Digging for Dinosaurs

Our first activity yesterday was another sensory bin. I wanted to do it in our new sand bin but Vada wasn't too fond of the sand, so I thought that I would do it in the rainbow sand that I made a few months ago. She really likes this bin and later this week I may try playing in one of our raised beds that hasn't had anything planted in it yet.

For today's sensory bin I had an archaeologist dinosaur dig in mind. I actually had this sensory bin in mind since the beginning of last month! I told you, I have really been looking forward to letter 'D'!

I brought out a bunch of kitchen utensils that I had bought last summer from a dollar store especially for these occasions. Vada seemed to enjoy using them.

Along with the "dinosaur skeletons" (which I found on Amazon and it was the best $6.58 that I have spent in a long time!), I also added in some "dinosaur fossils" -you know, for authenticity. *wink*wink* I also ordered the fossils from Amazon as well. I do a lot of my shopping through Amazon.

I also threw in some paint brushes to use as our cleaning brushes. Again, I was trying to keep it real. (Never mind the rainbow rice.)

After Vada had her first job as an archaeologist  we took some of the dinosaurs over to one of the desks and got with play-doh we experimented with different impressions that we could make, including the tracks.

While Vada was entertaining herself with this project, I was warming up some Crayola Air Dry Clay. I wanted Vada to help me make one more impression. In a couple of days, when the clay has fully dried, I will bring out the paint and let her paint this "fossil".

We worked on some of the curriculum from Letter of the Week starting with the Do-A-Dot letter 'D' page.

Vada is getting much, much better at getting the sponge tippers into the circles!

Check out how centered she was able to get the dotter below!

Obviously, there is a lot of progress to be made but hey, she is only three years old, so I would say that this is pretty great! And maybe I am being biased (and that's okay) but I happen to admire those who think and in this case, color, outside the box (or circles).

The end of the school year is always busy around our house. My older two girls are public schooled so they have a lot of "end of the year" activities to go to. Therefore, this week has been pretty busy. Yesterday, Vada had OT therapy in the morning which is when we typically do classes because I don't like to not be unavailable to my other girls when they are home from their schooling times. However, yesterday they got out of school early and also had chores to do and I didn't have to prepare dinner because of a family activity at our church so while the older two girls were doing their chores, Vada and I went down to the classroom to do some letter 'D' learning. 

We were in the middle of another craft when Kiliegh came down to tell me that she had finished with her chores and asked if she could help Vada -for a minute. (Literally, her attention span was only that and then she was off doing her own thing again!) 

Together, they started coloring a letter 'D' that Vada and I had just cut out together with her loop scissors.

After coloring seemed to no longer hold Vada's attention we moved on to pasting.

I usually have our classes prepared a week ahead of time now, for crafts such as this one, its not unusual for me to prepare it the night before. I actually had the pieces of construction paper precut and ready for Vada to grab and paste as she was going for this activity (other than the letter 'D'). For now, at her skill level, I felt this was a good way to begin doing a project of this size with her. We will continue to work on cutting more each week and pasting and eventually she will be doing it all on her own.

I would start by putting a piece down, such as a "green triangle" and then ask her to do the next one, after placing a gob of glue down, she would use her pointer and push the triangle into its place. She did the same thing with the googly eyes.

And then after completing her dinosaur picture she proudly walked it over to her I Did That Wall to show me where she wanted me to put it.

We ended our class time with some dino math.

This is an activity that we do at least once a week, usually in theme, this week being dinosaurs. Vada is getting really good at the process and knowing what it is that I want her to do, so today I added an extra step at the end. Everything was the same as usual, I would Say the number, point to the numeral on the dinosaur, count the clips out loud and then hold the card for Vada so that she could take off the clips and place them into the bowl. The final step added was that I would then hand her the dinosaur and she would put it into a new pile, upside down.

We did the process with the new step for the first few cards like it was no big deal and then Vada began getting very upset with me. I thought it was because she wanted to take more than one clip at a time and I am a stickler and make her do one at a time, for now. She was smacking her hands on the desk, raising her voice and over all just mad. My tolerance level with her is something I am pretty proud of (then again, she is just really an easy going child). She doesn't overwhelm me in her "moments" and I am typically able to quickly figure out what she wants when she is unable to vocalize it because I am able to keep my cool and just read her. 

Today it took a couple of minutes for me to figure her wants out but I finally did, it was a moment that told me that I must be doing something right because she was learning. 

