Fall Fun Trays

I just finished putting together our fall trays. A little later than I wanted, but still plenty of fall left! :)

Color sorting for Silas. Love these little sparkly ornaments and I think that he will too.
I think that this will be a favorite for Asa and Silas. My dad had a whole bunch of pink insulation board in his garage. I took it, cut it into squares and now we have lovely hammering bases. I stapled a pumpkin on this one to follow the fall theme. I did this activity in church (only with a church pic on it) and the littles LOVED it. The nails are golf tees. AND if you remember a prior disaster that I had with an activity similar to this (i.e. dents in my table...), please note that the insulation board is WAY thicker than the styrofoam I was using before. lol
Transferring kernels. Got these cute little dishes at either a Goodwill or a garage sale.
This is the Roll a Jack O' Lantern I made from this post. Feel free to visit it for more detail about it. I will say that the church littles really had a lot of fun with it.
Oh dear...I NEED new trays...I say that a lot don't I. This is a leaf counting activity.
Push the cupcake toppers into the floral foam (I dislike this stuff...but have a lot of it so I feel the need to use it).
Leaf Matching. This printout is from PreKinders We love our pocket charts. This is one of the cheap ones from the Target Dollar Spot. I would say that it is one of our favorite items and would recommend them to anybody!
This is learning the pumpkin life cycle. This printout is from Montessori For Everyone. Looking at this picture I realized that I need to add some arrows, or it will be the classic "What came first the chicken or the egg?" scenario. :)
I've seen this on several different blogs in the past. This is our spider sifting. Spider rings from Target Dollar Spot, rice from Meijer, towel from our closet, and slotted spoons from our kitchen drawer. I am already anticipating this being a favorite (and a huge mess). :)
The rest of these printables can be found at 2 Teaching Mommies. They have recently made a really cute Monster unit. This game I plan to use as they intended. It's a Monster Mash. I will say a letter (or a phonic sound) and Asa will find the letter and mash it. If we do the phonic sound I may just put out 5 letters at a time. He is really going to like this.
Just the standard pre-writing tray. P.S. sorry for these poor pictures. I'll say it yet again I am not a photographer by any means...so sad. I've been using a new camera and don't know how to use it (as Zak so kindly likes to point out lol).
They have added a Which is Different sheet to their units. I thought this might be something fun Asa would like since he is ALWAYS begging for more school work.
Roll a graph is always a favorite with Asa. He loves the big dice. Another highly recommended tool for preschool from us. We use it for so many different things.
This is new from 2 Teaching Mommies as well. It is their letter stamping strips. I'm going to leave them as a page for Asa, and cut them up for Silas. Asa can handle more than one letter at a time. I think that they will really like this.
Here is the fun part where I get to re-use something from earlier this year! You can see it more in this post. Basically it's a matching game for all the kiddos to play. They draw a picture and then place it in front of the matching picture. They enjoyed this when we did it the first time, so I'm hoping they will enjoy it again.
That's it! Will be back next week to show them in action. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Linking up to Homeschool Creations, 1+1+1=1, Living Montessori Now, and Pinterest Tuesday

A S A

I noticed that Asa had been paying particular attention to some of the items he was hoarding and carrying around constantly (does anyone else have littles that do this?). While he was using the bathroom he mistakenly left his precious items on the table. I used the opportunity to see what he had. I found these three stuffed letters. He loves spelling his name. I thought that it was so sweet that out of a bucket of stuffed letters he dug around until he found the ones that spelled his name. Love that little boy.
Just wanted to share a moment that made my heart smile this week. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Tot School: Apples in Action

We had a lot of fun with our Apple Theme the past couple weeks. If you missed the post on the apple trays or want to see what we are doing in more detail you can see them here.

Umm....this picture is just because I love it! I already posted it in Annabelle's review so sorry if it's repetitive. :)
Concentrating on cutting. He did this tray really very fast. Guess I need to find a way to make it more challenging for him.
He loves anything he can do with the big dice. If you don't have big dice I recommend them...they're one of our favorite tot school items (along with our pocket chart!).
Apple printing. This has been one of my favorite activities to do around this time of the year. I do it at home and I do it with my church kids....just so fun!
He is getting really good at recognizing and counting the numbers 1-10. I think that I'm going to have him start working on putting them in order (he struggles with that) and then we'll start introducing bigger numbers! This guy blows my mind with how fast he picks things up.
This is one of our recent phonics trays that I put together. You can see the most recent ones in more detail here.
Asa has been begging and begging me to do actual school work. I finally obliged and printed out some worksheets for him. He loved it and asked for more. Maybe I'll get him some Explode the Code books for Christmas. lol
Here are some tissue paper apples that we made. I should have outlined them in black construction paper. Hindsight.....
This is actually Annabelle's apple print wreath.
Silas really got into his trays this time....more so than normal. Sidenote: He is in the same clothes in all these pictures because I only took pictures of him on one day. He likes it when I focus more on him than taking pictures so I've had to set the camera down a lot more around him.

