Fun with Letters

This week's theme has been communication.  The Mail day was a huge hit in our house.

We started with the circle time activity, placing the month's phonics cards in envelopes and having the girls take turns opening them and identifying the letters.  I had Miss M go one step further by finding something in the room that started with that letter (we did floor, pillow and kick the ball--a stretch but all we could come up with for /k/).  Miss M then decided it would be a fun game to take turns closing our eyes while the other person hid the letters around the room.  She played happily for twenty minutes.  It was also a great way to practice the prepositions "in", "on", "under" and "between".

I buy diaper wipes from Amazon Mom and as a result end up with one new container about every four weeks.  I rounded up three of these containers to use for the letter sorting activity.  Since Miss M is very familiar with the three letters of the month, I added a little difficulty by giving each container a 3-letter "address", all letters that look fairly similar and that she sometimes gets confused.  I made three copies of each letter on cut up pieces of index card and gave them to her to sort.  Littlest even participated for a few minutes.  Miss M loves to let her choose a card and then shows her where to put it.  Since Littlest loves putting objects inside other objects, it was a win-win.  This was another extended play activity and is still sitting out in the living room to be played at will.

Since Miss M has a much longer attention span than Littlest, she needed a filler activity.  I recently bought a small bag of craft pompoms for $2; I dumped them into a bowl and gave her a spoon and yet another diaper wipes container.  She happily transferred pompoms for several minutes.  This easy, cheap and portable activity will be coming with us on our road trip this weekend.

For our final activity, we read the included storybook (I loved the emphasis on engineering and the fact that the kids had to try several ideas before coming up with one that worked) and decorated postcards to send to the grandmothers.  Miss M insisted I draw the stick figure on her swing set but I had her add the facial features, fingers and toes so it wasn't just my drawing.  She dictated a message to my mom and we wrote a note to mother-in-law on Littlest's card, added addresses and stamps and marched them out to the mailbox.  Since MGT includes a similar activity every week, I think this may become a tradition.  I used to love getting mail and it actually makes me sad that this medium is used so little now.  On our upcoming trip I think I will buy a few postcards for the girls to dictate messages/draw pictures on and mail them to ourselves so they can have the experience of getting things in the mail, too.

The Language of the Body

We had Mother Goose Time with just the three of us today, thanks to a little cold caught by Littlest over the weekend.  We focused on body language, especially facial expressions since I think those are a little easier for really young children to understand.

After our morning devotional and while they ate breakfast, I let them watch Daniel Tiger.  This episode focused on times you might feel sad and was a great opportunity to point out the body language of the children when they were sad and how it changed when they got happier (it also reinforces that it is okay to be sad sometimes and you don't have to immediately feel better.  I love this show).

Following circle time, I brought out several of the daily posters from the past few days and we looked at the children in them, describing how they felt and how we could tell from the picture.  Miss M enjoyed this activity and started playing the part of teacher, leafing through them and questioning me about the pictures.  It was a good way to keep her engaged while providing vocabulary and explanations she may not possess yet.

Surprised.

I supplemented some of the activities today with games I found on the internet to help teach the girls more emotional vocabulary.  One idea was to draw faces on circles and use them on a flannelboard to create an emotion word version of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear".  I found some pre-drawn faces by Googling "facial expression pictures", printed and laminated them.  Miss M liked identifying the emotion on each face and putting it in the familiar pattern (we have all the books in the Eric Carle series so she knows it really well).  For example; "Happy face, happy face, what do you see?  I see a sleepy face looking at me."  We talked about how we could tell what the emotion was by how the mouth and eyes were lifted or scrunched.  She practiced making her version of the emotion when I pointed to it.

The second game was simply another emotion matching game, similar to the one provided in one of last week's day bags but with a few more expressions to help boost her vocabulary (like exhausted, disgusted and bored).  I printed two copies of this free worksheet, laminated them and cut one apart, leaving one whole for an easier matching game.  The girls took turns picking a card and matching it while I explained the emotion and when they may have felt it.

I attempted several times to introduce the ASL activities but the girls weren't interested today.  I'm going to keep the poster out and try again another day.

Checking out the craft and trying
to make the sign.

They both scurried to our craft table in the kitchen when I announced that we were going to make a project.  They both love having their hands traced, even though it tickles.  I love the multiple mementos of their tininess that I get to save to look back on in the future.  They put the glue on the hearts and placed them in the palms of the hand cutouts, then (their favorite part) sprinkled the green sand on the top.  The project is meant to be a hand signing I love you in ASL, with the third and fourth fingers bent down.  My husband and I use this sign all the time with each other and Miss M has tried imitating it when we do but was adamantly opposed to bending down the fingers of her project so for now it is a high five with a sparkly heart.

Have you noticed that she's always wearing her crown?  She loves this
craft from June, even though most of the jewels have fallen off from constant use.  I rue the day it finally gets destroyed.  It is her "most favoritest" accessory (in her own words).

Dance Party

My husband was gone yesterday afternoon so after nap the girls and I had a dance party, using the Dance N Beats curriculum and DVDs.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love this music program.  Littlest requests it almost daily by going over to the DVD player, opening the door and then starting to dance to the warm up song (seriously the cutest thing ever).

We did the first lesson plan in the Dance N Beats DVD.  The girls liked making waving hands as music props and chose to stamp them instead of using glitter (much to my secret relief--the house has just recently been deep cleaned and I'd like it to stay that way for a few more days).  Littlest preferred to rip the fingers off hers instead of waving it around with the music like her sister, though.

For the language activity, I labeled three index cards "hands", "eyes" and "ears" (along with some awesome artwork) and tried to explain to Miss M that when she heard that body part named in the song "Are You Listening?" she should stand by the card and try to balance on one foot.  She had a hard time following these directions and mostly just wanted to give me the correct card, although she did try balancing briefly at the end.  After we attempted the activity as outlined, she used the index cards and sang the song all by herself using them to remember the order of the verses.

Miss M didn't want to do the math activity to the song "Introduce Yourself" so we tried it with "Body Language" and having her put a rabbit manipulative in the bowl every time she heard "body".  It worked for the first verse but then she was overcome with excitement over the rabbits and just started dumping them in.  It was still an opportunity to count them and sort by size.

After that she was done and just wanted to dance.  I love watching her follow along with the moves to "Scary Sounds".  It's super cute.

I also wanted to share one success story.  Just before bed, as I was finishing up the dishes and the girls were playing in the living room.  I turned around to find that Miss M had emptied all of our toy bins in less than three minutes.  I was exhausted, my husband was at a late meeting and I just wanted a clean house to relax in.  I had the thought to put on the clean up song from the ABC house album (I have all the music downloaded on my phone) and both girls quickly got into the spirit of picking up.  We had to go through it three times but they both helped the whole time (with Miss M singing along happily).  I've noticed that the Daniel Tiger jingles are a great way to remind her of appropriate behavior and now I've got another fun clean up song in my arsenal.

Friends and Word Families

I like that the lessons for this week all focus on things we can do to be better friends.  This is a primary goal I have for my girls; yes, I want them to be smart, talented and accomplished but above all I want them to be good and kind.

On Monday we focused on including everyone and sharing.  These are difficult concepts, especially when you are 2.5 and it is essential to your wellbeing that you and only you are the sole possessor of every plastic Easter egg in the vicinity.  Heaven help the ear drums of anyone nearby if little sister stumbles in her direction and casts a glance at a forlorn half an egg that has been missing its mate for six months.  These are essential life lessons and could not have come too soon.

After introducing the topics, we got to practice while playing the games, doing the crafts and generally interacting with everyone all day.  I did a lot of verbalizing so the girls could tell when they were doing things that were keys to good friendship and when they were not.  For example, "Miss M, look how happy Littlest is because you shared your crayon" or "Miss M, look how sad Littlest is because you took the book she was looking at."  During lunch we watched the Daniel Tiger episode where they figure out how everyone can play together and then we read Anna Dewdney's "Llama Llama and the Bully Goat" before nap time.  I tried to point out behaviors in both instances that were keys to good friendship.

Today we got to practice in "real life" as we attended story time at our local library.  Both girls did great during the actual presentation but the last ten minutes of the program is devoted to free play with a variety of toys provided by the library.  I'm pretty sure Miss M took a little boy's ball while I was tending to Littlest but since I didn't actually see it and no one was complaining to me, I let that slide.  However, when I observed her knocking down another girl's block tower, that earned a time out and explanation of why that was not acceptable behavior.  Then I made her help the girl build the tower again before she could play with another toy.  Unfortunately the lure of the tower overpowered her and the second infraction saw us leaving.  I was quite impressed though, that she didn't have a fit about it.  I explained why we were leaving,  she apologized to the girl and left quietly.  It's not the most positive example but gives me hope that she can continue to learn from her mistakes as her ability to resist such temptation grows.

