Vertuccio Farm

To kick off the Fall season and spend time with some very special friends, we headed down to Vertuccio Farms. We are staying in Arizona for four weeks while Tyson does an audition rotation at Phoenix Children's Hospital, a potential residency program. We have loved our time here so far and had a blast playing at the farm!

Welcome Autumn!

 The farm had some fun tube slides!

 Love his little dirty looks.

 The farm also had a large trampoline that was by far a favorite of the afternoon.

Sweet baby friends.

The race cars kept them entertained and laughing for a while. Owen has really missed these cute girls.

Visiting the animals is always fun.

 

 And a huge tire fort? Yes please!

I sure have missed these beautiful friends of mine.

 

And of course we had to ride the train!

 

Getting Back on Track

WOW. We sure have been busy adjusting to Phoenix life this week. We just barely got internet so I am so excited to document this weeks Preschool lessons!

I have noticed that we are slowly cutting back to two lessons per week and occassionally we will hit our goal of three. I am totally fine with this. I'd rather do it the right way, not rushed, and with higher quality.

On our first day of preschool we did this:

Opening Circle Time

Sang songs and played freeze dance.

Warm-Up/Review

 I have been leaving our previous words learned on the board so we can review them each time we have preschool. Also, as we are playing in the office, I am able to randomly quiz Owen whenever I please. The joys of doing home school preschool! To learn more about how I use this board click HERE.

Story Time

Activity

 To go along with our story and letter, we made a butterfly out of the lowercase "b." It is important to not only study and learn uppercase letters, but lowercase letters too. This was a simple activity where I cut out a "b", some wings, and grabbed two pipe cleaners. This was great practice for Owen to use his glue stick to put it all together. He also enjoyed making his wings "colorful."

Handwriting

Owen wrote on his usual wipeable handwriting page.

 Every few lessons I like to add in more handwriting practice. I found this idea on Pinterest and thought it was wonderful.

 I used some manuscript paper to write the letters of the alphabet using a permanent marker (it took two sheets). I then gave Owen some Q-Tips and paint to then trace the letters. He really loved this activity and it provided a fun and different way to practice writing his letters. 

I bought this booklet full of manuscript pages from Target.

Game

I didn't focus solely on the letter "b" for our game and instead decided to do a whole alphabet activity. Owen knows his letters really really well. We are learning sounds and so I prefer him to do games and activities that involve all the letters so I can help him learn his sounds as he plays the game.

This game or activity was super simple. I filled a tupperware with oatmeal (you could use beans, rice, etc) and hid little letter tiles (found at Lakeshore Learning) for Owen to search for. It didn't end there! We then used our little letter strip for Owen to place the found letter tiles on their matching letters. This helped him to see what he had found and as he placed the letter I had him tell me the name of the letter and it's sound (if we had learned it already). It was a great time for me to assess him as well as a wonderful teaching moment. He really loved it too. :)

Closing Circle Time

I let Owen choose a few Halloween books to read because he is just super excited for the upcoming holiday. I will post some of these next month when we do lots of fun Halloween activities! 

 

A Busy Week and All About Owen

This week has been sooooo hectic. We have been packing and organizing and staining our newly built dining room table (courtesy of Tyson) and I have been planning a baby shower. This Saturday we leave for Phoenix and then California for 3 months total! It's a bit overwhelming packing for 3 whole months! Needless to say our preschool will only be 2 days this week. Here's what we did yesterday:

ALL ABOUT OWEN

I decided to have our day planned with activities and games and excursions that make Owen the happiest. I didn't really plan this ahead of time. With everything going on I didn't have much time to plan anything. But when I came across one of our favorite books called "Owen" I thought of how fun it would be to read this story and then proceed to do everything Owen loves to do.

Owen chose the songs he wanted to sing in the beginning. He chose a primary song and we sang it multiple times. :)

We then began our time with our usual bulletin board routine.

I have kept the words we have been learning on our board from previous weeks as well because they are a challenge and the more Owen sees and reads them the better reader he'll become. 

The letter of the day was "O" of course, for Owen.

Next we read "Owen" by Kevin Henkes. He writes many books that begin with a name and you may just find one that has the same name as your child!

Onto handwriting! Owen is pretty good at writing his O's. He's had a bit of practice with them.

I've taught Owen to "lay the marker, pencil, or pen back in it's bed" to remind him how to properly hold a writing utensil. This is very important for his handwriting success.

I gave Owen a few options for our activity.

They all revolved around making his name. His choices included making his name with glitter (he's OBSESSED with glitter these days), making it with shaving cream on our table (I was SHOCKED when he didn't choose this one!) or writing it on a white board. He chose the last one.

Before letting him have at it, he practiced spelling his name using milk bottle caps. His name is written on an index card that's taped to a small baggy (where I keep the bottle caps) to help him spell his name. This is a great hands-on activity that's easy and cheap, yet very effective. 

