Letter U Week

REGULAR CURRICULUM:
  - Preschool: Confessions of a Homeschooler's Letter of the Week and Daily Learning Notebook
  - Tot School: 1+1+1=1's Tot School Letter U and Tot Time Notebook

MONDAY

Our "U" box was a lot smaller, today, than in weeks past.  I included our large foam "U," underwear, a unicorn, a book about Utah (the state we live in), and a book called "My 'u' Book." 

We read through the "u" book and it did a FANTASTIC job of sharing more short-vowel "u" words!  I got this from the library and noticed they had more of the letters, so I think I'll be trying to find this book to help introduce the letter/sound for the week.

I also found this music cd from the library, with a different sound track for each letter.  I turned on all the vowel songs when we moved back to the tables.

 And the boys listened while using their lacing cards and Lego bricks.  I tried to get Jack to do patterns with me, but he wanted to build towers, instead.  

Alex likes covering his card with Legos, and had fun using the foam U, as well.

Next up were our coloring pages. I helped Jack with his Color By Number page, and Alex enjoyed making tiny squiggles with each of the colors Jack and I were using.

I pulled out our large floor number cards (after finally laminating my apple ones), and we played our usual game.  I laid the cards in a circle on the floor, called out a number, and we raced to grab the correct card, first.  Jack started a new tradition of counting the apples in the tree on each card before we jump to the corresponding number (#5 card = 5 big jumps, counting all together).

I decided not to use the ABC Find It activity this week, so I got to just relax and enjoy the movie with the boys instead of hiding cards.  I found a video called "Preschool is Cool! ABCs with Elmo" at the library for today.  I usually only use videos that are about 30 minutes long, but this one ran for almost an hour.  I served snack to the boys during the movie, and I definitely noticed they were having a hard time staying focused.  Still...I think they enjoyed it.

TUESDAY

*We ended up taking our car into the dealership to get a recall issue fixed, so we did not do school on Tuesday. School Holiday!*


WEDNESDAY

And we're back. Sort of.  Wednesday morning was also a bit crazy, and my arthritis was nearly paralyzing me, so we started much later than normal.  Because of this, we skipped our Notebook time and went straight to activities after Calendar time. The first activity we did was our magnet pages.  Alex's Tot School vocabulary page was different types of weather, so the boys and I discussed things like avalanches, hurricanes, tidal waves, and tornadoes...things they do not normally see.  That was fun. For me.



I attempted a cut and paste activity with Jackson, actually letting HIM cut out a page of "u" pictures to glue on some construction paper.  I applaud him for trying and still enjoying the process.  ;)  Alex cut paper and then took a turn gluing things while Jackson moved on to puzzles.

Jack also did his pattern activity at this point, and I pulled out Alex's umbrella shadow match.  Alex did it (correctly) all by himself!  I was so proud.  While Jack was finishing up, Alex decided to pull out their "cd player" for some tunes.

Letter tracing was up next! Alex used the foam letter U and Jack used our "u" play dough mat.  He definitely has the feel of these mats, now, and knew to start at the blue dot and follow the arrows around. He showed ME how to create an upper and lower-case u!

We pulled the play dough out last.  Jackson tried to make little snakes to create his u's, but eventually just lined up little balls to complete the letters.  After he finished both letters, they got to play with the cookie cutters and play dough for awhile.  Lucky boys!

We also enjoyed a nice, impromptu nature walk after playing at the park.  The boys collected little berries and pretty leaves in their buckets, and we played in the leaves together.  Not every great activity has to be planned!

THURSDAY

We got started on school late today, and then had to finish early enough to walk to the store to grab some things for dinner, so school was quicker than usual.  First up was our alphabet q-tip painting. The boys love these sheets, although Jack decided to start using the q-tip brush to draw letters on his page. Oh well. Education!

Then we completed our letter match with our wooden nickel letters. I made a few extra letters a few days ago to make sure we had enough for our word this week. ;)

Back at the tables, we did our Do-a-dot pages.  I found a different page for Alex on dltk-teach.com.

Then we used our Bingo markers to do our letter hunt pages.

FRIDAY

We ended up spending the morning helping out a neighbor, so we had to push back our school day.  We did, however, find time to play this fabulous "Catch a Rainbow" color game from filefolderfun.com. I used this game as an excuse to buy my first circle punch, and I ended up laminating all the pieces to use frequently for color review.  We loved it!

MONDAY (OI!)