Aside from learning friendship skills, we also worked on learning some members of the -ad word family.  The folder game was great and both girls loved it.  Miss M got the hang of blending the sounds very quickly.  Later in the evening I made this little flip book (the onsets can be flipped up to form a new word with the rime) and she showed her daddy her new skill.  It's just a 4x6 index card, nothing fancy and super easy to reproduce at home.  She really enjoyed reading the words and asked to use it "all by myself" for several minutes before we headed up for bed and again this morning.  I'm going to make a few more for her for the -at and -it families and keep them in the car.  For now I am only going to do single consonant onsets and save blends and digraphs for a little later. I'm trying something new and I've attached a printable flip book for you to use with your littles.  Let me know if this works or not and if there's interest, I'll do more.


The friendship bracelet craft was another great fine motor exercise, especially for Littlest who worked very hard and very patiently for several minutes before getting frustrated.  She was actually able to get six beads on the pipe cleaner herself.  I love her determination.

Tomorrow is another school day and we will be talking about caring for others and saying sorry.

Preschool Gaming

On Wednesday we focused on the feelings of being glad, mad and sad.  I was shocked that the girls were able to identify those emotions just from the daily unit posters.  It goes to show how much more kiddos know than we think they do.  They really enjoyed drawing pictures in the included Feelings book and coming up with ways to finish the prompt "I feel ___ when _____________".  Most of Miss M's responses had to do with Daddy leaving or coming home. :)

Aside from talking about feelings and how we show them, we also played some fun games.  One game involved drawing concepts on the bottom of paper cups and hiding the colored buses from this month's manipulatives bag.  The child was supposed to identify the concept (a letter, number or shape) and then look for the bus.  Miss M knew all the ones I put on the cups so I started introducing the concept of subtraction.  I held up my fingers to show that there were five buses and said "There are five buses.  You have two (put down two fingers) so there are three still hiding."  She loved this game and we probably played at least a dozen times.  About the fifth time through I asked her how many were still hiding and she said "Three!" correctly.  I will admit I was completely floored that she got it that quickly.  She continued to subtract correctly until she got bored with me asking and just started looking for buses as fast as she could.  How I wish I could have gotten it on video!

 At the grocery store today I tested her to see if she still had the concept.  We went to the produce section and I handed Littlest a bag and an apple.  I told Miss M that I wanted four apples and we had one, so how many more did she need to give her sister to put in the bag?  She knew the answer, had a blast picking apples and Littlest loved putting them in our bag.  I think it is vitally important that our children learn to use academic principles in the real world, not just in the classroom, on a worksheet or a test form.  I try to be conscientious about pointing things out during our daily routines without getting into the habit of constantly quizzing.

The other super fun game we played was a variation of the one in the Teacher Guide.  I made the girls their own fly swatters using a folding square of construction paper with a straw taped to the middle.  I used the upper and lower case letter cards from our June theme, laid out the lowercase letters on the floor and then held up the upper case version.  The girls took turns swatting the correct letter, then practiced the sound the letter made.  They had a blast.  This would be a fun game for an older child to practice sight words, color or number words (hold up the color/number, they find the label or vice versa), math facts, etc.  I would recommend buying dollar store fly swatters if you do this a lot because our little homemade ones would not stand up to prolong swatting.

The mirrors were fun for both the big girls to make.  Littlest just wanted to work on her fine motor skills so she dumped out the jewels on the table and painstakingly put them back in a jar (quite contentedly, I might add).  See, there is always something for every age!

Grammie School

We were lucky to have my in-laws visit us for the holiday weekend.  We took advantage of a fresh audience and introduced Grammie to the pleasures of Mother Goose Time.  She loved it and the girls loved having her there.

Miss M loved showing Grammie how we do circle time and how much she knows already.  We introduced our letter of the week (Ff) and then she used a magnifying glass to find as many as she could on the world map.

The skill of the day for us was fine motor in the form of the I am Special trees and F is for Fox crafts. I let both girls use the glue on their own (for the most part--I added extra glue when they indicated they were done since they tended to put it just in one spot) and was proud of myself for letting go of a little more control.  Littlest got a somewhat frustrated trying to release the metallic hearts so I helped with that but she picked them up herself and used the glue bottle to squeeze out a well-measured dot of glue.  She liked having her hand traced, even though it tickled a bit.  Miss M really likes tracing her hand (although Grammie helped with this one) and insisted on doing it herself in her journal, with just a little help from me to keep her hand from moving too much.

