We created our own mail center in our schoolroom and play room because my kids love getting the mail. They love to send letters to friends, teachers, and grandparents. They love to send and receive mail. I made some monster post cards to help us practice writing, addressing, and sending mail. Of course, these aren’t post cards for the US Postal Service: they are for our own homemade mail box!
This month’s Story Corner Blog Hop is about Spring, and while I have a huge number of favorite spring books I could share about (I may in the coming weeks), the book I kept coming back to is one that my daughter has recently fallen in love with: Lift-the-Flap Colors.
Because spring is simply packed full of new colors, this seemed the perfect book to keep my daughter interested in a Springy activity. We decided to make our own Lift-the-Flap book, but this time with the spring colors we see!
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My son’s Math and Science Club teacher through the park district came to class with a pile of amazingly large egg cartons recently. They played a math game, but my daughter and I used a blank one to make an ABC Penny Drop game.
All we needed was the egg carton, a marker, and a handful of pennies. Strawberry had a ton of fun dropping or throwing the pennies at the egg carton and then delightedly telling me what letter she had landed on.
We also used some ABC flashcards to match the letter we hit to the letters of the alphabet. She was delighted whenever we landed on a letter we had not yet landed on! Continue reading
It’s so easy to say but it is true: anything can become a learning game. When I opened a box to find a dozen air bubble mailers, my daughter oooh’d and aaaah’d over the them. So I grabbed the sharpie and complied with her curiosity. “Letter POP” is the impromptu game that resulted. Continue reading
We’ve been learning about ducks, thanks to Strawberry’s interest. After reading dozens of books and playing with duckies in the tub, Strawberry still wants more! To play up the duck theme yet farther, Strawberry, Raisin, and I conducted experiments with sinking and floating. Continue reading
We found some rubber duckys at the Dollar Store the other day. My daughter was very excited to play with them! We had to stock up on a lot of them.
Of course, rubber ducks are a fun friend for the bathtub. But we decided to make a game so we could play and count with duckies anytime. Here are some ducky counting mats for rubber ducky fun outside of the bath!
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Enter: The Reid School’s new weather bear! A weather bear is a fun addition to our daily calendar time as we track the weather day by day and practice putting the correct clothing on Berry the Bear.
When my husband was young, his mother taught preschool. One thing he mentioned remembering was a weather bear in their basement classroom. A few months after we had a conversation about his childhood weather bear, his mother sent it to me!
But after 30 years of life, Grandma’s Weather Bear was definitely past his prime. The seal of the lamination no longer was tight. The Velcro tape had come off the back, and the sticky residue had somehow left stains that seeped through to the visible side of the bear. It was time for Grandma’s Weather Bear to retire.
We call our weather bear “Berry.” I bought a large set of bear plus clothes clip art to dress our dear Berry, created by Teacher Laura. We printed off our favorite clothes (sized just right for Berry). I planned to use small Velcro dots (affiliate links throughout this post) to attach the clothing and felt to attach the bear to the felt board. Magnets could also work for this, if I had a magnet board!
I decided to create her by printing on light fabric transfer paper
and ironing it directly on to felt
. I printed a lot of clothes for Berry. Right now I keep her clothes in a small box next to the weather bear board.
As my kids and I put Berry together, I started to thinking about you, my blog readers! While I obviously can’t include all the clothing options for all of you (WAY too many!), I wanted to share some with you. This free download for blog list subscribers includes the weather bear and clothes for five different kinds of weather.
With my preschooler and her Spanish preschool class, I also developed some more for weather learning fun. I include seasons and weather cards (in both
English and Spanish!), cards to practice the vocabulary for clothing, and also some places we can use to sort clothes: what do we wear to the beach? What do we wear to the mountain top? What do we wear in the pool?
In my Spanish class we also played listening games. I described the clothes of a child in a photograph, as well as the location, and they had to figure out which picture i was describing. It was amazing how much Spanish those little preschoolers have learned in the past 6 months!
I put all these items (the weather bear and clothes, the photograph discussion images, and the vocabulary/weather cards) together for those who would like a more complete weather set for their home or school. Get the full Weather Bear set at my Shop or TeachersPayTeachers.
[product id=”45151″]Whether you decide to buy the more complete product or you simply enjoy the subscriber freebie, I hope you and your kids have a fun time tracking the weather in your school or home!
Do you track daily weather with your toddler or preschooler?
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Weather bear sampler
This will be sent directly to your email address!
Today I get to share a fun pioneer covered wagon craft at my friend Kim’s blog!
When I think of Life Over C’s, I think of hands-on learning. I decided we’d share how we made a covered wagon with her readers. Click over to see how I put together the milk carton covered wagon. Continue reading
I have noticed that my toddler, Strawberry, does not recognize shapes: she knows heart, moon, and star, but not the basics like circle and square. She calls ovals “footballs” and gets excited when she sees them though! I have been thinking for weeks that we needed to focus on learning the shapes.
When I saw that Krista’s Math Madness Wednesdays this week is about shapes, I thought it was time to put some ideas into action.
Baby Strawberry is already 20 months old. I don’t notice homeschooling a toddler as much as homeschooling an older child because the things the toddler learns appear so simple. But as I watch her progress from hour to hour, I am amazed at how her every moment provides learning opportunities that will build on each other.
When my son was that age, I was going through a rough time. My husband was traveling weekly, my son was completely unintelligible, and I faced long days alone with a screaming toddler. I had no intention of homeschooling him, and I lived for the days when I knew I’d have a break.
It wasn’t until Raisin started reading to me (at age 3) that I began to think of homeschooling. I had read to him by the hour some days, and I had nurtured his natural ability to learn, but I had never considered keeping him home, and I’d never considered myself as a teacher.
Now that I am actively homeschooling Raisin, I see toddler Strawberry in a completely new light. Of course, my situation is a little different (my husband is around every evening, for example). But as I teach my daughter sign language and then hear her begin to speak words, I see her development in the light of education. I see progress from day to day. I hear her learn a word one day and use it in conversation (one-year-old conversation, that is!) the next. Being able to watch her learn is a blessing. Continue reading