Weeks in Review/Some Sneak Peek

Happy 2011 everyone! I hope that all of your Christmas' were merry. :) We had a wonderful time here, and it was extra special because daddy (Zak) was home! That hopefully explains the lack of posts as of recently. As stated before I hope to continue with these regularly again. It is difficult for me to balance all of the things that I do, but want to continue to blog this adventure we're having here. It has been fun to look back on them and I'm hoping Annabelle will like to look at them at some point and remember all the things she did for preschool. Anyway, on with the show!

The Little People Nativity was a big hit this season. It was played with almost daily. Annabelle loved to set it up and play with it. As you can see Buzz Lightyear and dinosaurs also wanted to visit our Saviour this particular day....I think that there is a Transformer in there too. :)
Annabelle really likes these building activities. This one is from the Hippo unit that I posted in the previous post.
Here she is working hard on the "How many animals are visiting Jesus" activity. (Link is in previous post as well).

I know this picture is a little dark, but if you can see she is holding her Christmas tree that she created from the play-doh I made and sequins provided. She and Asa had a really good time with this.

She also really liked the horse/legs activity. She asks to play with it some still. She had names for some of the horses, I wish I could remember them now. And yes, we did school in our pajamas this day because we can. :)

Our cute window after they decorated it with their snowman and snowflakes. We also have some snowflakes that we made from q-tips, glue, and silver glitter hanging up there too.

Annabelle was not thrilled at the beginning of this craft. We did a day that we talked about candy canes and the meaning behind them. I was really excited that she recognized that it looks like a letter J since we haven't gotten that far yet in the alphabet. I don't know why she knows that letter, but I'm not complaining it will just make my job easier when we get there!

Asa enjoyed it even though Annabelle didn't. They got new do-a-dot markers in their stockings.

The finished product and the book we read to go along with it: The Legend of the Candy Cane by Lori Walburg. Annabelle was pleased with the finished product. It just took her a few minutes to get on board. :)

These little angels turned out super cute! The bodies are their footprints, the wings are their hands, the little cheeks are their fingerprints. top it off with some yarn and google eyes and you can't go wrong. We all really like how these turned out.

Here is another craft that we did. Just a little snow scape and we let the glue run to make icicles on the houses.

Asa shaking away....they like it when they get to use glitter.

This was one of Asa's toys from Christmas. It has been used quite a bit since we got it. All three of them really like it.

Making towers is hard work....and notice the lack of pants, and a diaper....we are diving into potty training. It's going alright. lol

Asa loved doing these file folder games. He feels really special when I pull them out.

Just mommy and Asa having a good time. I love his little face! :)

Here is the little Summer Squash playing with some Christmas erasers. I know that I took more pictures of him, but they must be on the other camera and for the life of me I have no idea where it is at the moment. So this is all you get of Silas in this post. Sorry to all of his fans. ;)

Now I'm going to share a couple activities I'll be using this week. I didn't get around to getting pictures of everything, but it's alright. We will be finishing the Christmas story and our activities that we didn't get to. We will be discussing the wisemen this week and the journey they made and the star they followed. I have a fun craft to do along with that.

This is an activity that I've been working on for sometime. I got the idea from here: http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com/search/label/Alphabet%20Box The idea is that these items (minus the uppercase letters) will be in a bag. Annabelle will pull out an item and decipher which letter the item is/or starts with and will file it under the correct letter. The point is to get her to start listening to the sounds that the letters make so that she will be able to identify them easier. We have played this once already and she did very well for her first time I think. It took her quite a while, but she really liked it. It challenged her and engaged her mind the entire time. I only have A-H completed, so I have a ways to go before it's done.

This is one of Asa's trays this week. I'm sure that Annabelle will enjoy it too. The object is to lace the beads onto the pipe cleaners. I thought the beads looked like snowflakes, so it is appropriate in that it matches the weather outside the window right now!

