Tot School/Preschool Weekly Wrap Up-Letter B

Preparing for school for my little girls took a little bit of thought.  When I started homeschooling, I thought I would just continue representing the Montessori Materials over and over to the younger ones and it would keep them busy and happy...

Well, it turns out that my Mini Cooper isn't all that fond of the Montessori Materials.  Don't get me wrong, she likes them, she LOVES to play with them and use them and interact with them.  The problem?  She thinks of them as PLAY and not SCHOOL.  This wouldn't be a problem if she was ambivalent about school.  The problem is she LOVES school and would like school to last ALL DAY.  The problem is that she thinks that school should be a ton of worksheets and workbooks, cut and paste, and write on the dotted line.  She LOVES 'traditional' school.  Of course, this is what I had purposely avoided in the past, so it's been an interesting change for me.

But, following the lead of my child, I went ahead and ordered her some workbooks, and am working them into our school time.  The ones I got are from Rod and Staff.  The biggest reasons were because they came highly recommended, and were very affordable.  We started with book A and I also went ahead and ordered book C (we have a Bible curriculum so we skipped book B).  She is LOVING them.

She loves them so much that she is always asking to do work in them, and I even caught her stealing them off the school shelf after school one day.  So, for now, they are part of our school.  

Now for Explorer, she is just below a lot of our materials. She loves the knobbed cylinders and can already complete them all, and she is often working on the geometry and botany cabinets (she loves puzzles), but she is certainly not ready to move on to much else.  

We have tons and tons of educational 'toys' that are great for her age...more then the average person should own, which are great for this stage in her learning.  My problem has become the time consuming factor of planning when to use what.  So, I decided why take the time when someone else has done it for me?  I decided to follow the Tot School plan from 1+1+1=1.  I am printing off the printables for each letter that I think Explorer (and sometimes Mini Cooper) will enjoy.  Since we own many of the same educational toys, I am simply doing the exact same ones if we can :).  That leaves me only having to fill in the gaps for when we don't own the same toys.  Which, leaves my planning time to creating a few Montessori trays and trying to work with the big kids :).

After all that...on to what we did this week :).

We started with letter B.  We've done letter A and Apples so much I'm tired of them.  

We started out with our B object box and sandpaper letter.  The girls always love these.

Explorer worked in her 'Tot Book' a lot this week.  She is very into coloring with markers right now.  Pretty much all the printables you see on this page are part of the Tot Pack from 1+1+1=1.  You can find them here.

We tried a lot of the printables in the pack.  The coloring page, the puzzle, and then we also colored beach balls different colors.  She loved all of them!

The sequencing cards were a really nice part of the pack and she did well!  The three part cards on the right are old ones I had made for my bigger kids.  She matched our tiny objects to their matching photos.

Then Mini Cooper used them as three part cards and did very well.  She did a great job at looking at the words to match them.  She only messed up on basketball/baseball, which may have been a bit unrealistic to think she would get them.

  

We joined in on the state studies with Mustang and Charger.  These Delaware color pages are from Crayola.com.

As part of the Monet artist pack that I made for Mustang and Charger, I also included this puzzle from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  Mini Cooper loved it and asked to do it more then one day.

Trays and toys this week included scooping work.

Ladybug alphabet puzzles.

Bead family lacing.

LOTS of play dough time.  The roller and stamps are from Melissa and Doug. Thank you Great-grandma and Grandpa for the gift!

Discovery Toys Playful Patterns.

And, Melissa and Doug Monster Bowling.

We also read My 'b' Book by Jane Belk Moncure.

And, watched Meet the Letters from Preschool Prep Company.  My kids love these!  Thank you Grandma and Grandpa!!

As you can see, it was a pretty full week!  This week will not be so full as we are going to spend Monday at the doctor's office.  We finally get to see if baby #5 is a boy or a girl :).  That should be a good field trip!

How was your week?  I hope you had a good one!

God Bless,

Lisa

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B is for Bear Kindergarten & Preschool Free Printable Pack-And Our Wrap Up!

Over the last few weeks we have been learning about the letter B. In case you wondered, we do a lot of things at the same time! Like with the letter E, I made up a pack of printables to use with my kids and to share with you! I hope you like them!! I decided just to have the one file this time, since it doesnt seem that many choose to download individually. The package can be downloaded here: B is for Bear pack.

