Tuesdays at Tinytown

I am trying something new and using Windows Live Writer to write, preview, and publish my post.  I am not sure if I will like this more or less than using bloggers dashboard.

We had a wonderful time at Tinytown and Wiggle Worm did the cutest thing.  The little girl we visit with up there (she is almost 3) and Wiggle Worm held hands while climbing the slides and slid down together.  It was adorable.  I tried to get a picture of this, but they were too busy going up and down the slides.

After Tinytown, we went to a local education store and picked up some new Melissa and Doug products.  We got the fish colors puzzle which he has already played with and loves as well as the stacker.

Things I like about Windows Live Writer

• What you see is what you get!  For real!
• Picture upload is so much faster
• Picture is put where I am typing not up at the top of the post each time
• All the neat different plug-ins that you can use (except attach files)

Things I dislike about Windows Live Writer

• I still can’t attach files (not really WLW’s fault this is a serious blogger issue)
• ….still thinking can’t find anything I hate

Marvelous Mondays

While I was figuring out what we were going to do today. Aaron played with his paper trains.
We did our Kumon First Steps Let's Cut Paper!
Kumon First Steps Let's Color!
This is my other Prang watercolor set. These are for 2+years and are great b/c the watercolors are large and easy for small hands and they don't get all mixed up like Crayola's with the small watercolors.
We did our Abeka Aa page and watercolor painted with a q-tip. I personally love this much more than the paint brush for a toddler. I would recommend it over a brush any day.Our finished masterpieceFor our Bb page we had to glue white rice to the Bb. I did not like this. It was messy and Wiggle Worm wanted to put the rice anywhere but on the glue. The rice was too small for this activity. I like beans much better or cotton balls...anything but small, white rice.
Our finished Bb with rice. This was more me than him doing it and as said before there will be no more rice even if the instructions call for it.
We didn't do LHTH b/c I needed masking tape and construction paper. I had neither. So I decided to do our Abeka pages and our Kumon First Steps workbooks. I also have the Abeka fingerplay and poems book and we did a fun fingerplay. It has poems and fingerplays for every letter of the alphabet. It would work as a stand alone as you teach your child the letters or with almost any program.
I will pick up the needed items for LHTH tomorrow and we will pick up where we left off then.
We also read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I am putting the tot book together for it now and plan to give it to him Friday after reading all week. He will get to work with the tot book all next week.
I am planning to do this with several other books and tot books. I am going to read the book for a week (while I am making the tot book), then he will have the tot book for a week. I am focusing on the literature based ones. I picked up The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Five Little Monkeys, and Brown Bear Brown Bear today.
Does anyone know how to make the pockets for the tot books? I have some extras for our tot books that I want to make pockets for but don't know how to make the pockets. If anyone has a template for a pocket for PSP, I would greatly appreciate it.

One Crazy Week

This week has been crazy and really unscheduled. So we did Tot School on Saturday as well as give Wiggle Worm a hair cut. I didn't realize how long his hair had really gotten.
I feed him skittles so he will be good for the haircut. So he has a skittles mouth.
After the haircut...
We are mad and sad and very upset with Mommy. It isn't perfect but at least it is cut.
As a reward for surviving the haircut, we did a floating exercise from LHTH. We are learning about Noah and the Ark this week and we tried to see what would float. We tried a cotton ball (floated until soaked through), a popsicle stick (floated), and some pennies (sank). He really just liked playing in the water.
On to our Tot School work, we did our Hide and Seek B page from LHTH and he helped circle all the b's.
We did our count on me page. These are supposed to be blue ovals. I helped him with the first 2. He did the rest on his own. Then I helped him write the numbers. When I help, I put my hands over his and we write.He colored his Abeka Numbers with Button Bear pages. I just put them down in front of him and he colored them. The one for the number 2 you ask questions like how many eyes does the tiger have? how many ears? ...

This is his finished works of art.We also read out of A Children's First Bible every day with LHTH. It is a really neat little curriculum for ages 2-5. It's not expensive and it doesn't take a whole lot of time. I normally do ours M,W, and F. Carrie Austin has really put together an easy to use age appropriate guide.

