Help, My Son's Pant Are On Fire!!!!

It seems as though my big guy started a new hobby but unfortunately his new pastime has also made him the recipient of a new nickname,

PINNOCHIO

Unfortunately, within the last week or so I have personally caught my son telling numerous "fibs". They started with "I have to go to the bathroom" and then using that time to rummage through closets and bedrooms without supervision, then came along the random "little brother did it" even when he was not in the room and now we are up to "Mommy said I can have ice cream now, etc".

At first it was once a day and now the frequency is at least 5 a day. It makes me sad to think he could be so devious and scheming - in my eyes he is still my innocent baby. I just thought older kids do this to test boundaries but not 4.5 year olds.

Is this common?!?! When does it usually start? What advice do you have?

Due to his PDD-NOS he has a hard time understanding social cues or social standards and although we have had many talks about not telling the truth and he has had many of his toys taken away, he still continues on...

I need to help him find his inner Jiminy Cricket!!!!!

I am on my upstairs to go through our Davey and Goliath boxed set to see if there is an episode on the subject (yes, my father bought him the boxed set), will be renting Pinnochio today and going to the library or bookstore because I think there is a Berenstein Bear book but do any of you have any suggestions???

PLEASE HELP!

Flat Stanley Project

The big guy and I are so excited to be participating in a "Flat Stanley Project" based on the love-able, adventurous character from Jeff Brown's books, that is being hosted by Gabby at The Work of Childhood.

If you are not familiar with Flat Stanley, Stanley Lambchop was a boy who was flattened by a bulletin board. He soon finds out it can be fun to be flat and travel the world by mail having many adventures along the way.


So here is a picture of our big guy and his Flat Stanley, who will be travelling the "world" ready for some real fun adventures. In turn, we will be "hosting" other Flat Stanley's as they travel the world and end up in our mailbox and promise to handle them with care and truly show them a good time with lots of activities and fun planned.


Notice the "pocket pants" ?!?! My son is a big fan of cargo pants and asked that his Stanley have a pair... so I obliged by drawing them on.


Although my son needed some reassurance that he would be safe, we eagerly mailed our "Stanley" to his first visit in Tennessee. How exciting!!! Can't wait to see what he gets to see and do while he is there.

Since the big guy (and our little one for that matter) is a huge fan of mail, I am sure he will be checking our mailbox daily.

In the mean time, since school is starting for us next week, along with soccer and karate, I think we will suspend our postings for Tot School and use THIS wonderful opportunity for learning.

I will search tonight for a perfect map of the United States and show my son where we live and work with his little brother on learning our address since the big guy already knows that. Then when we get our first "Stanley" to babysit I will show them where he/she came from and plan our lesson from there.

Thanks again Gabby, we are so excited to participate!

Tot School - Dinosaur Theme

This is my fifth week of participating in Tot School by posting my learning activities with my two boys who are 29 and 52 months of age. Through reading the posts from Tot School I found a wonderful blog called Homeschool Creations who sponsors Preschool Corner.

Since I usually work with both of my boys at the same time and there is a two year age gap, I realize that some of my content my not be age appropriate for some of the tots in Tot School and would be a better fit for Preschool Corner so I figured it would be okay to post to both sites at the same time (I hope that is okay with everyone).

Since this is my first post for Preschool Corner I would formally like to introduce myself. Please feel free to read my first Tot School post here to read about my boys and what my goals and plans for teaching them are.

Dinosaur Theme Week

The little guy worked all week on a little dinosaur song that we learned from Kid Soup about colors and dinosaurs. I also printed the dinosaurs from there (I never did have a chance to properly cut them out or laminate them).

Also from my Kid Soup membership, I printed counting mats with pictures of dinosaurs with numbers for the big guy. We used our dog's biscuits as dinosaur bones (I wanted to paint them white for a better dinosaur bone effect but was afraid that my dog would get a hold of them).

The big guy tried his hand at tracing objects for the first time using our old Discovery Toys Place & Trace. He still needs a little more coordination with using markers before he can master the task.

The little guy worked on the "puzzles", especially the dinosaur one.

When the boys were sleeping I traced the dinosaur templates on black construction paper with a thin line of Elmer's Glue when once it dried made it very hard to see the images. In the morning I told the boys that there was "fossils" on the paper and gave them chalk to rub on the paper, revealing the dinosaur shapes.

The big guy made a paper plate volcano as a prop for his plastic dinosaurs.

This by far was the kid's favorite book of the week as David Carter pop-up books usually are. This book usually shows up at bedtime several times a week. Both boys love it.

I hid these "Treasure Stones" in our garden for the boys first to find, then break open to find little dinosaurs inside. To see my whole post on our Treasure Stones go here.