Lastly, this is an activity for Silas that I got from here: http://1plus1plus1equals1.blogspot.com/2009/06/tot-school_28.html Just an old coffee creamer container (thanks Zak!) and some pom poms. Just stick the balls in the container. Silas really loves activities like these....as a matter of fact he's playing with it right now!

Yup, that pretty much sums up our last couple of weeks. I'm going to go spend some time with Silas now...he started his Tot School without me. lol Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Week 20: CHRISTMAS!!! Hh, 6

So here it is, Monday, December 13th. A lot of hard work went into last week and this week. I'm very excited about the Christmas season that is upon us. Such a wonderful, beautiful time of the year and I think that having little ones just emphasizes the beauty of it. We are going to be doing so many fun activities in the next few weeks it will be nearly impossible to list them all. I will try to cover the ones that I think we will use the most/have the most fun with. So without further delay here they are!

I got this counting game off of this site: http://thoughtsofesme.blogspot.com/p/printables.html . I really think that Annabelle will have fun with this. The numbers go up to 10.

This is a game I created with the help of clipart. These snowflakes all have 1-6 arms. Annabelle will be counting and sorting them into similar piles.
Some of our Hh activities can be found here: http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/2010/11/letter-h-for-hippo.html This sites theme for this letter is obviously hippos. There is a hippo color/color word match, hippo builders (We did this with the fish and it was quite a challenge for Annabelle and she liked it so I thought we'd give it another shot with the hippos.), and of course the capital H, lowercase h sort.

This is kind of a dorky game that I made, but I think that the kids will appreciate it. There are four clothespins of each color for each horse. The goal is to match the clothespins to the correct color horse. Ok....stop laughing. :) It's supposed to be a memorable game to help enforce the letter Hh. lol

Yeah!!! Time for more play-doh. This is home made green, mint scented play-doh with green glitter in it. The sequence and buttons are added because we are going to make Christmas trees out of the dough. I got the idea for this from here and thought it looked really cute: http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com/2010/12/december-sensory-tub-playdough.html

Since we aren't putting up our tree yet this will be fun to do!
The following are Asa's trays.

The first is just some Christmas foam stickers that I got at the Dollar Tree along with some red and green construction paper. I have no idea why this picture won't turn the correct way, sorry.

The file folder games I printed off of this site: http://www.christianpreschoolprintables.com/ChristianFileFolderGames.html . They both have to do with color matching. Asa loves these things.

Christmas tree pattern matching that I printed from here: http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/Christmas.html

I have not had time to put together Silas' new trays yet. Fortunately he is still quite interested in the ones from last week. Hope you enjoyed this and became inspired to do some fun Christmas activities of your own! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Week in Review

This is only going to be one day of the week in review. It seems that I misplaced my camera after this day. And by misplaced I mean I set it somewhere one of the kids could get it and it disappeared until yesterday. It is back now so I can post what we did on one day this week. lol I'm glad to say that we are on our way to being back on track. We completed three and a half days of schooling and are well underway already today with finishing some of last weeks activities.

The Little People Nativity set has been played with a whole lot this week. All three kids are really enjoying it. Annabelle likes to set it up every night before she goes to bed. She does a really great job with this. I snapped this picture after she finished putting it all together.
Annabelle has done much better this week with knowing/identifying the letter Gg (and Ff). We will be moving on to the letter Hh on either Tuesday or Wednesday. We were able to introduce that letter to her this last week as well. Here she is playing with her gumball counting game. She enjoyed this a lot.
We finished up a project that we started a couple of weeks ago. The kids painted bottle caps purple and then we glued them on paper to make a bunch of grapes.

Here is Asa gluing.

I really think that they turned out pretty cute! Annabelle's is on the right and if you look at the bottom right corner of her paper she wrote her own letter Gg! She did a fantastic job.

Here is Asa mailing the Christmas cards. He really had a hard time sticking them in the envelopes so we only did that part once. Annabelle and Asa really both like this mailbox and played with it almost every day!