Little Hands to Heaven is a complete preschool program that includes letter recognition and formation, letter sounds with corresponding motions, beginning math skills, Bible activities, devotional topics, art projects, dramatic play, active exploration, fingerplays, and music.
-excerpt from the introduction of LHTH

It really makes it easy for me to make sure that I am covering everything that I want to get covered with my little Wiggle Worm while we have a fun time doing it all. I do supplement with Abeka here and there and also use my Montessori Sandpaper letters and Wikki Stix. LHTH makes everything so easy for us. We get to go at our own pace and he will go through it again next year at 3 and get a little more intensive study. It has instructions for youngers 2-3 and olders 4-5 to do with each project.

The Heart of Dakota curriculum grows with your child and is something that I am so glad to have found. If you would like to check out their site, below is a link.

Heart of Dakota

Throw Away Thursdays

We did our foam alphabet puzzle. I bought this for $1 at Walmart. I took all the letters apart and punched out the letter and we worked on one letter sound to its shape at a time. What does the M say mmm, what shape is the M, put it in Wiggle Worm...
This is my really cool watercolor set by prang for under 3's. It comes with a drape and a fat paintbrush. The watercolors are huge (as you can see) and very spread out so the colors don't get mixed up. I took a picture of it all pretty before we use it and it isn't pretty anymore.
This is Wiggle Worm looking at the butterfly and us talking about the b-b-b sound.
Finally, Wiggle Worms favorite part...we are painting. We are supposed to print out a B for him to watercolor paint with LHTH. I am using the Abeka Letters and Sounds N workbook pages for these exercises and just doing the instructions for LHTH. Last week was to put beans on the letter. This week is to watercolor.Our finished watercolor. He colored the butterflyand the B as best as he can.We were supposed to put the cups on the colors and add the bears. He kind of did his own thing.We sorted our colored popsicle sticks.Tot School went okay. He was kind of ornery and we both had allergies today. So it was short and sweet.

Wacky Wednesdays

Well, as is fitting for this week, everything is not going according to plan. I needed new ink to copy pages for LHTH and while at Walmart decided to get Wiggle Worm's pics took. Then we went to eat and now are at nap...so Tot School is being pushed to Throw away Thursday this week. But ain't he just too cute?

Tuesdays at Tinytown

Well, the first thing I should say is there wasn't a Tuesday at Tinytown today. Big brother, affectionately known as Bubba by Wiggle Worm, has bad allergies and our miracle combo of Singular, Zyrtec, and Nasonex (excuse the spelling it is probably wrong) has quit doing the job. So into the Dr. we went. So now we are getting rid of Zyrtec and starting Allegra (continuing all other meds).
Needless to say by the time we went to the Dr., ate, and went to the pharmacy...Tinytown time was long over. I'm sure the break from Tinytown will make Wiggle Worm even more anxious to go next Tuesday.

My First Blog Award

Woo Hoot! I am so excited. My little old newbie blog has been nominated for a blog award by Adventures in Mommydom.

There are some rules to the nominating awards and my newbie self is going to try my best to accomplish adhering to them all.

Rules:
1) Add the logo of the award to your blog

2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you

3) Nominate at least 7 other blogs

4) Add links to those blogs on your blog
5) Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs!

I am going to ask permission to link to the blogs I love first. So I will be editing this post as I receive permission from them.

1. Blissful Moments
2. ~There's More to this Life~
3. One of my favorite blogs is an award free blog that wishes to give all the Glory to God and I respect her so much for that. I am hoping that keeping this slot open and not including a link will be appropriate given her wishes.
4. One Child Policy Homeschool
5. Love's School
6.
7.

This is really a lot of fun and a good way to let other bloggers know that you appreciate their time and effort.
I have a mixture of favorites. Not all are Tot School blogs and some blogs don't have Tots at all. My children range in ages 2,6,7, and 8...so I am always looking at blogs that offer a little of this and that for my whole family. I hope that everyone enjoys reading my favorite blogs.

