On A Meiners' Note: 2012

Alphabet Book: I

This week I took a picture of every page we put in the alphabet books each week.

Letter Collage Page:

V on the Left, B on the right

I is for Inchworm Craft:

V on top, B on bottom

I is for Ice Cream Coloring Page:

I was so proud of how well they colored these pages! They worked so long on them. Sometimes it is hard for me to be patient when they go really really really really slow. I love how they turned out though!

V on the right, B on the left

Letter Crafts: I for Ice Cream

They just colored the pieces and glued them together. The highlight was gluing real sprinkles to the ice cream part. It was really fun and really really messy.

B on the left, V on the right

Week 5

No picture of the wall this week. Sorry I forgot - and didn't feel quite guilty enough to go and get it all out again. At least not yet :).

This week we did

Letter I
Number 5
Ovals

For the Number 5 we did a tracing worksheet everyday. My sister taught me some cute songs about how to write each number that my kids love. (I will make a seperate post with all the songs) They sing the number song as they write their numbers. I would still love to come up with something fun to do for each number but so far we just write them.

For ovals this week we found ovals in our house, practiced drawing them and I was ambitious (rarely happens) and made the girls oval puzzles. They loved them! We did it twice in one day and again another day.

Tracing ovals to make a crown. V sometimes writes circles and ovals
backwards so she always put a dot at the top to help her go the right way.

The concepts we covered this week were:

Cutting: Still doing straight lines - going to do something new next week
Counting
Rhymes
Same/Different
Colors
Sight Words

This week was really fun cause I had finished a couple of new things for the girls to use. First time is always extra special!

Counting: They have to put their cupcakes in the right order and then count the candles out to match each cupcake.

For the first time I had V do 11-20 since 1-10 is so easy for her. Her initial response was, "It is too hard" We got to talk about how even if it is hard she can do hard things. She was so proud as she started figuring it out. What an accomplishmen! I felt like we learned something more important than counting that day.

Rhymes: I put a pile of pictures in the middle of the table. The girls drew out of the pile and placed all the words that rhymed into the same piles.

The rhyme sets were: ar, ee, and at

Same/Different: A simple worksheet. Find which one is different. We haven't done this before and we need to do it again! It is tricky, tricky.

Colors: Saw this on pinterest and made my own. They have to put the paintbrushes into the right paint cans. The girls already know their colors but they loved doing this. A good review and a nice break from 'hard stuff'

Sight Words: I am beyond excited about how this is going. The girls are both doing great with learning new words every week. We range between one and three words a week. I can never tell which words they will find easy and which will be hard. For example, they got 'can' almost immediately and took all week to learn 'it'. No idea why.

Letter I

I forgot to take pictures of our sound pictures and the school wall. I have been resisting the urge to get it all back out to the pictures. I decided it would be okay to just not post the pictures. Our I sound pictures were:

igloo
inchworm
ice cream
island
ice skate
iguana
indian

If you say these words out loud you will realize they don't all start with a 'short i' sound. I didn't think about this AT ALL (obvious beginner) until we were saying the words and we couldn't go, "i, i, ice cream" DUH! I explained that I made two sounds. I think V understood but I sure wish I would have noticed before hand.

For the letter I, we did I is for Inchworm:

What is that face!?!?

Or that face?!?!

We did a punch page. I noticed that the girl's weren't as enthused this week about this. Newness officially gone. Next time I put together schedules I am going to mix in some other activities.

We also did our five tracing worksheets and alphabook crafts. Letter I is easy to write and the girls got bored with the tracing worksheets. It was the first week that they didn't do them quickly and try hard every time. :( It was bound to happen. Here are some pictures of them hard at work.

B coloring I is for Ice Cream page. Loving that headband aren't you?

I can always tell when V is really loving what we are working on. Her
interest is directly proportional to how close she gets to the paper

Our highlight this week was making an igloo! The girls LOVED this. I don't remember where I found the idea online but it was a huge success. Paul was out of town this week and the girl's kept their igloos INTACT until he got home to show him. I think this will be a "just for fun" activity again this winter.

Sorry the flash freaked out! But here is the final product.

Hudson working hard in the background:

First Snow

Our first snow! I am a sucker for snow, and I am happily teaching my kids to be to! We always have hot chocolate and cookies for the first snow. We went to our friends' house to make cookies and the girls insisted we dress appropriately for the snow. After getting all three kids bundled up, I remembered some of the reasons why I don't like snow at all....

So, I was REALLY, EXTRA ambitious and decided to take pictures of the kids in the actual snow. When we got down the stairs, V said she didn't want to stand in the snow so we weren't in the snow but next to it I think the reason H never moves in these pictures is because it is too hard in his coat. I love looking at pictures like these - they make me happy :)