School Time: Week 4 (Pp concluded)

As I mentioned last week, we continued the letter P this week.  One of our word cards is "penguin" and we have been waddling like penguins to go hang up our pictures.  We played a follow the leader type game acting out different penguin actions as we walked around the living room and dining room.  That reminded me of our little booklet about penguins in our lapbook, so we pulled the penguin lapbooks out of the box and used the "Parts of a Penguin" cards in addition to reading the booklet and looking at our shape hunt.  For complete details of the penguin lapbook head on over to my post from earlier in the year.

 We put our P collages together.  I have decided to do all the cutting for it because the girls have found it too tiring.  I guess a little cutting is okay, but I was having them do too much.

 Amelia has started layering everything:

 We also made our P Pig craft.  You can find the details here.

Because I could NOT come up with a p craft myself I took some time looking at the crafts linked up at The Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection.  I really liked the pig, but hubby liked the idea of the piano.  So, instead of a tactile P we made another letter shaped craft.

I had the girls trace over dotted lines for the piano keys

 Amelia wanted to trace her own lines in addition to the ones above

 After she glued her keyboard to the P Tabitha pretended to play the piano.

 I thought it was neat that Amelia made her own pattern

I was familiar with the following idea from working at the Montessori, but I couldn't figure out how to implement it at home.  Then I remembered I had an extra container available so I filled it with a thin layer of salt so the girls could practice writing their letters.

 Finishing up our Pa state page

 Tabitha's tracing is improving a great deal

 This morning I let Amelia get on her Starfall (alphabet as she calls it).  Tabitha helped her move and click the mouse.  Then they wanted to type, so I opened up our Microsoft Works program and let her type away, occasionally giving her a specific word to spell.  This was how she spelled pepper, "pepr."  She getting there.

 Then they pulled out their farm.

 All ready for lesson time.  Hannah in the Bumbo doesn't last too long, so I enjoy it while I can.  

My left arm really appreciates it.

 A simple popcorn counting game.  I just cut out a strip from an egg carton and wrote the numerals 0-5.

I used popcorn kernels, but I won't do that again, too hard to get out.  So I let the girls use the popped popcorn.  

 Stay tuned to see what we make with these materials.  

We are almost done, but decided to do some baking instead.

We decided to make something special for the bake sale (we had already made some for ourselves last night).  Can you guess what we made to go with our letter P

adding baking powder to the flour and baking soda

 and some cinnamon

 after adding the nutmeg we stirred together the dry ingredients

 Getting ready to cream sugar and margarine

 Amelia thought it was loud.  

So do you know what we made for the bake sale?  If you think you know just leave me a comment.

 Some special Tiny Tot/Mommy Time

Hannah is learning to sit!!

I did catch her right after taking the picture because she started to fall, but she is getting there.

 Just one little helping hand is all it takes to keep her steady

 Couldn't resist this expression:

Our Bible verse these last couple of weeks has been, "Praise ye the Lord for it is good to sing praises unto our God." Psalms 147:1

To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1, Homeschool Creations  Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

Gonna link up our piano to 

  

Already linked up the pig.

Muffin Tin Monday Part 2: Shapes (plus)

Today I wanted to work on the children's green collages because the pictures they had colored have been sitting patiently waiting to be cut up and made into something.  When I scheduled my days for this "school year" I forgot we were in the middle of our number/color lessons from the summer.  So today after the girls colored their "p" pictures I had them cut, tear and glue green items onto a piece of paper.  Because today's Muffin Tin Monday theme was shapes I tried to focus a little on shapes with their collage.  I searched through the foam bead shapes and found some circles, hearts and squares. They each got 2 green pompoms.  I gave the girls some green construction paper cut into triangles, rectangles and squares.  They were allowed to cut this up however they wanted to, except for the large triangle that I had them place in a corner of their paper.

Then I made the muffin tins while they watched their Signing Time show.  I have to tell you, I think I got confused on what the theme was supposed to be.  It's supposed to be shapes.  Well, it still is, but it took on a life of its own as I was searching (once again last minute) to find foods that would work.  And we ended up with a shapes/orange muffin tin.

2 cheese triangles

2 square peanut butter on cheese crackers

5 fish shaped crackers (pushing it a bit on this one, huh?)

1 oval hard boiled egg

5 circle carrots

2 crescent peach slices 

(Though Tabitha didn't quite think they were crescents, maybe wedges?)

The eggs were last minute so fresh from the pan.  If anyone else struggles with making hard boiled eggs that come out of the shell easily, let me share what I discovered today.  I was reading some directions here but only took part of the advice and mine turned out perfectly.

I did 3 eggs, one each for each of us.

Placed them in lukewarm water.

Put the flame on high and brought to a boil, added a sprinkle of salt while they were coming to the boil.

When they were at a boil I turned the flame to low so they would simmer for 10 minutes.

I ran them under cold water, alternating draining and adding more cold water 'til the eggs were warm and easy to handle.

I gently tapped them 3-4 times in different spots and peeled.

Perfect

I waited about 10 minutes to peel mine and the shell stuck in one spot, could have been a fluke, or could mean it's better to peel right away, don't even wait 10 minutes.

Then we played a game with the Preschool Printable: Shapes Around Me that I discovered over at Carissa's blog, 1+1+1=1 yesterday.  I cut the pieces out and put the rectangle cards in the center with the shapes in a circle surrounding them.

I drew one card at a time and had the girls look at the pictures.  I had them tell me what shape all the pictures showed, then they were to find the shape on the floor that matched.

Amelia had a hard time trying to understand she was to pick one off the floor not on the card.  The girl who found the shape kept the card and put it down in front of her.  Of course I insisted that Tabitha let Amelia take her turns.

Here I thought Amelia had the right one

Then she went on to just keep pointing at shapes.

Oh well.  Something to work on.

Head on over to Muffin Tin Mom  to see other's muffin tins