We played alot with our dinosaur counters this week,

I photocopied pages from the booklet (and laminated them) that came in our bucket of dinosaur counters for the big guy to use as sorting mats. I thought he was going to have trouble with it as he really had to sit and look hard at the line drawings and match the plastic counters to the pictures but he sailed right through it!

The little guy sorted them by color.

Here are some of the other books we focused on this week:

I still have lots of dinosaur themed things planned but unfortunately ran out of time this week. I will save them for the next time that dinosaurs come into out rotation. In the mean time, if you are interested to see what other parents are doing to teach their kids please stop by Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1.

Tot School - No Theme Week

I am sad to say that our "Dinosaur Themed Tot School" week was a bust this week!

First, it was my son's last week of actual district pre-school so there was lots of things planned outside of the home for the week.

Secondly, I bought two new games for the kids at the beginning of the week which quickly became favorites in the house and was all they wanted to do when we were inside.

And last but not least, I ran out of paint to make "dinosaur bones" for our paleontologist dig I had planned and the coffee grinds that I had drying to make dinosaur stones got moldy and grew "hair" so I had to throw it out.

The good news - the boys played wonderfully together with their new games, took turns, were not sore losers or winners for that matter and almost everything is reading for dinosaurs next week!!!!

Here are some pictures of the boys playing with their new games.

Hiss by Gamewright was by far the favorite of my two year old and it is an excellent game to reconfirm colors and to work on visual discrimination and orientation!!!!

The second game was "Feed The Kitty", again by Gamewright. It was a cute game too but the big guy had a harder time with winning/losing with this one.
We did get in some Occupational Therapy while playing with Perfection. You can see my original post on the Perfection game here and some name spelling with our "magical rocks"

To see what other had planned for their tot's this week click here.

WFMW - The Perfection Game and Fine Motor Skills

I am always on the look out for cheap ideas to teach my sons especially those items that are great multi-taskers. This week it is the Milton Bradley game of "Perfection" that works for me.

We use it as a puzzle to practice fine motor skills since the little shapes can only be picked up and placed in using a mature "pincer grip", great for shape recognition, eye-hand coordination and when I tell my 4 year old to start at the top left and work across each row he is practicing a great early literacy skill while training himself to think left to right, top to bottom!!!! All that and we have never even turned it on yet!

Now that is a great multi-tasker!!

Improving Hand Strength and Writing Skills

Isn't he cute....he loves to color (and hoard all the crayons and markers as he works). If you look at the next two pictures you can also see that he still has an immature hold on those crayons and does not use a "tripod" grasp.

you will not get those extra crayons and markers away from him!

Since my big guy has had lots of Occupational Therapy, I feel that I have some tricks up my sleeve to help the little guy with his coloring and writing skills that I would like to share with you all.

First of all, a lot of our crayons look like the one below. Actually we have a whole box of them! Some were broken unintentionally, others were broken by the big guy when he was learning to color because he would hold them so hard his knuckles would turn white and they would just snap in half and most of them I just broke in two as soon as they came home.

No I am not just a crayon murderer, the smaller size no longer fits in the palm of his hands, promoting the proper tripod grasp.

We have not tried these markers yet made by Crayola but they would work the same way due to their smaller size (they are on my list when I find them on sale).

Another great idea is to use an easel and have them color and write on it instead of a flat surface. Working on a vertical surface helps strengthen the whole arm which is an important foundation skill for writing plus it helps position the wrist correctly.

This is the type of tabletop easel that we use at our house. It is made by Battat for Parent's Magazine Toys, I purchased it a long time ago at Target for about $20.00.

Another good activity to improve the strength in the small muscles of the hand is to load a big ball of play-doh or therapy putty with small beads. It is also another way that the big guy and I work on counting skills. I just tell him that there are 15 beads hiding, can you find them all?

"Magical" Rocks

Well, they are MAGICAL to me!

A wise friend who works in "Special Education" told me awhile back to write letters on rocks for my son to help him learn the alphabet. At first I must admit, that although it sounded like a good idea, I had a hard time thinking that something so simple could possibly work since he was having so much trouble at home and at school.

My son attended early Pre-K at a local church starting at age 2 1/2 and since the age of 3 1/2 he has attended a Special Education and Therapeutic Preschool. So, with two solid years in actual school and all the work we did at home he still did not know how to spell his name, recognize more than three letters (only 1 was in his name) and occasionally confused numbers for letters until the MAGIC ROCKS!!!!!

As some of you already know, my son has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS and like a lot of kids on the Autism Spectrum who have attachments or fixations on certain items my son does too and his "thing" is rocks...the kid loves them!!!! My friend kept insisting with me to use the rocks to my advantage, he likes them and will pay attention!

