Preschool/Tot School + Other Fun and Learning

Its been awhile since I have update what we are working on at home in "school", so I'll do a quick update.  Some of these videos/pics are from December and a few are from this week.

Bible Memory
Here are Summer's last two verses of the week:


Matthew 11:28 "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest."


Psalm 122:1 "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.'"



Writing
We have been practicing lots of writing over the past month in the form of writing thank you notes :).  We still have many more on our list, as they take awhile, but they are the perfect way to practice writing skills and to watch how letters make words, especially words that come up a lot, like "the" and "and".

Reading

Summer is doing awesome at her "at" and "ad" words, so we have moved onto "ug" words.  She is doing great at sounding out her letters.  Here are the words we have recently added to her reading list.

Arithmetic

We are working on basic addition with Summer.  She loves doing "her math problem" with mommy and pretending she is one of mommy's students coming for tutoring :-). After she did her problems she had a blast making a worksheet for mommy, putting numbers together for adding for mommy to do :)  I forgot to take a picture of that worksheet, but it was pretty cute!

Cheerios Math

Here is a video of how she currently processes a math problem verbally out loud.  It also shows how long we take to do one problem ;).




Colors

With Colton we continue to practice colors, by verbalizing all colors of things we use in a day, as well as having him verbalize colors he sees or wants (in crayons or markers).   He is definitely getting more right than he used to, but we still have quite a ways to go!!!  Here are a few games we have recently played to practice colors (*note they are all action games so he can be "on the move" while he is learning!)

1) Twister

2) Matching plastic letters with colored bowls (See picture and video)

 Letters

Summer and Colton play letters with foam sticky letters in the bathtub quite frequently, and Summer loves to teach him.  We also practice the letters in his name when we look at and do his name puzzle in his room.  Recently, he has started to pick up the letter names and sounds, largely due to an awesome DVD a friend from church (with older kids who don't need it anymore) gave us last month called Letter Factory.  Both kids love the DVD, it is catchy, and has really helped Colton learn his letters and sounds through the music and way the letters are presented. 

Here is a clip of the movie from youtube:



We have also worked on letters at home in various ways.  Here is a clip of the kids helping their monkeys learn their letters....



Here is another clip of us practicing letters during breakfast...even though Summer knows her letters she likes to do it with us :-)




Colton currently can (most of the time) do about 1/3 of his letters and/or their sounds including: C, S, W, T, U, I, L, K, and H.  He also knows and will add that "C is for Colton" and "S is for Summer" :)

Cooking

We have done a lot of baking and cooking this month.  Summer loves helping Mommy in the kitchen and truly is helpful.  Colton wants to help, but is still learning how to be "helpful" :)

Art

The kids are almost constantly coloring, drawing, playing playdough, painting, etc etc etc.  If there is a lull before dinner or really anything, they will usually do one of two things...either pull out a book to look at or pull out the paper and crayons!  Here are two pics I snapped of the kids painting the other day.

Music

Both kids (but especially Summer) will often be found singing her way around the house, singing about anything and everything.  Many times Colton joins in the singing, and the house is quite amusing.  They both love to dance when music is on, and they both love playing with their "instruments" and dinking around on the piano.  Here is a little clip of them playing piano together...