Asa loves this Melissa and Doug Beginner Shape Patterns set. It's really helping him along with learning his shapes too. I find it humorous that he is able to identify a rectangle, but has a hard time remembering what a square is. lol

Silas had a grand time during his Tot School this week. The bells were a big hit. I had to pay really close attention though, seems like he really enjoyed the way that they felt in his mouth. I normally don't have much of a problem with him putting things in his mouth, but this week he was all about it.

He also played with this activity a lot. I love his little hands in this picture. So much concentration is involved in sticking those pom poms into the Christmas tree spots!

Pretty proud of himself.

He also really enjoyed playing with the Nativity set. I think we were singing Away in a Manger when this picture was taken. We've sang that song close to a gazillion times this last week. The kids are practicing it for church this Sunday night. Now Silas doesn't really sing the actual words, but I know that in his little heart he is praising Jesus with the best of them! Make a joyful noise....and well he does that very well.

Here they all are having a picnic lunch and watching Finding Nemo (Ff review). The fourth little guy is my nephew Jude that I watch a few days a week.

Good review week. Looking forward to diving into this week. Last full week before daddy comes home! Looking forward to his return. Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Week 19: CHRISTMAS!!!! Review A-G, 1-10

I'm back and feeling totally refreshed!! As said previously I'm missing my Nov./Dec. crayon so no crayon date for you....but it is the week of December 6. :) I want to start off by sharing my incredible new contraption. This is my Scotch laminator hard at work. I am super excited about this little guy. It takes a laminating job that I would've done in 2.5 hours give or take and crunches it into 20 minutes tops! I am very pleased to say the least. So here is my new little buddy......

All of December we will be focusing on the birth of Jesus and celebrating God's greatest gift to us, salvation. I have plenty of fun activities that I will be sharing in the upcoming weeks, and a few are included in this post. I also got out our Little People Nativity set. I think that it is so important to have a set that kids can play with, ours is very loved. It is so sweet to watch them take set up the manger scene and tell the story in their own words. One of my favorite parts of Christmas thus far.

Annabelle is reviewing the letters A-G this week. We are doing a deeper focus on the letters Ff and Gg because these letters were new to us before our break and she is having difficulty remembering their phonic sounds. We will be reviewing the fish activities that I previously posted. She also will be working on the gumball games that were previously posted. Here are pictures of the finished gumball games. I got the idea to use pom poms instead of paper gumballs from another blogging mom. I think it turned out much more interesting than the original activity.

The Big G, little g sort. As always, these are way too easy for Annabelle but it really is just for recognition purposes.

This is a fun game that I printed off from......I don't remember where. Really simple, easy game. Roll the dice and identify which number was rolled. 6 is the number of the month so this will be a fun game to learn more about the number 6 with.

New window clings from the Target Dollar Spot. Annabelle and Asa really enjoy decorating our window with things like these. I always find fun seasonal ones at Target or the Dollar Tree.

Here are a couple of Asa's trays for the week. I'm sure Annabelle will join in with this first one. Found these fun stamp sets at the Dollar Tree. The kids have done stamping before and LOVED it. I hope that they have as much fun with the Christmas stamps.

These Christmas cards have matching envelopes. The goal is to put the card into the corresponding envelope and then put them into our cute wooden Melissa and Doug mailbox (not pictured, just got it off of Craigslist!). I'm interested to see if he can get the cards into the envelopes without ruining them.

Lastly, here are Silas' trays. I think that all three of them will absolutely adore these bells, and I may just regret setting them out by the end of the week. lol There are two really big bells in the red present box. This tray cost me all of $3.00....everything is from the Dollar Tree!

One-to-one correspondence. One pom pom to each tree

Don't tell anyone, but these balls are actually dog toys.....sssshhhhh. Actually our dog has never touched them. Silas really loves balls. These were cheap in the Target Dollar Spot and they are so colorful I couldn't resist them. I think he will have a good time with them. Better get ready to play catch this week, it's one of his favorite games.

Well, that about wraps up that. lol I am going to try to get right back in here with the regular blogging schedule. So hopefully I will have a post for you on Wednesday. Happy blogging!

jess_hak