Weekly Plan: Colors

Tuesday: Color Sorting, Primary Colors song with two color color hunt, bean bag toss
Wednesday: Colorful family book, color hunt with two colors, story time
Thursday: Color matching file folder game (HomeGrown Hearts), Brown Bear Book, color hunt
Friday: Play date, bean bag game, color matching, colorful family book, color hunt and sort with all three colors (pile of all three colors of items around the house, and sort into correct colors)

weekly plan

My printer is on its last leg, it makes a TERRIBLE noise when printing, so I haven't been able to print out the things I would like for my mommy school. Plus, this week is RIDICULOUSLY busy...prepping for a wedding, every night a new responsiblity - just crazy. So, we are just going to have fun this week, and if I find time in our busy schedules to do some sit down activities with the kids I will post.
No weekly plan this week.

Weekly Plan: Colors and Counting

Everyday we will focus on counting anything and everything, as well as identifying the colors all around us to introduce the topics of colors and counting. Both boys are excited about counting and colors. They have been trying to count many things over the last week this is why we are beginning a study of counting. We will begin by learning the primary colors and counting to 5.

Prior knowledge for Thing 1: Can count to 5, starting with 2. Doesn't verbally identify colors, or respond when asked to find a certain color.

Prior knowledge for Thing 2: Can count to 3. Can identify the color blue.

Monday:
- Colors Movie (Baby Einstein: World of Colors)
- Read Counting Book (Spot Can Count by Eric Hill)
- Shapes Game

Tuesday:
- Read 'Brown Bear' (my homemade version, which has shapes and colors to identify)
- Color Sorting Found at Home Grown Hearts
- Barney Counting Movie "It's Time for Counting"

Wednesday:
- Gymnastics 9:30 - 11:30
- Basic Color Book (found in the dollar section at Target)

Thursday:
- Library Story Time (10:30 am)
- Basic Color Book
- Counting Caterpillar (similar to this one except the one we have comes apart at the segments, found at the local library for check out)

Friday:
- Counting Book "City 1,2,3" by Zoran Milich
- Color Matching File Folder Game
- Building color matching towers with Lego's

Next week we will learn about the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. And go on color hunts.

Square Lacing

I used an old diaper box (we have way too many of these hanging around) and cut off one of the top flaps. Cut that in half, then used a hole punch to punch circle holes all around the perimeter of the square. Then I took some yarn taped one end to the cardboard and with the other end I wrapped tape around it. The boys loved lacing their square cards and was amazingly the longest activity of the day!!

Shape game

I put three shapes on the floor using colored duct tape - blue square, yellow circle, and purple triangle. Right away Thing 1 ran to the kitchen, where we just finished playing with our shape cookie cutters, ran out, and put all the cutter shapes in the right shape :) At least I know he can match the shapes!

I had the boy sit on special spots (couch pillows) next to me. Then I said "Run and touch the purple...."(and waited to see if maybe they knew the color, only Thing 2 knew the color blue because that is the color he has been assigned since birth). Then I picked up a shape outline and said the shape name. "Touch the purple.....triangle". The boys would jump up and run to the triangle and touch the shape. They played this for about two rounds of each shape. Then I just said the shape without any helping pictures or colors. This was a bit harder but they got through a round.

I think it was a successful way to get them to better identify one shape out of the three.

Shape exercise:

After they were tired of playing (which was sadly only about 4 rounds total). We each stood in a square and did different things like spin, touch toes, jump, donkey kicks (hands down and kick legs up) etc. They thought this was fun, but then kept fighting over who got to stand on what shape so we moved on to another activity.

Shape tracing with cars:

I got out some toy cars of the boys and let them race them around the shapes. This only lasted a minute or so until they were up and finding something else to play with (sadly, when one boy decides he is done both stop playing...).

I think it was a very fun, successful time playing with shapes :)

playdough cookie cutter shapes

Using this tutorial on wiki I made some shape cookie cutters. Originally the plan was to make sugar cookies using shapes cutters but I didn't know who we were going to make cookies for and next week we have to make a lot for Little Princess' birthday. So, we improvised with playdough. Thing 1 and 2 had fun with this but it didn't last as long as I had hoped.

Tuesday: Squares

We started this activity by reading about squares in one of our shape books. Then we had an exemplar and sang a square song
This is a square, this is a square.
How can you tell? How can you tell?
It has four sides, All the same size.
It’s a square, It’s a square.
(found HERE).
Then we went on a square hunt using the exemplar.

Weekly Plan

Monday
Ee name sound
Clapping to music

Tuesday
Squares
Practice hopping (this is her new trick so we might as well practice)

Wednesday
Throwing 10 “snowballs”
Ee letter book

Thursday
Animal sounds
Make pink playdough

Friday
Bus driver
Ride the bus

Week with Shapes/Setting up Potty Training

Monday:
- Read Shapes Book
- File Folder Games
- Ant Shape Matching (found through Confessions of a Homeschooler)
- Shape Matching (found through Home Grown Hearts)

Tuesday:
- Shape Viewers shape search (found through Home Grown Hearts)
- Highway Cars driving cars around the shapes (found through Making Learning Fun)

Wednesday:
- Play dough shapes (possibly using highways as our template)
- Potty Movie ("GO POTTY GO!")

Thursday:
- Library Story Time

Friday:
- Shape Cookies (using cookie cutters to make different shape sugar cookies)
- Potty Movie ("I can go Potty")

EDIT: We didn't do any activities on Wednesday because we had friends over for the day so I was in charge of 6 kids, instead of just my 3. It was quite the adventure. Here is my revised plan for the end of the week.
Wed: Play Date

Thurs: Shape Play dough, square lacing, shapes games

Fri: Library Story Time (read shapes books at the library)

circles

Last week we did a few things with circles. First we read a book about circles that showed us circles in every day things. Then we used our circle shape viewer (found at Home Grown Hearts) and went on a circle hunt around the house. The boys LOVE having this shape viewer to look through and to check and make sure it is actually a circle. Then we colored and cut three circles from paper and made them into a circle snowman! The boys weren't too excited about coloring the circles, but love cutting since we don't do it very often.

(I helped them with the circle eyes, and buttons down the snowman. Thing 2 was adamant that I be the one to decorate his snowman. Not sure if he is not wanting to do it, or doesn't think he does a good job...)

More Changes

So I want to start a monthly topic share. This will be outside of what I "normally" do but rather an opportunity to explore an idea more in depth and hopefully get lots of ideas to use in our mommy schooling endeavors. This topic can be used as a jumping off point for activities this month or just a way to gather a lot of ideas on the topic to use through out the year. Comments are a great place to add your ideas.

This month's topic SQUARE!

What are some ideas to learn about squares?


Here are some of our posts already written about squares.

Mommy Schooling Success!

I have been introducing the letters (check here for how I have been doing it). I have NO expectation of her "knowing" the letters but rather just introducing them for the first time. One letter we have focused on more than other is A because it is in her name, basically we just write her name and point out the A at the beginning. So today dh traced it in some dew on the car and Angel Girl said A!!!! Then he wrote it on a piece of paper for me to see and she KNEW it! This is huge. Letter knowledge is important but not really until a child is in Kindergarten does it become a necessary piece of knowledge. But I do think that introducing a child's first name and the letters in their name is important just because a name is knowledge a child own's and can be used in reading and writing as a valuable starting place, (many children start writing stories with just the letters in their name). So to have Angel Girl identify A the first letter in her name is Awesome! Now if she can learn how to write her name before Kindergarten then it will be a major mommy school success.