So...my Letter U week has been spread out quite a bit.  I ended up volunteering to work at an LDS cannery this morning while a friend watched my boys, so we finished up our Letter U activities in the afternoon after naptime. Jack started out on the Uppercase/Lowercase U sort while Alex did the umbrella size sort.  The boys still hadn't quite grasped the size sort concept, and I always end up helping Alex.  This time, however, I dumped the pieces out and walked away for a minute to grab something else and when I came back...he had figured it out! 

Alex did the size sort - correctly - all by himself! Oh my goodness, Mommy Pride! 

Not to be outshone by his younger brother, Jack proceeded to complete the size sort, himself.

At the tables, I introduced a new activity for Jackson.  I put the letter U alphabet maze from 1+1+1=1 into a sheet protector and showed him how to cross the maze by following the U path.  Meanwhile, I pulled down our laminated number mats for Alex to trace his numbers.

And then the boys switched.

We finished up our letter U activities by reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and putting our letter U on our coconut tree.

Thankfully, there is a lot of room for flexibility with homeschooling.  I only had Halloween activities planned for this week, so adding a day of U activities worked out well.  

Letter O Week

REGULAR CURRICULUM:
 - Preschool: Confessions of a Homeschooler's Letter of the Week and Daily Learning Notebook
 - Tot School: 1+1+1=1's Tot School Letter O and Tot Time Notebook

MONDAY

During our Calendar Time today, I introduced the new LDS Scripture Verse for the week: "O, remember, my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth." (Alma 37:35, Book of Mormon)  After our daily notebooks, the boys joined me on the rug to introduce our new letter and sound for the week: O. I threw this scavenger box together quickly this morning, but I was still surprised by how much I was able to find.  This includes an Oo Octopus card from a new set of ABC flash cards I bought recently, our large foam letter O, the "O is for Obey" page from our Gospel ABC book, an ostrich puzzle piece, O the owl from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, Owl from Winnie the Pooh, a little wooden Obi-Wan Kanobi peg doll I made awhile back, a picture of an otter in our animal book, and a picture of an orange in our colors book.  We pulled out each item and talked about the o's, although I tried to focus mostly on the short-o sound.

We moved to the tables to work on our lacing cards. Jack and I used Lego bricks to create patterns on his large O lacing card, and Alex just had fun covering his ostrich lacing card with Lego bricks.  Then I let them make Lego towers for awhile:

Coloring pages were next.  Usually the boys spend 1 minute coloring before jumping up and declaring "I'm ready for the next activity," but I sat with Jackson and encouraged them both to spend more time on their pages.  When I read On Becoming Preschool Wise, the authors talked about having a daughter that was like that - she couldn't focus on a single activity for more than a minute or two.  They started to help her learn focus by giving her a coloring page and setting a timer for 20 minutes or so.  If she finished coloring the page before the 20 minutes was up, they would simply hand her a new copy of the same page and have her start over.  And they'd repeat that until the timer went off.  I have considered attempting that exercise, but for now I'm just encouraging and prodding Jack to take more time on his.  And it worked! He actually spent a good 8-10 minutes on his octopus coloring page!  Alex had to finish cleaning something up before starting his Oo coloring page, but he spent a little longer than usual on it, as well.

Our large floor number cards were next, and, as usual, the boys loved it.  Sometimes, however, they fight over who gets to pick up the card (as you can see below).  Erica also has a set of octopus large floor numbers for download.

Now that the boys got some wiggles out, it was "educational video" time.  I took the Letter Factory dvd back to the library last week, but I found a couple Sesame Street videos I wanted to use.  This week we decided to learn more about numbers using The Great Numbers Game (counting up to 20).   The boys loved it, and I thought it did a great job not only counting to twenty with a cute story, but also showing representations of each number.

As the movie was playing in my room, I went back to the playroom to hide our ABC Find It cards.  After the video was over, the boys came back in for the final activity (finding the cards and matching them up to the clue card on the table), and then we finished for the day.

Reading books I found for this week include:

1. Oswald by Dan Yaccarino

2. Olivia by Ian Falconer

3. Olivia Counts by Ian Falconer

4. Living Things: Octopus by Rebecca Stefoff

5. Oliver's Tree by Kit Chase

6. Olivia Owl Finds a Friend by Maurice Pledger

7. More Tales of Oliver Pig by Jean Van Leeuwen

8. One fish two fish red fish blue fish by Dr. Seuss (read-along book)

TUESDAY

The boys were pretty cranky in the morning, but school time got them excited and focused. We started off our activities with cutting practice.  Jackson doesn't even need my help with proper hand/finger replacement - he knew just how to hold the scissors and paper correctly.  I gave him the octopus cutting page, but he doesn't really care to cut along the lines.  For now, he just enjoys cutting long strips and tiny pieces.  I gave Alex some scrap paper and helped him maneuver his scissors.

