Christmas School Activities

 We have actually fallen behind in school because of so many extra activities going on but we have squeezed in some fun school lessons!

 We took the girls to Pump it Up just so I could get some lesson planning done. ha!

 She ordered the candy bags into the correct order and then added the correct amount of candy to each bag. The blank bag I tried to "trick" her by calling out a number and she had to fill it with that amount. But she was too smart...I couldn't trick her. ;o)

 We love those little dollar spot erasers! We use them for so many math activities. Here Marin is making an ABB pattern.

 She did some addition problems using mini Christmas lights I found at a yard sale last summer!

 Marin is a beginner reader. We are working on sight words and blending/segmenting CVC words. She's not a fan of blending to read the words but she loves breaking them apart and segmenting the sounds in each words. Marin is a math/science girl so taking the sounds apart is much more fun for her during reading lessons.

 Here she picked a card. Read the picture. Then broke the sounds down and put them in the box to spell each word.

 I love her sweet handwriting.

We read Christmas books and did a few activities with some of them....

They played a tree/ornament game where they had to look for letters or sight words that I called out. it was a good review game. This is actually a freebie in my teacher store.  

 This center was to help practice middle sounds. Marin picked a card. Read the picture in Santa's belly. Listened for the middle sound and wrote it in the correct box.

Another math game to practice early addition....

 We started some language lessons and the first lesson was on nouns. So I made this little stocking noun sort to give them a visual for each type of noun.

This was a cute little game where Hollis looked at the letter ornaments on the tree, Once she found one, she wrote it on her recording sheet. Hollis loves to write!

We did Count the Room as a center pocket game this month. She counted the pictures and then recorded their amount the sheet.

We use Saxon Math Kindergarten as our math curriculum. I really love it. It is very relaxed and hands on. But the number line below is a part of that curriculum. Hollis is working on recognizing and putting the numbers 1-10 in order.

 Another Saxon activity was to graph the eye color in our family....

Jolly challenged the girls to send their friends Christmas cards this year. Marin worked so hard coloring and addressing her envelopes to her friends!

 Hot chocoloate marshmellow number order!  Marin really likes math so I try to supplement activities with our Saxon curriculum.

And there you have it...a few of our holiday school activities!

Feature Friday

I was the Feature Friday guest on the Kinder Tribe blog last Friday. Here are the apple ideas I shared over there....


Tis the season for....apples!! Hello, I am Stacey from Giggles and Glue Sticks and I am so excited it is September! Time to bring out all of our apple math and literacy centers and have some apple fun! I am going to share with you some of the activities we do in September all centered around apples! 

  I created this pack to have a quick and easy go-to for a review of muliple early literacy skills. For this month the theme is APPLES, of course!!! For each of the 6 pocket activities, there is a little song to go with it. Some days we have time for the songs, some days, we just go down the pockets and it gives me a quick assessment of what to work on more. But the skills covered are (1) letter identification (where is the worm hiding), (2) word counting/sight words, (3) beginning/medial/ending sounds,  (4) syllables, (5) rhyming words, (6) segmenting and blending. It has worked beautifully for a fun little practice and review!

 Another great apple activity is reading about Johnny Appleseed! And we love QR Code listening centers...such a great way for students to listen to a story multiple times to improve comprehension, vocabulary, and reading fluency!

We also do lots of reading and writing fun with apples! We read poetry about the life cycle of an apple, we write and tell stories with our apple cubes, and we practice letter fluency by reading our apple strips! If you do Daily Five in your classroom, this is a great set to implement apple science into those centers.

I really LOVE math for little ones. There are so many fun, engaging, and hands on ways to teach number concepts to young children! And apple themed games are the best! 

This set has so many fun games to practice early math concepts! Great for centers, small groups, guided math groups....

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We LOVE our Roll and Race games! It is one of our favorite go to centers and it practices couting, graphing, more and less!! I had one commenter mention that she used these games for morning work! Brilliant. Such a fun way to start the day!

And last but not least....another favorite....and FREEBIE!! Our number line mysteries are a great mental math game that helps them practice counting and number order! You can get this freebie or any of the other activities mentioned by clicking on the pictures! 