With the Fox craft, I brought out a pack of dollar store Christmas stickers (it's what I had) and I let them choose what they wanted to use to decorate their fox.  When they pointed to one they wanted I did my best to use a word that began with "f" to describe it, like funny rabbit or furry mouse, or used it in a sentence with as many "f" initial words as I could think of such as "Father Christmas is frolicking in the frosty air in his sleigh pulled by Fred the Reindeer."  We called this auditory bombardment in the speech therapy world.  I was doing it in the context of teaching children to say the sound correctly but it works just as well in teaching the sound a letter makes.  I used to make sound collage pages with my students, using stickers, magazine and newspaper photos or pictures they drew themselves.  When I worked as a reading tutor before graduate school, I helped the kids make their own personal alphabet books, which they loved.  Using stickers helps them with their pincer grasp and finger strength, as well as coordination (it takes a bit of maneuvering to get those stickers off your fingers and on the paper in one piece).  All in all, it was a fun morning with MGT.

An InLinkz Link-up

Making Friends

We have started our September unit, Friends and Feelings.  During circle time I had the girls look at each other and list off the attributes that were the same while I pointed out things that were different.  There is a great episode of Daniel Tiger on this very concept if you're looking for a fun media supplement.

The girls enjoyed learning how to say hello in different languages.  I think I will make this a part of our circle time from now on and maybe look up "goodbye" in the corresponding languages so we can use them both.  We played the matching game by first handing a card to each girl and placing the rest face down on the floor.  I turned their name tags over and picked one to decide who got to go first (I will be doing this from now on, it worked really well) and then let that girl turn over one card.  If it matched her card, she got to keep it and pick another card to match on her next turn.  If it didn't match, she turned it over and kept the original card.  It actually went pretty well.  Littlest even had a card to match but her attention span conked out before her second turn, which was fine.

Making the friend puppets was a huge highlight.  They named them after themselves at first, although Miss M later changed hers to Elsa Tiger.  Littlest liked playing with the feathers and glue and scribbling on paper but otherwise wasn't much interested in the puppet itself.  The older girls zoomed around the downstairs, rescuing each other while I cleaned up the art supplies and set up the bus sorting game.  The puppets were then used to help the buses get to their appropriate stations at the store, church, library, museum and park.

Littlest has lots of fun putting things away so after the girls finished sorting the buses appropriately, I let them zoom around some more and focused on labeling the bus colors while Littlest put them in the container.  We then dumped the container and sorted them together.  It took a lot of modeling but she did get the concept after a while.  With Miss M attending a three hour playgroup on Fridays now, I see a great opportunity to use my MGT materials with Littlest (which she will love having unfettered access to with her sister gone).

It was a really successful beginning of a new unit.  I think the focus on labeling emotions and interacting with friends will be great for Miss M as she meets new children in the playgroup and encounters opportunities to express how she is feeling in an appropriate way.

The End (of our Fables unit)

I have really, really enjoyed this unit.  I may just have to come up with a few of my own story-based activities to supplement our Mother Goose Time curriculum because it was just so much fun and I loved introducing the girls to literature from around the world at such a young age.

For our last class of the month, we read the folktale "Stone Soup.  We brought out our favorite manipulatives so far, the glass rocks, and practiced counting with them.  I put them in a pot from the play kitchen, had each girl (even Littlest) grab a handful and put them in a little bowl and then they jealously guarded their treasure as they counted how many rocks their little hands had acquired.

The story pieces were a hit, with each girl calling dibs on a particular vegetable to add to our pot as the story went on.  Miss M has learned the word "favorite" although I am not sure she quite grasps the meaning since she joyfully declared potatoes to be her favorite snack even though she has refused to eat them for months now.

For the postcard activity, I cut up the produce section of our local grocery ad and let the girls choose pictures to glue on the front.  On the back I wrote their names and the date and had them finish the sentence "I like to eat ______."  I gave one of the cards to Littlest to practice scribbling on as well (shoving down my instinct to keep it until she was old enough to "do it right").  She's getting the hang of holding a crayon and uses pretty good pressure so you can actually see the color on the page now.  It is exciting to watch her new skills emerge alongside her sister.

Instead of the vegetable soup, which I would have liked but I'm pretty sure would have been wasted on my girls given past experience, we had a snack of homegrown cherry tomatoes and raspberries with zucchini bread (I grew the zucchini, too) while watching a version of "Stone Soup" on YouTube.  It was a yummy way to end a fun month of fables and folktales.  I can't wait to start our September unit!

An InLinkz Link-up