We pulled out our magnet pages, next.  Jackson did his octopus magnet page pretty quickly, and had to (very impatiently) wait for Alex and I to finish up his African animal vocabulary page.  The boys then switched (to Jack's great delight).

We learned the proper way to write our letter O with our fingers using our play dough letter mat, and then we pulled out the play dough to help shape the letters, as well.  Instead of using one of the ostrich pages from the Tot School printables, I gave Alex the foam letter O to work on, instead.  He still traced it with his finger like Jackson and I were doing, and then he wanted help making "snakes" of play dough to form his letter, too. The boys played with the play dough and cookie cutters for a good 10-15 minutes after I put the letter stuff away.

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 Following our play dough cleanup, we worked on our puzzles.  Jackson did the octopus 6-piece puzzle and Alex did the ostrich 3-piece puzzle.  Jackson loves puzzles, and even though these are pretty simple he still enjoys doing them each week.

Our last table activity was patterns and sequencing.  Jack completed his octopus patterns and I helped Alex with his 3-part ostrich sequencing activity. 

We ended school with our exercise time.  Funny enough, I hadn't even mentioned that we were doing our "exercise time" today, yet as we were cleaning up the play dough Jackson said "now we'll do puzzles and then we'll do our pattern and THEN it's time for exercise!"  Schedules really are a good thing for that kid!  Instead of doing our Exercise ABC cards, we put on a toddler Pandora station and did free-choice exercises.  This led to animal walks (bear walk, crab walk, duck walk, etc...), and suddenly we had a few active songs come on the station and we ended up dancing along with them, instead!  "Shake Your Sillies Out" was our final number, and we were definitely ready for snack time!


WEDNESDAY

We started off the day with our matching games.  I found a color-matching octopus game on filefolderfun.com (where I get most of my file folder games), and we also used the ostrich shadow match game.

Since our file folder game reviewed colors, I decided not to worry about separate color review activities.  I found this name stamping page and was excited to work on it.  I used a sharpie to write their names along the top lines, and then dotted letters on the bottom line for tracing.  I made photocopies of those pages so I would only have to do it, once.  Instead of using alphabet stamps to stamp their letters in the boxes (because I don't have them, yet), I used some upper-case letter stickers I found in the $1 section at Target.  They loved putting stickers in the boxes to match the letters on top, and Jackson was a pro at tracing his name on the bottom (this is something we do together all.the.time). 

Next up were our dot pages!  Jackson did his usual Oo do-a-dot page, and Alex did an o/owl stamp page from 1+1+1=1.  I think this was the first week they didn't go crazy and soak their pages with ink.

Our last table activity was our O letter collage.  We glued little oats all over it.  After helping the boys learn how to use a bottle of Elmers glue the past few weeks, I let Jackson be in charge of all the gluing by himself. He did great!

Counting practice was next, and I was super excited!  First we used the 1-20 ostrich cards from Alex's pack to review our numbers.  We went through the set together and I let the boys take turns slipping the cards into our little formula-can slot.  Jack decided he wanted to work on the number cards himself - without ANY input from me - so he did that for awhile.  Although he can count up to twenty, he did not really recognize those higher numbers (which we also review with our Calendar Time).  He kept saying five-one for fifteen and eight-one for eighteen...yet any help from me was received with a quick reprimand.  Okay, then.

After the cards were cleaned up, I pulled out a brand new game to play!  I bought this cute little Numbers Go Fish game at Hobby Lobby a few weeks back (for $2.99) and totally forgot about it until yesterday.  I pulled out half the cards, so each number only had 2 cards in the stack, and went through a slow process of teaching the boys how to play Go Fish.  They got the matching part, and the saying "go fish!" part, but not really understanding the rest.  And that was okay, because they still had fun doing it.  Our number one card even had an octopus on it to match the theme for the week!

Our last activity for the day was our octopus letter match.  I realized as we were putting it together that I never made a second 'O' nickel, so we were one letter short, but the boys didn't mind.

THURSDAY

The hats to go with the boys' Halloween costumes came yesterday, and ever since then they have refused to take them off.  This morning, while getting dressed, they decided to wear their shirts, too, so Mario and Luigi visited our school today.  Their shortalls, however, remained in their drawers, only to be worn while actually trick-or-treating.  Here they are working in their daily notebooks:

We had not done a gluing activity for awhile, so I used the stamp/paste page from Alex's packet and found some pictures to glue on Homeschool Creations (the Alphabet Cut and Paste sheets on the right). 

