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

Testing

Just got a new iPod touch and testing out some blogging programs.. Real posts coming soon!

Christmas time!

After a busy summer im back to blogging! We had a great summer filled with lots of outside exploring, attempting to grow a garden, cooking with fresh veggies, and most importantly, just having fun being kids! We have also gone through our transition time of our big friends all heading off to school and have settled nicely into our new schedules and groups. Now, time to get everything ready for christmas! All my little ones are just so excited to see the big jolly man coming soon and i'm doing everything I can to make that excitement even bigger :)

This month we are guiding our activities towards winter and christmas things.. Here is the start of our new shelf activities.........

Pouring silver balls.. For an added challenge I gave them just one cup but more beads then will fit into the cup so they need to learn when to stop pouring so as not to make a mess

Here I cut up cinnamon sticks into small enough pieces that they can fit into the snowman on the ice cube tray.... The kids then practice using the tweezers to pick up the pieces and put them in.. and of course theres always the added fun of smelling each piece which seems to be their favorite part  :)

Because my kids all seem to be super big into tweezers and things I set up a second game using them this month. In this game there are red and green bells and they need to be separated into two little metal containers

Dollar store find! Everyone always loves tic tac toe :)

I took old easter egg halves and attached bells inside of them using pipe cleaners which also make the handles. Half of the bells I took out the piece inside that makes them jingle so the kids need to separate them between jingly bells and silent bells.

The other day we also did a great activity to make snow flakes. I cut out the snow flakes from paper first and then we taped them onto a white piece of paper together. I then gave them a sponge and black paint so they could sponge overtop of all of the snowflakes so that when we took them off we ended up with white snowflakes in a night sky :)

I love these little books.I picked them up recently second hand and the kids look forward to this every day. there is a book for each day before christmas and as an added bonus, each one is also an ornament for the tree. It has become part of our circle time every day to get our new book and read it before putting it on the tree.

This is all juts the start of our christmas fun.. Hopefully I will have more activities to post soon!