Putting letter A on each Aa. You can't hear him but he's saying, "A say ah". :) This guy is so observant...he knows all his uppercase letters (and a lot of lower case ones) just from watching his brother and sister (and Super Why).
Getting a little more consistent with his colors. He sorts them alright. Still having slight problems with red and green....and of course every color is still yellow.
He LOVES dot markers. Can we say stocking stuffer!
I've said this before, but these Lauri Fit-a-Shapes are wonderful! Time after time they are consistently his first tray choice.
Apple stamping. He really just wanted to eat the apples and paint with his hands. lol
Nothing to do with apples, but this is just a picture of our day off. My kids love puzzles.
Asa and Silas both do 25 piece ones (as long as they are in trays). Annabelle has been working on 100 piece ones! (Although she needs some help along the way).

Yeah....I tire my kids out. Silas has been refusing to nap sometimes in the afternoon (NNNNOOOOOOoooooo!!!!!). If he doesn't nap he usually crashes watching tv around 4:30. I found him on our mini trampoline one afternoon.
Baby, don't you know beds are so much more comfortable?
I hope that everyone else has been having a wonderful fall season! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to 1+1+1=1

Roll a Jack o' Lantern

Sorry if it seems that I have been really sporadic in my posts lately. I noticed last year at this time I was having difficulty buckling down and doing school (and blogging). I think that I'm coming out of the funk quicker this year though. It is a good thing that we started school as early as we did otherwise we would be way behind. So my question to my readers....Do you ever burn out/slow down? What do you do to avoid said funk? AND What helps you get out of it once you're there?

Anyway, onto the fun little game that I spent my evening last night making. I originally got this idea from Pink and Green Mama. She has a lot of fun ideas on her blog! And kudos to Pinterest for actually helping me remember where I found it! lol

POINT OF GAME: Roll the die (just one) and add the feature (eyes, nose, mouth, nothing, stem or eyebrows) onto your felt pumpkin 'game board'. The first person to create their face wins. Pretty simple. :)

Last night I spent a lot of time finding templates, printing templates, cutting, tracing onto felt, cutting, painting, cutting, gluing, cutting, gluing, cutting, some writing, and then touch ups. This is the final product....and I love it! Just a note: I made so many pumpkins because I'm taking this little game to church tonight for the littles to play (I teach 3-5yr olds on Wed. nights).
I bought these wooden die at Hobby Lobby and painted them black. Then glued (almost decoupaged) the pumpkins and their feature to add on them. You can also see the pumpkin stems in this pic above the die.
This is what took me forever! I googled jack o' lantern templates and went through them to find the friendliest/happiest versions. Tracing onto the black was a pain. I had to use chalk and white crayons...yellow would have been much easier (this was my thought half way through cutting out the black lol) Then you have to cut them all out. I was disillusioned as to how long this would take me (I'm WAY too much of a perfectionist).
This is just the fun pile of 'game boards'
Well, that's it. I'm taking it to church tonight. It will also be set up in our schoolroom to play with throughout the next couple weeks. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Linking up to Pinterest Tuesday and Sunday Showcase

Family Time Fun

My parents have a cottage on a pretty little lake. We went there to visit one weekend in September. This little lake is fun in the fact that I have two aunts who also have places there....which means my cousins are there often. I'm looking forward to next summer to spending time there with my parents and my extended family (I love being close!) I have a whole bunch of pictures to show for it so bear with me! :)
We went on a pontoon ride around the lake (Thank you Aunt Robin!)
Asa's life jacket was a little big. :)
Silas and I enjoying the ride....it wasn't as chilly as these pictures make it look.
My very handsome Zak.
Silas got in trouble....this is his 'I'm giving you attitude' look.
My dad and Annabelle at the helm (is that boat jargon?).
My mom and Asa.
We went to a really fun little farm. We didn't go pick apples, but we did a lot of other things. It is pretty much free (or by donation). I'm sure apple picking costs money, but this was such a fun frugal afternoon!
Feeding the goats....
Silas was particularly interested in the little baby goats.
I thought that this was a really frilly looking chicken.
Little baby piglets. So cute.... That'll do pig...that'll do. :)
They had a wooden train, tractor, and truck. Silas really enjoyed these.
Huge pipe slide.
Coming down.
They had an old firetruck there for the kids to climb on and play with (and a boat).

This was my favorite part. I have never been to or heard of anything like this (I'm sure it's out there...I'm just not as versed in zoos and such). They had a room full of parakeets and you could buy a birdseed stick for $1.00 and the birds would fly right onto your stick and eat. It was pretty cool.....if you're into that kind of thing.


I'm a dork....I get so excited about such silly things. lol
They LOVED my mom's shoes for some reason. They weren't doing this to anyone else. We still don't know why.
Annabelle loves horses.

Back at the cottage we were able to just sit and relax and have a good time (at least I was...dad was busy entertaining the troops).
My grandparents came up for a visit. I am so very fortunate to have pretty much the best grandparents ever. Such a blessing that my littles will know what amazing people they are. LOVE THEM!!!
Fun times!!! Happy blogging!