Garage sale time!

Garage sale season is always my favorite time of year.. I love being able to find new treasures for the kids at a fraction of their normal price! This year so far we have already found......

A game of magnetic gears! The center gear also has a battery and can spin in both directions

It goes great with our new magnetic chalk board! This is approximately 2ft x 3ft

and is even a felt board on the other side :)

We also found this set of magnetic words for our new chalkboard

An abacus to help us with our math

A wooden train set, with 1 thomas train even!

A phonics game - The place where you write with the pen doesnt work so well but all the buttons and games on it work perfectly!

And of course, everyone needs some new furniture sometimes.. They are just LOVING their chairs 

I don't have a picture of it but we also got a HUGE stack of highlights magazines.. Altogether we've gotten everything for maybe $20!  Heres hoping the weather will cooperate for more garage sale fun this weekend!

March

For march we have decided to learn about homes! Today we focused on spiders.. We started by talking about their webs and how they make them.. Then we moved onto an alphabet game
In this game we took our sticky web (pipe cleaners covered in tape) and caught the fly with the right letter on it

We also made marble paintings for spider webs

We also sang songs about spiders and pretended to be them
It's been a great start to march!

Valentines day!

We are all starting to get excited for valentines and have started our valentines activities
First is our calendar which goes with valentines as well as human bodies/people around the world theme
We are cutting folded paper to make hearts which we are then putting into a group picture
This ones a big hit with the kids.. Putting sparkly hearts and roses into a heart ice cube tray.. Great for patterning and pincher grasp!

Feet!

To help us in the transition between learning transportation to learning human bodies we talked about feet! We practiced our running, jumping, skipping and walking. We tried walking with no feet but it didn't work very well, they realized when they tried they were either crawling or slithering :)

We made a painting using our feet as well. One had a blue foot and a yellow foot to make green, another blue and red and the last had red and yellow feet. Not only was it good messy fun but it taught us color mixing and patience waiting for their turn to go on the paper as well!

Games

Sometimes the best games are the ones the kids invent themselves. We have lost a lot of the shapes to our shape sorter so I was going to tuck it away until little dude found a new use.. Putting animals in it! This has been his favorite game all week :) it's also great to teach him about how things can be too big to fit at times

Track painting

Painting is fun but it's always more fun when you get to use tools to paint that normally aren't allowed! Today we decided to gather a bunch of cars and make a track painting. It's great for learning color mixing when the tracks go over each other and just super fun :)

Monster trucks

Today we focused on monster trucks and decided to make our own! We started with a template found at http://www.busybeekidscrafts.com/Monster-Truck-Collage.html and painted them using water colors. Once they were dry we glued them to paper with colored plastic in the windows (quality street wrappers work great!) and used foam for the wheels. Then we attached the wheels with brads so the kids can drive them!

Calendar

Every month we have a new calendar that goes with our theme.. This month is transportation so we put the numbers on a monster truck, a helicopter and a boat for land, air and water. We do our calendar every morning to learn patterns, numbers and dates

Word families

So I still can't find a program for my iPod that lets me put the pictures through the post. I know one exists since I used to have one on my iPhone but I can't remember what it was! If anyone by chance knows please let me know :)

This month we are starting to work on recognizing word families. I thought the -ar would be great to do with our transportation theme so I made a little car out of poster board where they can spin the wheel and make all the -ar words.

Transportation

Now that all my little ones are back from holidays we are starting our transportation theme! Today we started by talking about different modes of transportation (they were amazed to find out people ride elephants!) and worked on our January calendars.

To make them we used their feet as the body of the plane and their fingers as the wings. Then we added a calendar and a poem we found at http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/transportation/m-songs-airplane.htm