Tot School - Letter Ff

Mouse is 3 years old.

Letter Ff activities

We sang Old Macdonald Had A Farm and taught him Farmer In The Dell.

Dot Paint sheet from COAH, but we are using a round stamp and inkpad instead. (Boy would I love to get my hands on a set of Do A Dot markers!)

I found a lot of Farm Tot/Preschool packs from CreativePreschoolResources as well as 3Dinosaurs (they are using the same graphics) so I picked what I felt was suitable for Mouse and left the rest for when he is older. Here he is putting up his coloured barns on the pocket chart.

Takoyaki and Roast Meat were tasked by me to help Mouse build a farm out of Duplo bricks, Playmobil figures and whatever else they could think of. The fence was my contribution - it's an adjustable drawer divider from Daiso that was keeping my ladles from meeting my can opener and graters d:)

 

More farm role playing - I recently acquired this paper cardboard box which is made out of different sized smaller boxes, and I showed him that we could stack them up to create a kind of dolls' farmhouse. Here he is placing the various figures and animals into the different rooms of the farmhouse. You'll find many animals that do NOT belong on a farm, haha!

Non-Farm activities

Strangely, the moment he saw the different compartments, he immediately started to sort our marble collection into it. We have christened it our Sorting Box d:)

Sorting marbles into the Sorting Box

Playing at cooking and making bentos.

Stacking fruits and veggies.

Threading alphabet beads to make a bracelet. This activity was too difficult for his little hands as the beads were stiff and had holes all over so he wasn't sure which hole to push the bracelet through. We'll try again when he's a little older and is more dexterous.

Tot School - Letter Ee

Mouse is 3 years old.

Letter Ee activities

We introduced Mouse to stamping (or "chopchop" as we call it in our family) and he's totally addicted to it. These are Do A Dot worksheets from Me&Marie but we do not have the Do A Dot Markers, so we've improvised by using a round wooden stamp.

Stamping big E

And little E

We did some prewriting practice worksheets from 1+1+1=1. In the picture below, he got tired of tracing the shapes so he just circled them d:)

We found corresponding "egg containers" for this prewriting page from 1+1+1=1. Those are plastic toy eggs from our cooking set.

Transferring plastic toy eggs into basket.

Transferring eggs with a spoon to an old egg carton.

Colouring eggs from Haffly Homeschool.

Sorting uppercase and lowercase Ee from Me&Marie. Not sure what he was saying when we took the photo d:)

Size sequncing with Es. He's rather resistant to size sorting and sequencing.

We also worked on some elephant stuff from COAH, but regretfully, I did not manage to take any pics.

Non Letter Ee activities

Cutting velcro fruits and vegetables.

And serving them up d:)

Transferring pompoms with tongs (Roast Meat wanted to join in the fun too).

 Playdough time - always a favourite.

Arranging number blocks in sequential order.

And stacking them (and letting them fall!).

Pattern blocks.

I am working on drawing up my own Homeschool and Curriculum Planner, after seeing a number around the web but not finding one that suits my needs. Hopefully after I've got those done up, our homeschooling will be a little more structured, or at least a little more consistent d:)

Tot School - Letter Dd

Tot School has been hanging in the air for the last few weeks because I have been very busy with our primary school's annual Teachers Day Concert. So the letter of the week was actually spread out over a few weeks; we had tot school whenever I didn't have to go to school for practices.

It is my first time directing the concert and this is the project that has been keeping me on my toes for the past month and zapping a lot of time and energy out of me. However, I enjoyed the experience very much as I loved working with the incredibly talented students, some as young as 7 years old, who came forward and auditioned with their skits, songs and dances, as well as some other special talents such as wushu and instrument-playing. Moreover, I am always happy to have anything to do with theatre, stage, and performing d:)

(Mouse is 36mths old this week. We celebrate his 3rd birthday.)

Letter Dd for Dog, Duck and Dino

Because I couldn't find enough satisfactory activities for only one animal, I decided to go the full monty and use all the D animals available on the homeschool network for this week(s)' letter. Very typical of Singaporeans - kiasu (afraid to lose).

Using printouts for Dinosaur from COAH, Dog from Royalbaloo.com and Duck from 1+1+1=1, we focused on the D sound. There are also flashcards from Kidzclub.com (I love how they provide flashcards for multiple items beginning with the letter rather than just one item per letter) and these were really useful in linking up the different familiar items that begin with D.

Here he is working on the Dinosaur counting activity - we used number magnets with the printout on a magnetic whiteboard. And we discovered our number 3 magnet is missing d:(

He finally opened up to using scissors and cut up the little doggies, with me guiding his hands on how to hold the paper so he wouldn't cut himself. Then I passed him the glue stick and he applied glue and stuck those doggies on paper.

It is now our habit to put the crayon-coloured animals in the pocket chart (which has moved house to a clothes rail). He loves either naming the colours (blue duck, green dog) or counting the animals (not very correctly yet).

More dinosaur activity - sorting big and little Ds. I should mention that he is wearing his Tshirt that has a stuffed dinosaur on the front d:)

Next up, playdough with the Dd playdough mat from Homeschool Creations.

And there was a Letter Hunt maze from 1+1+1=1. He didn't get the idea at first, so I guided him by pointing to the letters, and finally, after he had coloured them, I showed him how to draw a line to join them up so the duck gets to the pond. Here is the letter hunt maze on our pocket chart.

The children played dressup and here he is in a Dinosaur headdress from IKEA.

Non Letter Dd activities

Chinese lesson - we reread our 小扭扣 book and played with some coloured buttons. I will need to get some more buttons in blue, green and yellow.

I got hold of some magnets in different shapes and put them on the IKEA art easel for him to play with. I also showed him that he can do a sort of colour graph by lining up the magnets according to colour, regardless of shape, under "head magnets". Then, we counted up the magnets in the same column/colour.

While I was assembling a shelving unit from IKEA (to store my homeschooling materials), he played with the screwdriver bits from our toolset. He liked plucking them out and sticking them in again, and remembered not to touch the last two which were thin and sharper.

And last of all, he wanted to play with the Giraffe ABC/123 puzzle which was a gift from Grandma for his elder brother years ago. He needed some help with the right pieces to fit in as his version of the alphabet song is kind of slurry.

I haven't prepared my E materials yet, so it's a good thing I don't school on Mondays. Plus this week is the September one week hols for the older kids, so it will be hard to school with them around. Strangely, Mouse is just more distracted when they are in the house.