(Yes he did write this on his own. He's pretty meticulous when it comes to writing his name!)

For our "game" time we played with play dough. Both the boys can play with play dough for at least 20-30 minutes straight. This is one of Owen's favorite things to do ever which is exactly why we did it!

Owen and I built the word of the week (said) as well as his name. It was fun to play together.

Just the other day we had ventured out to the Aquarium and Owen was in Heaven. The kid loves underwater sea life! 

We reflected on our experience at the Aquarium and then I decided we should do another one of Owen's favorite things: look up sea life pictures online. He was so happy! We spent some time studying the pictures and talking about them. Our time got cut short otherwise I would have had him create one of his favorite sea animals. I figure we can do that another time. Eric Carle has a few great books about sea life that I'll have to highlight in the coming weeks of preschool.

Our day ended with freeze dance (another choice of Owen's) instead of our usual story time.

All and all it was a fun day with much learning going on and a very very happy little boy.

Toddler Busy Bags

Okay if you haven't heard of a busy bag then you need to read this post! They are AMAZING and are the perfect solution to any outing that needs to be more on the quiet side while having your toddler(s) in tow. A busy bag is an activity that can be played quietly, easily contained and transferable, and something that is engaging and interactive for your toddler. Basically they are perfect for places like the doctor's office, plane rides, restaurants, church, you get the picture. They are super easy to throw in your diaper bag and best of all they keep your child entertained and happy.

So I decided to host a busy bag swap (I did this last year and it was a hit). I invited 9 other ladies with children around the ages of 2-4/5. Each person chose one activity and made 10 of the same activity. I made sure to include guidelines for everyone to follow so that one person didn't spend oodles of time or money while another didn't. They all had to fit in a gallon sized zip lock baggy too. I gave them about a month to create their busy bag, making sure we didn't have any duplicates. Then we met at my house and swapped our bags, leaving each lady with 10 DIFFERENT busy bags to go home with! It was so fun to see what everyone made and not to mention have a little ladies night as well. 

Here are the 10 activities:

Upper/Lowercase letter match using clothespins

Felt Face with all the fixin's 

Shape Snake

Upper/Lowercase Spoon Match (Clear spoons had the lowercase letters and white spoons had the uppercase letters so you could see both letters when stacked) This busy bag also included a laminated alphabet strip. Can't wait to use it for multiple preschool activities!

Magnetic Popsicle Sticks to create SHAPES. This busy bag also included a set of alphabet tiles for lots of potential activities!

Butterfly Matching

Popsicle Stick Puzzles

Popsicle Color Matching

Velcro Building Sticks

Lacing Activity

And that's all 10! Pretty fun huh? My boys have already played with so many of these busy bags and we even used two of them in preschool on Wednesday.

If you have a group of people that would be interested in doing a Busy Bag Swap with you, you definitely should do it. It was so fun and now so helpful.

I got this idea from this wonderful blog and of course Pinterest!

Today for Preschool....

I am loving how we are falling into a routine of doing preschool 3 times a week. I love it, the boys love it and it really makes me happy to be able to teach my little ones. We have been doing our preschool after naps. It just seems to work best for us. I love to get out in the mornings and do something fun with the boys. Since I have both boys nap at the same time, it leaves us with the afternoon to get errands ran, dinner prepped and now preschool taught. It works great for us.

Here's what we did today:

Circle Time

The boys weren't really up for singing today, so we turned on some tunes from my iphone and had a little "let's get our brains working" dance party. It was fun :)

Warm-up/Review

I love this part of our schedule. It gets us focused, reviews previous material and gives me a chance to informally assess where Owen is and what needs to be looked at again. Today we focused on the letter "W", how to write it, it's sound and we looked for words that begin with W around the room. Our new word is "a". We wrote it in the air, said it out loud and looked for it in the story we read together. We focused on our new number, color and reviewed the previous preschool day's shape since it was a bit difficult (hexagon). Last, we reviewed the other words and letters of the week.

 

Story Time

 This is the cutest little story and I just love this author. We read another one of his stories last week too. It's about two friends who after getting annoyed with one another get over their differences and become good friends and pen pals too. I asked Owen who he wanted to write a letter to like Wendell did in the book and he chose he very best friend Zurik.

Activity/Craft

Owen "wrote" a letter just like the one in the story, drew a few pictures and we mailed it off to his friend.

 

Handwriting

We practiced letters F and L (both from previous days) as well as today's letter W. You can learn more about what I do for handwriting HERE.

Game Time

We did a few games today using our new busy bags (more on that later). One was a letter matching game. Owen matched the uppercase letter to it's lowercase letter using spoons. Super easy to create and so fun!

Closing Circle Time

Usually we finish with another book and some snuggles but today our time got cut short because a bunch of our cousins came to play. Of course we decided to skip our story and run outside to play!

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions!