.
I was surprised that he worked on this veggie garden activity for so long. I was even more surprised to find that he was matching the numbers on them! Yes, this boy can apparently count to 11 without missing a number. When he picked that up I have no idea.....kids are pretty amazing.
Silas did his farm puzzles.....and then one by one threw them off the table. He is such a stinker....and LOVES to makes messes.
This was by far his favorite tray. He loved matching his farm Little People to the vocabulary cards.
He also really enjoyed his dot markers....of course.

I got this cute idea from Honey Bee Books. I saved up some milk jugs and then the kids painted them and turned them into farm animals....


They are supposed to be a cow, pig and a horse.....the pig lost an ear...but he does have a cute little curly cue tail that you can't see in this picture.
Silas really enjoyed playing with these while they lasted (....about 25min. lol).
The boys had a fun time with farm themed sponge capsules.

I laid them out to dry and then we painted with them a couple of days later.


Good times. We are taking it easy this week. We'll be doing a couple of Thanksgiving activities but not much else besides that. If I don't get back before Thursday the happiest of Thanksgiving's to all of you! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking to 1+1+1=1

Farm Theme Tot Trays

We started our farm theme last week but had a really short week so we didn't get to everything we had planned. We will finish up this week. Just wanted to share the trays that we used. I must say that thanks to Pinterest I was able to find a lot of my inspiration on the Joyfully Weary blog.

I found these little farm animals at a garage sale for .75 this summer. We had the cups from the counting bears. Silas will color sort and do the easy pattern cards, Asa will do some of the more difficult patterning cards.
Silas LOVES puzzles. I got out some of the farm animals from our word puzzles that we have.
Farm animal/Not a farm animal sort. This is using our Melissa and Doug magnets.
How many spots on the cow? This is a printout from the wonderful 2 Teaching Mommies blog. I think they even had the idea of using the black pom poms for spots. Really cute!
I made this Vegetable Garden activity last year and it was a favorite of Annabelle and Asa's. I made it using clip-art in Word. I numbered the vegetables to add another element. Not only do you put the veggies in the right row, but you put them in the right numerical order too.
Stamping pages. I made these using clip-art in Word as well. They were simple to make and Asa will really enjoy them.
Shape patterns. These print outs can be found at Pre-Kinders.
This is my favorite tray (and Silas has been enjoying it too). We used the vocabulary/matching cards from 1+1+1=1 Tot School printables Gg pack. We are matching our Fisher Price farm people to the correct cards. Silas has been liking the 3-D type matching more then the pocket chart matching lately.
We are/will be learning about animals and their by-products. It has been interesting and fun to see the reactions they have to knowing what items come from what farm product. This print out is from the Joyfully Weary link posted above.

Also from the 1+1+1=1 link above are these letter Gg print outs. Silas LOVES to dot.
That's it for the trays. We'll be doing a fun craft or two to go along with it this week. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Linking up to 1+1+1=1 and Montessori Monday

Sneak Peek Week 12: Parable of the Sower, Farm

Ok. So officially for the next few weeks I will be doing school from Tuesday until Saturday. I have obviously found it to be difficult to post on Saturday and Sunday. So I'm going to experiment. I will continue to do Wednesday. That has been fun. I will also continue the Week in Review on Saturday. I am going to try doing the Sneak Peek on Monday, but it will definitely be up by Tuesday. I think that Sunday is so busy that in the afternoon between church services all I want to do is relax with Zak. Monday is difficult as well because I use that day to recover my house from the weekend. So we will see how this works!

We have a very fun week planned with lots of fun crafts. We will be introducing the letter Ff and talking about farms a lot. Our Bible lesson for the week also fits the farm theme. We will be talking about the parable of the sower. I hope to have some good conversation with Annabelle on this. It will most likely be spur of the moment because I don't have a whole lot planned specifically to enhance the lesson. I was going to be checking out Hubbards Cupboard today to see if there were any supplemental activities on that site. So onto the rest of the activities. So many things you can do with this theme, it's had to choose!

This is a picture of our farm activities for the week. Starting at the top left and going around clockwise. Roll a barn is a fun game that we are going to do with our big dice that we got in the Target dollar bins. It is played just like the game Cooties....only you're trying to build a barn instead of a cootie. Then there are farm animal coloring books. Next is a game called How Many Spots. I plan on using black or brown pom poms for the spots. You play by drawing a number card and placing that many spots on the cow. Simple enough right? Then we have a farm animal matching game. I am also going to see how Annabelle does at playing memory with them. Also we have a heads and tails matching game. This is fun because Annabelle and Asa can be silly with these too and make funny animals. Last but not least is a barn puzzle. I actually printed out two of these pages, cut one into squares and I'm going to have Annabelle paste them onto the picture. Thought that would be more interesting for her than a paper puzzle....plus she loves to use glue sticks. :) All of these printouts can be found here: http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/FarmTotBook.html

and here:

http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2010/09/farm.html

A vegetable garden that reinforces counting to five. I made this activity myself using clipart. It took a lot of time, but I really like how it turned out. The veggies are all numbered, as well as the spot they are to be planted in. They are also all have velcro on them so they don't slide around on the posterboard. I hope that this helps Annabelle with her counting skills.

We don't want to forget about the letter Ee during farm week so I made this cute egg counting activity. This also took some time to create, but again I like how it turned out. Annabelle just needs to stick the corresponding amount of eggs on the hens.

To help introduce the letter Ff we will be using frogs as well. This game I got off of this website: http://folderfun.ning.com/ It is technically a file folder game, but will be just fine without the folder I think. It is slightly more challenging in that there are two colors to match, not just one. Sorry about the dark picture. It really is more cute than what it looks like in this picture.

Here is another game that I made. Although it is not an original idea. I plan to spruce it up a little more too eventually. I would like to get more fry cartons and more 'fries' either roll the dice to find out how many fries to put into a carton, or write numbers on the cartons and put the corresponding amount of fries in it. I really love the dice I've found....can you tell. I think that it is because it reinforces counting by making Annabelle count the dots and then count again the corresponding amount of 'things' (in this instance fries) that she is supposed to put somewhere. I guess that I just like that it makes her count twice and she doesn't even know that it isn't all that fun. lol Wow, that was kind of rambling, and made little to no sense. Welcome to my mind. :)

That is it for pictures. In addition to all of these things I got out our Little People farm, our farm animal beanie babies, farm themed books and puzzles, and even fun Melissa and Doug farm scene magnets. Should be a great week! Happy blogging.

jess_hak