Marvelous Mondays

Here is Wiggle Worm with his Dr. Seuss Alphabet cards. I let him just explore with these while I was getting ready for Tot School. If he sees me pull out the wikki stix, sandpaper letters, Child's First Bible, LHTH teacher's guide, and whatever else we will use that day...he drives me nuts and I am flustered and we are scatterbrained while trying to do the activities...so today I gave him something to occupy him while I got myself together. Also it is fun to see what they do without direction.We did our sandpaper letters first. We reviewed A and introduced B. We did trace these but I have no pictures of that b/c he spotted the wikki stix before I could snap a shot and he was quickly done with the sandpaper letters. In an earlier post, there is a guide to using sandpaper letters as well as the site of where I got my wonderful wood backed sandpaper letters. These are meant to last. No cardboard paper here. I will make a label as soon as I am done with this post and link all the sandpaper letter posts if anyone is interested. You can also make your own and I will link lots of free printouts and instructions to that soon also.
Once again, I decided less direction on the letter we had already introduced. He did Aa all by himself. B was guided b/c we hadn't had it before. I let him just do what he wants with the pictures. By the time we were through, the ant had about 30 legs and the butterfly was a wad of pink wikki stix.
If you haven't gotten wikki stix, they are great for fine motor skills and learning the formation of the letters. I don't separate ours, he has to pull each one apart from the stack. This is really great for the pincer grip. The cards that we use are the Wikki Stix Alphabet Fun Cards for Learning. I got mine at Therapro.com and they are well worth the money. They are only $13.95 and if you order $35 in an internet order you get free shipping. This is a great site. You can click on the Wikki Stix picture below and it will take you to their site.
We also introduced the number 2 in LHTH today. We were supposed to find in a magazine or print out 2 hands to cut out and glue. Wiggle Worm was not wanting to leave the wikki stix and he isn't that great at cutting and gluing yet...so instead I traced his hands in 2 different color crayons and wrote 1 and 2 in them. This was much better and engaging for us b/c he got frustrated last week with the cutting and gluing. He really got into it being his hands and we counted the hands on the page and his real hands several times.
We will be going back through LHTH as a 3 year old next year and I think we will do more cutting and pasting then. To save stress and frustration on his part and mine. I will cut out or adapt the lessons for his level of ability for now. We will be practicing our cutting and pasting with our Kumon First Steps workbooks. They seem more on the level of a 2 year old boy.

Fabulous Fridays (a few days late)

We did our LHTH work this morning and all was fun. It called for us to say in different voices...I'm mad, I'm sad, I'm glad...and so on with different emotions. We were learning about Cain and Abel. I brought out an emotion exercise that really helped us to visualize and understand emotional faces to go along with my different exclamations.

Wiggle Worm really liked this exercise and had fun making the scared face as well as the surprised face.Here is the exercise up close and below is an up close of the "scared" face.

If you would like to get a copy of this file. I downloaded it from childcareland.com. Here is a link to the file. http://www.earlylearningactivities.com/PDF/feelingsfacesc.pdf

We actually finished Tot School for the day after this and went to a Reruns are Fun sale at our mall. They fill the old Service Merchandise with items that are in good used condition and I made some real finds besides clothing.

$4 chalkboard and dry erase board with stand
$4 Melissa and Doug animal sounds puzzle
$4 Montessori n Such parts of the grasshopper puzzle
$3 Dress the elephant magnetic dress up
$4 Pound the ball toy
$3 Crayola paint sponges and rollers (butterfly, leaf, house...)

Later, when I was trying to do the dishes and the rugrats were all away at sleepovers, Wiggle Worm was very much under foot. He didn't know what to do without his siblings. I took down the beads and pipe cleaners and he stayed occupied for a while.
Then I took out the tongs, pom-poms, and pinch bowls for the first time. He really stayed at this for a while and got the hang of the tongs pretty good. And he practiced color matching at the same time. I showed him once and let him be. He was doing it wrong at first but corrected himself naturally. I almost corrected him but it must not have been comfortable or working well the way he was doing it wrong and he corrected himself. He once again switched back and forth between left and right several times. Left is dominant though.
While our official Tot School time ended @ 10 am Friday morning. We did several more things during the day.

Throw Away Thursdays

We didn't do a lot today. We worked on our flash cards at our own pace. He loves the touch and feel cards. We have several sets of Baby Einstein and he will happily sit and pull them out and say the names of them or ask me if he doesn't remember. These are neat b/c we talk about the touch parts. The fur is soft, the elephant skin is smooth,...We also did a lot of outside time today with our big brother and sisters.