**For some reason, my pack has been reported for copyright infringement laws and is currently not downloadable.  I am trying to find out what I have done wrong (if anything) and as soon as I can get it resolved will get it back up.  I try hard to be honest in my sharing, so hopefully this was just a mistake!  Please check out my other printables for now.  Thank you!!!**

The B is for Bear pack includes:

*Three part beginning letter B cards (based on the items in our alphabet box)
*Uppercase and lowercase letter B sorting mats
*Bears and tents word family game
*Sight word cards
*Bears and fish cards and counters
*Color fish sorting
*First letter clip cards

Our literary tie in was The Three Little Bears. I had thought about making a printable set for the story, but I was excited to find out that there is already a great set out there! Kidzclub.com offers TONS of great printable sets to go with your favorite stories (free!).

I let Mini Cooper play with our 3 Bears set after our story. She loved matching the different sizes of bears, chairs, bowls, and beds.

While Mini Cooper played, Charger and Mustang made books. The books are also from Kizclub, but I could not find them on the site. I got there initially by following a link from The Virtual Vine (which has a ton of great ideas for a 3 Bears unit), but Virtual Vine takes you directly to the download which I try to avoid. But, in this case I dont seem to have a choice. Here is the direct link: http://www.kizclub.com/storytime/threebears/threebears.pdf.

LANGUAGE

Letter B 3 Part Cards

I presented the 3 part cards to all three kids at the same time, then they worked on them individually at other times. As I was making the cards I realized that there are a million and a half words that start with B, so I am sorry if I am missing any words that you think should be in there! I went by what was in our alphabet box...which was A LOT!

Uppercase and Lowercase B Sorting Mats

Since she loved it so much last time, that I made Mini Cooper sorting mats that had a place for each of the bears (she doesnt feel like she should make piles of things, she thinks they should each have their own spot). This week, however, she wasnt really very interested. Do you see the 3 Bears on the pocket chart behind her on the floor? THAT's all she wanted to do :).

So she went back to her story, and Charger decided he wanted to do the work. It's too easy for him, but for some reason he wanted to do it, so I let him.

Bears and Tents Word Family Game

In this set, there are 4 tents-it, in, et & en. The bears have words on them: sit, hit, bit, tin, sin, win, set, net, wet, ten, hen and ben. I attached the tents (already laminated) to a piece of card stock (not laminated) and cut the tent open. The idea is to put the bears in their word family tent. *I base the words and word families on the lesson we are in following the Bob Jones K5 Beginnings Curriculum.*

Sorry there are no action shots, I was helping one of the other kids and Mustang did this one pretty quickly!

Sight Word Spelling Cards

Like last time, I set out the scrabble pieces and trays to use these cards. I just somehow didnt get a picture. The set has bears instead of elephants and includes the words: a, here, is, love, mother, orange, the, and a blank card that you could write in any word you want your child or students to work on.

First letter clip cards.

There is one card for each of the 8 sounds we have 'officially' introduced in our curriculum: t, short i, s, n, h, w, e and b. I say it that way because Mustang is already reading, I just want to make sure she REALLY knows her phonics!

CUTTING AND GLUING

All three kids worked on their B is for Balloon page from Learn The Alphabet Arts and Crafts. It is a 1.00 download book from Scholastic and I really recommend this one!! This is Charger's completed page.

Charger and Mini Cooper doing their letter page. I found these Bible stickers in the the Hobby Lobby clearance isle last year!

Mustang once again did her letter collage from Homeschool Creations.

MATH

Bears and fish cards and counters. Each bear is fishing for a certain number of goldfish. Help him catch the correct amount. I thought it would be super cute to have real goldfish for this tray, but I learned with the elephants and peanuts, that if there is food in our classroom, Mini Cooper will eat it!

I have not had luck with getting my kids to do cards and counters work in the past. This time I worded it like I did above. Instead of saying, "Charger, can you come help me count?" I said, "Charger, can you come help me feed the bears?" That worked! After he was all done counting the fish to the bears, I had him match up our beads to the correct set.

SENSORY

I guess I had Mini Cooper in mind a lot when I made this set, because this one was 'for' her, too. She seems to have gotten interested in colors lately so I thought this would be a fun way to work on them. The counting fish made me think of colored fish, so away I went :).

The object is to match the fish to their mats. It turns out that there were too many fish for Mini Cooper. I just now thought about the fact that it would make a fun group game!

B is for Bird, using the Melissa and Doug Wooden Magnetic Pattern Blocks.

B is for blocks that make a puzzle. No clue where they came from (yard sale find), but they made a great tie-in with our food pyramid lesson.

PRACTICAL LIFE

B is for Build, using the Melissa and Doug nuts and bolts set. I dont think it's made anymore, but this is a good alternative.

I hope you enjoyed our B lessons and can use some of the printables with your children or class!

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Have a great weekend and God Bless!!