While we were at the tables, I pulled out our q-tip painting letter sheets.  We used orange paint today to match the O theme. Jack was very precise about filling in his dots (top page), and Alex had fun dragging the q-tip like a paintbrush (bottom page).

Since beading and lacing has not been happening the past few weeks, I decided to switch things up a bit.  I brought out our orange lacing card (from a pack of 4-5 fruit lacing cards bought at Dollar Tree), and then pulled out a few pipe cleaners to use with the beads.  I twisted one end around a large bead, first, then showed the boys that they could put beads on the other end like normal.  They LOVED it, and actually had a much easier time getting the beads on this way instead of using the normal string.  Victory!

Shape review time!  I made a geoboard using a small wooden cutting board ($1 at a thrift store) and 3/4" long nails.  I drew on a grid and placed the nails one inch apart.  Since I already had the nails, I spent $1 for the board and less than $2 for a big pack of rubber bands (varying colors and sizes).  The boys LOVE making shapes with the rubber bands!  I also made a laminated copy of 1+1+1=1's shape tracers to use as a matching game, and that became a new favorite. Alex matched them up all by himself!

The boys completed their letter O Letter Hunt worksheets...

...and then we decided to do some painting.  The boys have been begging me for the past few days to paint, so I obliged.  Usually we just use these Melissa & Doug Paint with Water books, but I popped open my small watercolor tray, too, and gave them some water in a bowl.  They had a blast.

I need to get art aprons (or old shirts of mine for them to use when painting).

Mario and Luigi had so much fun in school that they decided to join me at Costco.  Jack kept shouting "I'm Luigi! And this is Mario!" to everyone that walked by.

FRIDAY

Instead of doing prewriting pages this morning, I pulled out my newly-laminated play dough number mats for us to work on writing numbers.  Jackson has learned to "start at the dot and follow the arrow" on these mats, especially since they are made by the same lady that made our playdough letter mats.  I only pulled out 1-11 (I printed these back-to-back), but Jack traced the number with his finger and then put Lego bricks on the corresponding circles in the graph below.

We moved to the floor (have to keep moving!) for our octopus size sort.  There was some drama here with the boys not wanting to share, so I divided them up and let Jack do the whole thing himself, and then I helped Alex do it afterwards.

We did our "O" letter craft next, which I hurriedly cut out this morning when I woke up and realized I never prepped it.  I had no pink construction paper, so we had to use orange, instead. But the boys did not care at all.

I had another new activity to work on for our upper/lower-case matching.  I printed out, cut, and laminated these Uppercase/Lowercase Letter Matching Puzzles for the boys (the link to download is about halfway down the page on the left).  They LOVED these mini puzzles! I had them all spread out on the floor and told them to match them together up on the table to keep it neater.

They were so proud when they finished them all.  :)

We ended the day reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and putting our letter O on the coconut tree.  I also borrowed the movie "Oliver and Company" from the library for family night.

A Few Money-Saving Ideas

These are a few things I have found at great prices to help keep homeschooling costs down:

1. Cardstock: This pack of 250 sheets from Amazon. I spent $4-5 on 50 sheets from Hobby Lobby before.  This set on Amazon has 250 sheets for less than $12 and the quality is fantastic.

2. Laminating: I borrowed my mother-in-laws spare laminator and finally purchased these laminating pages on Amazon. You get 100 sheets for less than $14 and, again, the quality is amazing.  I spent more money having things laminated at a local teacher supply store, and the quality from the big laminator there is less than what I get laminating from home.  And with my boys, it is necessary to laminate things to keep them from being destroyed!  This is not an Amazon Prime order, though, so it will take a little longer than the free two-day shipping to get to you.  The shipping is free, though, and I still received my order in just a few days. 

3. Printer ink: I just recently discovered that Costco refills ink cartridges! Why did it take me this long to figure that out!?!  I am low on ink, but not quite empty, so I have to wait a little longer before I can test this out.  Knowing Costco's incredible customer service, however, I'm not worried.  According to this chart, it would cost me $10.49 to refill my XL color ink cartridge.  A new cartridge costs $26, normally.  That is fantastic!  I am also getting better about printing less papers each week, because I know better what we will actually use and I have found other ways to teach things without printing off every activity.

4. Planning: I recently found this daily planner in Confessions of a Homeschooler's shop.  I want one so bad, but I will wait and purchase the 2015 daily planner when it comes out.  In the meantime, I got one of her student notebooks for free. I printed off the weekly planning pages, as well as a few extra pages I liked, and put everything in a small folder.  I use this for my specific weekly/daily planning, referencing my general plan to get ideas of what to do. It is so nice to have a plan book, again!