Pipe Cleaner and Cylinder Beads - An easy fun activity

My friend Flo, who has four children under five which includes a two and a half month old, created this activity for my kids with leftovers she had from making it for hers.  She's pretty amazing!  This activity allows the children to work on sorting, fine motor skills and counting.  The items needed are pipe cleaners and cylinder beads. We also use a sectioned tray to sort the items in, a mat to put the items on  (shelf liner) and a bowl for our numbers. 

There are many different ways to set up this acitivty, but here is what we do.  The pipe cleaners and beads start out in a plastic bag on thier trays with the numbers in the middle.  I have K and G pour the beads and pipe cleaners on their individual mats and then sort them by color onto their sectioned trays (I purchased these trays at Wal-mart for a dollar over the summer).  Then they put a number on the mat, count out the beads and put them on the pipe cleaner.  Then, I have them take the beads off and put the pipe cleaner back, placing the number they use to the side or in a small bowl before they choose another number.  They have the option of using the different colors available; sometimes they do, and sometimes they do not.

G at work

K at work

 The kids have really enjoyed this activity, and we are very greatful to Flo for making it for us.

Week in Review (August 20th)

This week was a good one at our house.  The kids have a new memory verse, Deuternomy 6:5, which talks about loving the Lord your God completely.  I found the suggestion of this verse along with the actions that go along with it here.

K asked me if he could work with his coin actvity (I discuss this activity here), so I brought that back out.  He enjoyed sorting the coins and has improved in his knowledge of the names of the coins and how much they are worth.  K has also continued his work with his letters and continues to improve there.

G has really gotten into puzzles and enjoys many of the puzzles we have available.  We also continued our sight word work; it's been some time since we worked on this.  She's doing well and knows about 20 words.  She uses the cards below, and we also check out the Sight Words DVDs from the library, which we watch occassionally (the sight words DVD series is by a company called Preschool Prep)  While we are reading, I allow her to tell me the name of a various sight words when we come across them, and she is even beginning to find them on her own in books and when we are out and about. 

I have a ring of cards (from my parents) and a set of unringed cards (I believe I purchased these at walmart some time ago)

M is doing more talking, and he loves music.  We have two leap frog drums and some simple an instrument tub from Toys R Us that he truly enjoys.  Here he is playing our little keyboard. 

With one of his favorite trucks in hand =)

A great week for us her at the academy!  Hopefully next week I will have more pictures to share!

Week in Review (August 13th) - Let's fold clothes

We had a great week here at the academy. We are going to walk in lots of power as we are still working on our verse about God not giving us a spirit of fear.  The kids enjoy it, and K is able to talk about what the verse means in relation to not being afraid.

Our new activity brings joy to my soul.  As a stay at home mom/homeschooling mom or any mom for that matter, at times, I feel like all I do is clean and do laundry.  So now, it's time for me to give the kids the opportunity to help out, and of course, at this age, they are ready to help :).  And thus, after inspiration from Counting Coconuts, we created a practical life activity in the form of a clothes folding basket.  Both K and G have used the activity, and they both like it.  In our basket are some of M's shorts, M's onesies, and K's t-shirts.  I would like to continue to incorporate different clothing items as folding of each is mastered.

Items in our basket

G working on folding a t-shirt...I helped her with the sleeves :)

We also worked on our phonics with our letter mat; G worked on her beginning word sounds, and K added forming his blends to our work as well as spelling various words.  M absolutely loves the mat as well (and anything else that has to do with letters), and takes letters out and says their sounds.  Now, he's starting to say the names of the letters as well as saying the sounds they make. 

K and G also had fun buliding puzzles; they really love them and enjoy putting them together all the time.  K also had the opportunity to do some water color painting.  He's getting so much better at understanding and implementing the concept of covering the whole picture in color, which is nice to see.

K painting Owl from Winnie the Pooh

The kids also had fun outside with our diy water table.  They played for about an hour and fifteen minutes outside; it's been a bit rainy here lately, so the kids haven't had the opportunity to play outside as much.  It was a lot of fun for them and low maintenance for me. 

I took this picture through the screen

An enjoyable week!

Week in Review - Legos (August 6th)

This past week was a good one for us.  With the new (to us) legos that we received from my parents, I decided to see how many activities we could do with them.  Here are some of the things we were able to do so far.

Counting with Legos
We used our jumbo numbers that I printed from here, and used legos for one to one counting.  Both K and G enjoyed doing this. 

K counting

G is focused

K also enjoyed stacking all his smaller stacks together and counting all of the legos.  I liked this because it was a way for him to practice some higher number counting. 

Addition
We have a set of addition cards that are in nice bright colors, the same colors as our legos, so we used the legos to practice addition.  He only does about 4 or 5 problems per sitting.  Hopefully, that number will grow.