She was trying to tell me (or so I assume because once she got this she was content) that she could do all of the steps of this counting activity on her own and without my assistance. I handed her a fully loaded dinosaur and one by one she pulled off the clothes pins and placed them into the bowl and once they were all on the bowl, she flipped the dino upside down and put it into the correct pile. then she signed more! All I did was count out loud while she removed the pins!

What a great way to end our lessons! I am one proud Mama!

Day Three of Letter 'C'

Yesterday was beautiful outside! Finally it is warming up and seemingly staying that way! It wont be too much longer before I am complaining about it being too hot! For now, I am trying to take advantage of the nice weather and do what I can for school stuff outside. Technically, I could do it all if I wanted to but I do like the flow of the way certain things are going so I do pick and choose!

For yesterday's beginning lessons I decided to start outside. We did some sun art on solar energy paper. The age suggestion is six and above I would assume for the understanding and comprehension of the actual process of whats taking place but I thought since we had the paper and it was so sunny out, why not. 

I gave Vada the simple task of placing the plastic butterflies onto the paper while I counted how many she chose. If your interested in how her picture turned out stay tuned for this weeks post of "I Did That", where I post all of her crafts of the week at one time.

Next, we got into her new Fun Sand sensory bin. Well, we kind of got into it. She wasn't overly excited about the sand and kept saying "yuck". 

She was alright if she was sitting on my lap and if I was picking up the alpha cookies but she just wasn't comfortable fully immersing her hands into the sand.

After about five minutes of her sitting in my lap and watching uncomfortably as I brought the alpha shaped cookies closer to her I decided to have her do the same activity that I had originally planned only using a bin of water. 

Every so often there would be some left over gob of sand on a letter that would throw her off a bit but in general she was quite content "diving" for letters in the water.

I had her grab for a letter and then show it to me. Once she showed it to me, I would tell her what the letter was and then I would sing the Leap Frog Alphabet Letter song for each letter. "The 'a' says "ahh". The 'a'a says "ahhh". Every letter makes a sounds..." and so on. She really enjoys Leap Frog videos and frankly next to Signing Time and Sesame Street, it's about the only thing that we let her watch on tv.

After playing in the water I did try to reintroduce the sand to Vada but she just wasn't ready.

Then we went for a walk around our neighborhood. 

And of course we had to stop to smell all of the beautiful flowers.

After our walk we came back inside to do our lessons for the day. 

We read the Caterpillar book as usual and Vada made sure to feed her hungry caterpillar.

We started with math. Counting and numbers. 

This printable activity came from our Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

I had theses Measuring Worms that I thought we could pretend were caterpillars and use them as our counters instead of the printable paper caterpillars that came with the curriculum. Just to change things up a bit.

The only problem was that I am pretty for sure that Vada thought that these were crayons.

I thought maybe it was because I gave her the longer worms so I gave her the shortest worms instead. Same thing, she tried to color with them.

I tried to reason with her. No, these are our caterpillars. Well, not for real but for pretend. Were pretending that they are caterpillars and were going to count them. Okay? 

For some reason I really wanted my "caterpillars" to work, so I tried to give her the numeral card first then one caterpillar to count and place onto the leaf at a time.

I guess you could say that sometimes mother doesn't always know whats best. We ended up going back to the printable caterpillars for our counting activity and Vada did great! She knew what was expected. The caterpillar cards were not confusing and she didn't try to color with them.

I wonder what she would do with cut up pipe cleaners...?

Together we worked on tracing and then Vada got her time to practice writing on her own.

We also did some cutting together and this time she was much more cooperative, which was pleasant! 

Then, I gave her a chance to hold the loop scissors and paper on her own. She has a great deal of practice left before she is able to cut things on her own but at least we are working on it!

I tried to work on Large, Medium and Small sorting with Vada but she saw the caterpillars and instantly was done! I think after our counting, she had had enough for one day!

We ended our day with learning colors and some pre reading color cards that I printed for free from This Reading Mama.

I did a couple of things with these cards. I introduced them and then put them into the slots. Then I introduced a handful of items of the same color.

I always gave Vada a couple of minutes to check out the items that I placed onto the table and made sure to keep reinforcing what color they were and that they matched the colors in the slot or on the cards.

I always put a crayon of the corresponding color onto the table and also let her try it out.

For literacy purposes I made sure to highlight that both of the written words said the same thing. I would say "This one says blue and this one says blue." Then I would hand her one card and ask her to put the blue on the blue. I would ask her to do this twice. the first time using the black card and the second time using the colored card.