On Friday night my mother handed the boys each a set of rocks with the letters of their names printed on them and kept arranging them in the proper order for about 15 minutes while reciting the letters.

After the initial 15 minutes the big guy had is name down pat!!! The next day he still had it plus if we included the little guy's letters into his pile he still knew which letters to pick out.

He still gets a little confused with the actual "names" of the letters at times but he knows which ones belong to him!

I guess I have to get out more paint and make some more letters soon!

If you have a child who is having some difficulties learning letters try using the things they truly love...I have a feeling I will be buying some cheap wooden trains in the future and using my Sharpie marker to make an alphabet train for my little guy.

Tot School - Farm/Garden Theme Part 2

Grammie came to visit the boys this week so we focused a little more on "Life School" which included shopping at the mall, restaurants, lots of swimming in the pool and the boys first play which we saw at a local children's theatre.

I have to apologize at the lack of pictures of the boys actually doing their activities this week, but it always seemed that when we were working on our planned "Tot School" activities my camera was outside by the pool and I was to hot, tired and lazy to go get it.

In honor of our second week of Garden/Farm themed activities we played this old game a lot. (I just realized that I had two of these games in the closet).

We took some rocks from the boy's "collection" that reside in one of our gardens and wrote a letter on each so that both boy's would have there name. This was a learning technique that I was asked to try by a dear friend to help my son learn the letters of his name. I will be writing a separate post about this activity soon.

The big guy worked on a "What Does Not Belong" worksheet that I printed from my Kid Soup.com membership. This was so easy for him (one of his big strengths is visual concepts), it took him seconds to put his "X"s on the items that did not belong.

Although we continued to work on the letter "C" for carrot, I also worked on "Beginning Sounds" with the boys using little barns printed from Kid Soup. It was great practice although the boys did have some difficulties. There were several pictures for each of the letters (H, P, C and D).

I also tried another Upper and Lower case letter match-up game (again from Kid Soup) with the big guy, he did much better than he did with our beach/ocean themed one. I am thinking it was easier for him since it was on a smaller scale plus the clothes pins are a great fine motor exercise.

I also printed this great "chick" pattern pages for the big guy, he had trouble with some of them (there were 5 or so pages) but all in all he did a great job.

We read the same books over that we read last week which you can see them listed in my original Garden/Farm theme post.

Don't forget to check back next week for some more of our fun themed ideas. We haven't started anything yet today but I think we will be doing "Dinosaurs".

In the mean time, if you are interested in the fun ways that other's are teaching their tot's, stop by 1+1+1=1.

Tot School - Garden/Farm Theme

Since we are still fairly new to "Tot School" I will introduce ourselves again, my boys are 28 and 51 months (special education, PDD-NOS) and my goals for participating in Tot School is to learn new ideas from others and to track my boy's achievements in meeting their goals. Our biggest goal right now is getting my 51 month old ready for kindergarten (one more year to go) and hopefully into a mainstream class.

I started this week with these awesome assessment sheets from Making Learning Fun to measure where my big guy is at now. I was very excited that they matched our theme - even Mrs. Wishy-Washy!

The big guy got to mark each circle that he knew correctly with a bingo marker. As you can see, we have a long way to go with the Alphabet.

The little guy worked on his colors this week with this file folder game that I printed from my membership to Kid Soup.

We worked on the letter "C"...

I printed this "card game" from Kid Soup and it was supposed to be used for a sorting game, "farm animals" from "zoo animals" but neither boy had any interest. I just worked with the little guy and his animal identification.

The big guy worked this week on a chicken and baby chick matching game that I printed from my membership at Kid Soup. I see improvements in his counting every week - I am very proud of him!

I printed a "Cow Roll and Color" page from Making Learning Fun, which the big guy loved!

After reading "Growing Vegetable Soup" we made big soup bowl pictures with construction paper, macaroni, foam letters and vegetable pictures that the boys colored.

After reading "Oh Say Can You Seed" the boys and I did a quick art project showing some of the things that make plants and flowers grow. Occasionally, I like to do art projects along side them so they can take a look at mine as they go along to get ideas.

Here is mine...

Here is my big guys...he was so proud that he grew tomatoes (the big red circles at the end), he had also "planted" red and purple seeds for tomatoes and eggplants. Pretty good imagination emerging!

The little guy didn't pay to much attention to this project and just drew "dirt" but he did keep it fairly within the different columns. He proudly professed that he drew "big, huge rocket ships".

We worked in our garden this week and even sampled some of the carrots that we planted (although they are not fully grown yet).

These are the books that we read together this week...

Since I planned way to many Farm/Garden themed items for us to complete this week we will be extending our theme to next week also so don't forget to check back.

If you are interested in what others have been doing with their tot's be sure to stop by 1+1+1=1 to see the links.