Summer Plans

What are your summer plans?  I intend to work hard with my play group (LEARN= Life Explored and Responsibility Nurtured) to set up education based intentional meetups.  I love being in a group that I consider my homeschooling group even though many of them aren't officially "homeschoolers".  We all have the same goals and values for our children and that is a powerful thing.  We're working on setting up a School Co-Op Day for the next school year that will engage all children from toddlers through Kindergartners (more on that Monday or Tuesday after we meet as a group).  In the mean time I'm hosting a variety of play dates known as "Little Learners" for the group to demonstrate to other moms how to lesson plan and intentionally spend time with their children.  We will be using the Little Adventures Tot Camp Printables as the lesson plans for these get togethers.  They are great packs you can use at home with your child(ren) or you can get together your playgroup and make it a fun meetup.

Tot packs are about 20 pages in length.  They each have a page of activities ideas and oodles of printables.  You can certainly use all or part of the lesson plans.  The printable pages include songs, matching games, drawing games and other activities.  Tot packs are designed to be a first introduction to math concepts, letters, shapes and colors.  They are not meant to obtain mastery in any subject.  Let them be a guide for educational play between you and your child.

There are 6 packs for the summer time curriculum and as we have each activity day I'll post pictures and share how it went.  If you are interested in getting in on the fun you can buy the packs from Teacher's Notebook or enter the raffle below to win your own downloadable set.

Tot Summer Camp -Download all 6 Summer Tot Packs-

click on the picture to link to the printable.

  

  

Little Adventures Preschool is holding spot #6 over at Circle of Moms Top 25 Homeschooling Moms for 2013.  Please show your support by stopping by and clicking the heart next to our logo.  Thank you! 

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Planting Seeds - Tot School Thursday

Tot school was so fun today!  We finally got to go outside for the whole day.  Yay for springtime!

 We played with the peg boards and got a chance to get reacquainted with the backyard activities.

 I just love how relaxing and how fun it was to enjoy the sunshine.  We were talking about planting seeds and had a lot of fun eating apples and exploring the seeds from the apples.

 Our sensory bin for the day was black beans (dirt) with play vegetables (to plant), gloves and shovels.

 I'm in love with this picture.  She was so proud of herself for getting her glove on.

 For art we explored liquid glue and beans/seeds.  It was the first time that toddlers have been given a bottle of glue to explore on their own.  Most of the time I put glue on things and have them move it around with a paintbrush.  We've moved on to learning how to actually squeeze it out of the bottle.

 We also planted peas today.  Just keep your tray of soil warm and moist and when the peas pop up in about a week plant them in the ground (or a pot). Putting them next to a piece of chain link fence (or something similar) will let them climb up the fence.

 Playing with the planting seeds tot pack.  Our focus was on the numeral 1 in math.  Be sure to point out numerals 1-5 in your daily activities this month.

Manners - Tot School Tuesday

I made a silly picture mistake and uploaded pictures from my camera and my iPod at the same time and my computer went bizerk and ordered them all crazy, so I apologize about the random order of the pictures in this post. 

 We read the story "No, David!" and let David know when he was making a sad choice by shaking our finger at him and saying "/n/, /n/, /n/" to practice the N sound.  Then we made "Yes, ___(child's name)___" books.  We practice saying the sounds in our names as we wrote it on every page and then children drew/scribbled pictures of themselves doing good things like helping people, playing outside, giving hugs, etc.  When you read your book with your child ask them what good things they are doing in each picture.

 I left the blocks out from preschool patterning and they became pretend ice cream that we learned how to pretend eat without actually putting it in our mouth.
 We sang the song, "Do as I'm Doing" while we jumped, clapped, twirled and stomped.
 Playing with the Manners II tot pack.

 We're playing a little bit with ABAB patterns and today we explored the idea with beads which also helped us work on our fine motor skills.

 N the newt was so naughty because he painted with finger nail polish on the wall.  We painted with finger nail polish on our papers!

 At one point I was being mobbed with kids who wanted to play our shape learning game.  We're working on learning 2D shapes through February and then we'll play with 3D shapes in March.