Love that K wants to add

Sorting
We sorted the legos by color and shape.

Design
Of course, K and G enjoyed simply playing and building with the legos. 

In addition to our lego play, we made very simple party hats (used white computer paper, markers, and stickers) after reading Blue's Big Parade, a story where Blue and her friends plan a parade and make party hats as a part of what they do .  K asked to do this. 


G designing her hat

 

K and his hat design

K's finished product

We also used our first words cards, which allowed us to work on beginning sounds of words with G.  We also used our giant letter mat, which K and G used for some beginning, middle, and ending sound work.

G enjoying placing her cards on the table and emphasizing the beginning sounds of the words.

M is still playing, investigating and discovering all over the house.  We had a good week here!

Week in Review (July 30th)

Last week was a good week.  We continued working on our scripture from the past couple of weeks about not being afraid.  We were a bit more relaxed with our learning time this week, but learning took place nonetheless.  We also enjoyed a surprise visit from Grammy, too.  How fun is that!

Thanks to my parents, we have gotten a bit of items from a former day care building they are transforming into their new church building.  The former owners left everything behind.  One of the items we used this week are these wonderful write on, wipe off letter boards.  I got these mostly for K at this point, but got two because I knew G would want to work on them as well.  K has enjoyed working on the letter board, and his writing is progressing.  We are continuing to work using the lines as our guide; that's definitely a work in progress =). 

K's letter work =)

The back of the board

We also received this wonderful letter mat.  We have used it to work on letter sounds and beginning word sounds for G, and beginning sounds, vowel sounds in cvc words, and ending sounds with K.  The kids really like this because they get to move around going from letter to letter.  M also enjoys this mat, he is learning his letter sounds (with a great deal of reinforcement from his teacheres K and G), and he will go to the letters, try to pull them out and make the appropriate sound for the letter.

We were glad to spend some time outside and had some fun with sidewalk chalk (new chalk also provided by my parents).  G worked on some of her sight words while we were out there, and K worked on his writing. M likes to draw with the chalk as well, and now, we have a lot less eating of the chalk, something for which I am grateful.

K's photography

Sight words

We enjoyed some fun at the park and reading as well.  All in all, a wonderful week!

Week in Review (July 23rd)

We spent this week out of town - a little getaway for the family. We had a fantastic time.  We had the opporunity to visit with family the weekend we left - Grandma, Aunts, Uncle and cousin - and celebrate our neice's birthday. From there, we headed to Orlando (my husband had to work there for a week, and we tagged along this time).

We took our travel boxes with us, which had activities for the K, G, and M to do while we were hanging out at the hotel. K's box had his Sesame street books, crayons (dry erase and traditional), letter magnets, a hot wheel eraser set (which is like a puzzle; you can put the 2 different cars together and take them apart); I also brought his phonics book.  G's box had a Pooh Number Match Cars, a Melissa and Doug 4 puzzle set (this was a hit with both K and G), lacing beads, and a her counting stars actvity from this post.  M's box had his shape stacker, a couple of zoomer cars and some items from our sensory tub I thought he might like.  I brought a couple of books for all of the kids, which came in handy, particularyly during the car ride. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but some of the items are the same ones from this post. 

I also printed out the rain packet from here, mostly for G. She liked it a lot asking for them almost everyday, but went through the activities pretty quickly. Here are a few pictures.

Shadow matching

Counting

K and G's aunt bought them some flashcards - alpahbet and addition/subtraction. K, once again, was eager to use the cards and was the most engaged with addition (without cars involved) as I've ever seen him. Score for Auntie Betty!

K used bottle tops as counters

G also loved the letter cards, said the sounds, and put them in alphabetical order.

M played with his leap frog letter drum and his melissa and doug shape stacker.  We spent time at the pool, a nearby playground, and got to visit with some friends we don't see often. It was a wonderful week!

G and M at the park

Week in Review (July 16th)

Another week at our little academy has passed. It was a little different than it normally is because I spent a great deal of time was packing for our upcoming travels.

We continued reciting and talking about 2 Timothy 1:7 (For God has not given us a spirit of fear...).  We also had fun with our sidewalk chalk numbers on the deck, which I talk more about in this post. 

The kids had a great time making letters with playdoh.  I hadseen this mentioned by various other bloggers but had never tried it with the kids.  They really enjoyed it and got creative with making other things out of the playdoh.  Of course, K wanted to build something on wheels, in this case a van. 

Our van =)

M has learned something new.  He has started sorting his stacker shapes by color according to the peg, so that is really cool. 

Go M!

We also enjoyed some time with some friends we hadn't visited in a while.  K helped with the packing a little bit, so that was fun for him.  He is such a good little helper most of the time.  All in all, it was a good week.