I hope this has given you some apple inspiration for this new month! Happy September! 

Preschool Calendar Time

We try and do calendar every day. I will be honest, calendar time, is not my favorite. But it is such a great way to teach so many basic skills so I push through it. We have our rhythm with it so we usually can cover all of it pretty quickly and it is great daily reinforement for the girls.

 This is what our calendar looks like. My pocket chart calendar is a DIY project. It orginally was a cheap mini pocket chart from the Dollar Tree. Then I just stitched lines down it with my sewing machine for the days. Easy Peasy and it works perfectly! Last year I had seasonal numbers and we would count the apples or count the leaves, pumpkins, etc. But this year I left our numbers blank with grey font. We talk about what the day is and trace the number on the correct card. Then we have two colors for this month. You see the blue and yellow crayon at the top of the chart? Those are our colors for August. We are making an AB pattern with those colors. Each month will be different colors and pattern. But once we trace the number, we color in the box.  I usually let my youngest do that part. 

Both girls have a notebook but my 4 1/2 year old enjoys it the most. She writes in it daily as we do the big calendar together. It is great fine motor practice for her...writing the numeral, coloring in the box, etc.

Work at the table....or on the table.... whatever works.

 Then we check the weather. I made my graph for one week only. The sheet is in a page protector so they use a dry erase marker and X the weather for the day. On Friday, we look back and read and analyze our graph.
We have songs we sing for the months/years/seasons. But they do draw a line through or circle on their sheet. 

And SONGS!! These are the only way I get through calendar. We sing! The weather song actually changes every day but we sing these months/days songs pretty much every day. There are so many more out there. Learning Station has great songs for days/months! 

If you are interested in the our calendar notebook, you can check it out by clicking on the picture below! It's on sale today!

Learning Our ABCs!

One of the main things we  (mostly Hollis) will be working on this school year is learning her letters and letter sounds. There are so, so, sooooo many fun ways to teach the alphabet but today I'm going to share three of our favorites. In the past we have done a letter of the week type of curriculum and did a craft project with each letter. That was fun and great and wonderful. But a couple of weeks ago, we attended a homeschool convention where I went to a class on whole brain teaching. It was so interesting! I have actually signed up for another free workshop on the same topic next month. But the speaker shared ways to bridge both left and right brain thinking so that a concept could be easier to learn, master, and recall. She mixed a lot of black and white information (for left brain learners) with colors and stories (for right brain learners) so that we are using are whole brain to learn new things!
So I came home and searched blogs and Pinterest for a new way to teach the alphabet. But....I couldn't find anything with this approach! I found gestures for the letters on one blog. And I found poems for each letter on Pinterest. But nothing where the visual, the auditory, and the kinesthetic all matched. So, I got busy and made them for our girlies! And we LOVE them. We have been practicing all week just looking at the posters and telling the stories. It is AMAZING how many gestures and sounds they remember simply from remember the picture and stories! This whole brain learning stuff works, ya'll!!!

Drinking her juice and saying /j/ /j/ because every juggler needs his juice to be strong enough to do all that juggling!!!

 Marin is telling the stories and listening to the sounds in the whisper phone! 

This video was after hearing our Alphabet stories twice! She remembered so much having all those "clues" to pull from! Way to go, Hollis! 

 If you are interested in this alphabet set, just click on the picture above! 

Other favorites.....SONGS!!! If we can sing it, we have fun with it!

This is a simple song using letter magnets! You sing it to the tune of "Five Little Ducks" but instead of ducks..."five little letters went out to play. When the teacher calls /z/ /z/ /z/ /z/....only the letter ____ came back." She has to decide which letter was being called home and pull it down. Loves it. And it is SOOOO simple. You could easily write the letters on a white board and the student erases the correct letter.

This last activity was actually one of my very first games I ever made for the girls. It is an I Spy ABC game.

 I have the student flashcards printed and laminated (larger sizes available) but they use a dry erase to circle all the letters on the card. Again, super simple but reinforces letter recognition! You can find it in my by clicking on the picture above.

 I'm linking up with The Inspired Apple for her AlphaBoom link up! Go check out all the other wonderful alphabet ideas!