Autumn Week

Our theme this week was Autumn.

We took a neighbourhood walk and collected leaves which we glued on our tree. There was more but they kept falling off.

Alastrin painting with Autumn colours


Morgan painting with Autumn colours
Alastrin making apple prints

Morgan making apple prints

Not picured is our demonstration of the four seasons. I did a quick drawing of a tree and a person in each season illustrating what happened to the tree and what kind of clothing you would wear in each season.

We also read autumn books and sang a few autumn songs and I answered all kinds of questions everytime we were outside about squirrels and leaves.

We didn't do as much as I'd planned, this was sort of a laid back week.

Transportation Week

The above picture is because this post is being linked to other blog posts on teaching tots. click the picture to see more.

This week our theme was transportation. I further separated each day into a specific kind or kinds.

Monday - Planes and other Air Craft
Tuesday - Trains
Wednesday - Cars and Trucks
Thursday - Buses and other vehicles
Friday -Boats

Things didn't go exactly as planned (do they ever?) and so some activities crossed into others days. We didn't finish everything I had planned but also did some things I didn't have planned. We also did some basic street safety.

MONDAY - PLANES

I don't have any pics for Monday. We made a cardboard plane but the pic isn't very good so I didn't include it. We went to playgroup today and airplanes were overhead on the way so we talked about them. I asked questions such as where do planes fly? Are they big or small? I said how planes are really big but they are up so high they look small. She doesn't really understand that though. We read a book about airplanes too.

TUESDAY - TRAINS

Here Morgan is making a number train. she has 5 train cars with numbers on them and she has to glue them on my hand drawn train tracks in order. Then she colored them in. She liked this activity. I believe it was one of Jan Brett's pages.

Alastrin colored a train picture.
This wasn't on the plan but since we didn't have a chance to see a real train, I called up You Tube and searched for trains and we watched a few videos of trains. The one pictured was her favourite. You could see the lights of the trains for a while before you saw the train. I didn't but I would suggest you screen you tube videos before showing them to your children. We didn't stumble upon anything bad but we could have.
Way back when I was pregnant with Morgan, our friend Jay gave us this train set that used to be his. Until now I had never brought it out but since we were learning trains, I did. It's beat up and needs batteries which we didn't have but Morgan liked it. When it first started moving (the old batteries lasted a minute) she was scared of it! She's still a little young as she wants to push it around the tracks and it's not made to do that. It's completely electronic.

We also made an egg carton train but it didn't turn out great so I didn't post a pic.

WEDNESDAY - CARS AND TRUCKS

Wednesday we didn't do much structured homeschooling as we went to playgroup in the morning and Girl Guides after dinner. We did talk about cars and trucks on the way to playgroup and watched a recycle truck at work on the way home. She did a traffic patterns worksheet from Bry Back Manor but our main craft waited till Friday. (see below)

THURSDAY - BUSES AND OTHER

We made this cool egg carton school bus. The yellow paint didn't cover the words on the carton though like it was supposed to so we glue yellow construction paper over it as well. I couldn't find magazine photos of kids though so it's adults in the bus. Oh well. It's just the top half of the carton so she can't drive it around or anything, it's just for show.

Thursdays we go to the library and to their playgroup so we didn't do much that day either. We did see a firetruck go by and talked about that. They had bus colouring pages too and we sang the wheels on the bus and read her Seals on the Bus book (by Lenny Hort)

FRIDAY - BOATS

We got an activity sheet from Enchanted Learning that had her trace the letter b, colour in a picture of a boat and then cut out some pieces to make a boat. The picture above is showing her decorating in her boat picture after gluing the pieces down. She loved this too.

Alastrin with another colouring page.

As stated above, we did our cars and trucks craft on Friday. They painted by rolling toys cars and trucks through paint on their paper. This was a hit.

Here is Alastrin doing her craft.

Not pictured for this week: more transportation books, practicing street safety, watching Barney safety video, watching Thomas the Tank Engine, watching Transportation Songs video, lots of chat about transportation as we were outside walking and a few homemade matching pages.

Next week is Autumn!

Opposites Week

NOTE: Today I also posted the rest of the alphabet activities. You can find them after this post.

So this week was Opposites. I had trouble finding activities online for this other than boring worksheets so I made up a lot of what we did. We had books from the library that we read every day. Unfortunately Alastrin didn't do much with this theme.

After reading some books, we demonstrated opposites as well as some directional words by using things around the house. Here Morgan is demonstrated In. Other examples included: The cat is ON the basket, Alastrin is BETWEEN the doors, the tree is OUTside, we are INside, Morgan is UNDER the highchair, Morgan is stepping OVER the toy etc....

Here Morgan is working on a "game/worksheet" that I designed She matched up the opposites a couple of times and then the last time she glued the cards down.

Morgan was really confused with hot, cold, warm and cool so we filled four cups with water at the appropriate temperature and felt the outside while going over them. Then I'd give her two to choose from and tell her which one to find. When she had that one down we chose from three, then all four. She seemed to really get it but today she was confused again.

This is the one and only real worksheet we did. She circled the hot things in red and cold things in blue. She actually did this before the cup activity and got them all right, so she can't be completely confused.

First we built a bridge and then a house and used toys to demonstrate opposites and directions. Dora is IN the house, Ducks are ON the house, girl is BESIDE the house etc.. We also did behind and in front of but just briefly. She enjoyed this activity and did it on her own a couple of days later.

On the weekends we go visit the Grandparents and Grandma has an activity or two to keep us busy. This week she had both girls glue on a table and then glue objects either on top of or under the table. Alastrin did one too but she did it so fast and wanted to glue more on so she glued on fun foam shapes until you couldn't see the paper colour!

Grandma did this one with just Morgan. It's of course a house and fun foam animals are stuck inside and outside the door.

So it was a pretty laid back week with not quite enough activities. We also went to playgroup three times, one of which had gym class and we rode bikes outside one day.

Next week is Transporation!

Alphabet Week

So week one went well. Our theme was the alphabet along with the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We are still doing a few ABC activities this week because I had a couple migraines last week so we didn't get as much done. I'll post those later.


Here are some pics and explanations:

Exercising to the Alphabet Exercise DVD

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Craft

Doing an alphabet puzzle

Sorting through alphabet pasta letters to spell out her name. She then put them in clay and baked it.

The little one (16 months) "typed" letters on the computer.

Not pictured is all the alphabet books we read, the alphabet blocks they built with, magnet letters played with, another Chicka Chicka Boom Boom craft, some drawing and "writing" and a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom counting book that we made.

Also the two activities we are still working on will be posted later.