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 - 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.

Tot School-Beach and Ocean Theme-Part 2

This is our second week posting our official "Tot School" activities and it is also our second week of Beach and Ocean themed fun and learning. If you missed our first Tot School posting with our introduction my boys are 28 and 51 months, my eldest son has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS and has some trouble with learning, even though he attends a special pre-school 5 days a week, we are working hard at home with helping to prepare him for kindergarten.

Last week we still focused on the letters O and F and re-read all of the books from last week.

We tried to do a color by number that I printed from my membership at Kid Soup but my big guy got frustrated and would not complete it.

We also did a tried a color by letter also from Kid Soup, which he got partially done before yelling "I do not have to finish this, it is an octopus"!

We made some colored salt "Rainbow Fish" which you can read my detailed post here if you are interested. They were lots of fun although the boys were not two concerned with keeping the colors separated.

I printed this awesome "Shadow Match Game" from Kid Soup which can be used mat style or as a memory game. I laminated them and used them mat style so I could separate them giving two pages to a child without overwhelming them. Both boys absolutely loved this one and did a great job at it too.

I love the big guys "whipped cream mustache" in this pic.

I also made this beach scene using some construction paper and a palm tree from an enlarged computer graphic (I wish I would have laminated it before I spilt water on it, oh well).

I then printed out a bunch of beach/ocean themed items such as beach balls, crabs, fish, sharks, turtles, etc. I used these little pictures to work on numbers and spatial concepts with the boys. I gave them directions such as put three crabs on the sand, put one crab on the right of the palm tree, put the boy in the water, put two sharks on top of the boys (ouch). This went over pretty well so I will be thinking of more of these for our future themes.

Although I do not have any pictures we also work on our gross motor skills this week with lots of physical activities such as crab walk races and swimming in the pool like fish.

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to come back next week, we will be working on a Garden/Farm theme. To see what others are doing with their tot's be sure to check out the weekly posts here at 1+1+1=1.

P.S. I asked the big guy at the end of two week's what does fish start with and unfortunately he did not know. Since we are having so much trouble with learning letters we were thinking of ordering the "CORE" books. Does anyone have an opinion or another suggestion? I would love your help with this.