Happy New Year!

Since I've been criticized (playfully of course) by my family for taking down my Christmas decorations before New Years I thought I would post pictures to justify why. It's because this year I decided to do a little New Year's decorating :) New Year's is actually a pretty low key holiday for us. We don't do big parties and we may or may not even stay up to watch the ball drop. For some reason though this year I wanted to decorate for it. (Maybe I just needed a creative outlet?) Who knows, but whatever the reason, I'm really happy with the results.

I would like to have done much more, but it's a start and I plan to add to it each year. I may even stay up to welcome in the new year this time. I personally am ready to bid this past year goodbye and am looking forward to 2012 and fresh start ahead.

Christmas Stockings

I LOVE Christmas! The moment we start pulling out the boxes of decorations and put on the music, I just get downright giddy :) I love the baking and the wrapping, planning our picture for the cards, shopping, etc, etc, etc.... I LOVE IT ALL! One thing I didn't love so much were our cheap fuzzy red and white stockings. How's a kid supposed to know on Christmas morning which stocking is theirs if they all look alike? Every year I vowed to make them stockings that were distinctly theirs, and this year I finally did it. And.... Here they are!

I followed this super easy tutorial I found on Pinterest, and I think they turned out so cute!! I made one for each of the kids and then decided that The Professor and I each needed one that coordinated with theirs. I love that mine is made from all of the different fabrics.

I can finally add stockings to the list of things that I LOVE at Christmas :) Now to make something super cute to hang them on since we don't have a mantle.

Bark, George

Our Preschool book of the week was Bark, George by Jules Feiffer. I know I say this every week, but I just love this book. It's about a dog whose mother is trying to get him to bark. When all that comes out are other animal sounds, the mother takes him to the vet to take care of the problem. It's a great book for repetition and predicting what will happen next. The ending is not so predictable, but quite funny.

I remembered to do our book cut out this week. I cut out and glued an image of George on our book. Peanut colored pictures from here that I shrunk down, cut out, and had her glue in George's stomach.

Peanut did some size sequencing with dog bones. These are in the printable pack found at the end of this post.

Petie, my Kindergartener has started practicing some sight words, so I made some bones with sight words on them that he had to feed to George as I called them out. When they were all in George, Petie "reached deep down in George", pulled out a word, and read it.

Petie and Peanut used these tile word cards from Making Learning Fun to spell out all the characters from the book. Of course they had to turn it into a race. What can I say? We're a bit competitive in our household :)

I made up some cutting strips for Peanut to practice her cutting skills. These can be found in my Bark, George printable pack.

Making Learning Fun has Bark, George calendar numbers that Peanut used to practice numerical order. We only used 0-11 for this.

We also played animal sounds bingo, did some more counting using dog bones, and a few other things that can be found in the printables below. You can download them here.

I realized I don't have any alphabet activities with this theme. I've actually started Peanut on the same phonics program that I'm using for Petie, but at a much slower pace, so I didn't incorporate any of that into our theme this week.

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Blueberries For Sal

This week, the book we used in Peanut's Preschool was Blueberries For Sal. In case you're not familiar with the book, it's about a little girl and her mother and a little bear and it's mother that are all trying to get as many blueberries as they can before winter. I was actually quite surprised that with such simple illustrations, and so many words that this book still held Peanut attention each time I read it.

Here are a few activities we did to go along with this book, and you can also get any of the printables we used in our week by going here.

Peanut placed bear counters on any blueberry that had a "b" on it.

I used a picture of the book cover and turned it into a puzzle. Peanut had to line the numbers up in order to put the cover back together.

We looked for things that were blue in magazines and glued them to a big construction paper blueberry.

Here's a little math page I made to go along with our theme. I was planning on using it for my Kindergartner, but Peanut quickly grasped the concept of how to use the greater than/less than symbol, so we played with this for a while.

Here's a little game both Petie and Peanut loved playing. I took 10 red, and 10 blue pom-poms with magnets glued on and stuck them to our filing cabinet. Then, across the room, on our metal board I put a picture of a raspberry, and one of blueberries. The kids had to race across the room, grab one of their berries, race back and place it under the right picture, and race back for more. The first to transfer all their berries was the winner. (By the way, if you haven't seen this tip yet floating all over Pinterest, these automotive drip pans make great magnetic boards, and they're super cheap. I got mine at Wal-Mart for under 10 bucks and it's huge!)

Peanut did this berry shadow match page over, and over, and over again. For some reason she just LOVED this activity. It's funny the things they enjoy that you just don't expect.

This berry patterning page can be found with all the other printables.

We pretended these pom-poms were berries we had picked and Peanut had to sort the big berries into the big pail, and the little berries into the little pail.

I later looked over and saw Penny ever so carefully scooping and transferring the pom-poms from one pail to another with a spoon. :)

I specifically chose this book for this particular week because in our co-op, the kids picked berries, smashed them, and made them into raspberry jam.

I actually realized this evening that we completely forgot to decorate our book cut-out this week. I guess we'll be doing that tomorrow.

I somehow missed taking pictures of them playing the Blueberry Picking Game I made up, but you can find it here with the other printables along with instructions on how to play. We also watched the telling of this story on youtube. You can find the clip here.

Here are a few more links with Blueberries For Sal related ideas:

Teach Preschool has a really fun blueberry pie craft.

Lightning Bug Literacy has some fun ideas as well.

Jolanthe at Homeschool Creations has created (as always) a fantastic set of printables for this book.

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The Carrot Seed

Our Preschool book this week was The Carrot Seed. There's something about the determination of the little boy in this book that reminds me so much of Peanut's personality (maybe that's why I love this book so much.)

The first thing we had to do of course was harvest some of our carrots. We had a pretty successful crop this year and the kids really had fun pulling them up and seeing all the different shapes and sizes.

They all played a roll and cover game that I made to match our theme.  To play this, they roll a die, count the dots, and cover that number of squares. (We just used orange beads for this.) The first one to cover their whole page wins.  You could also use two dice and have them add them to make it a little harder. You can print the game here.

I wrote a number in the corner of this Play-doh mat, and Peanut put the correct number of carrots into the wheelbarrow. It looks a little different than the one in this picture, but if you want a printable for this you can get it here.

Here she is matching an uppercase carrot to the right lowercase wheelbarrow. Again, these won't look like the ones in the picture, but you can download the wheelbarrows here, and the carrots here.

These little carrots I just cut out of construction paper and laminated to use for a number of different activities. I cut slits in a brown box so she could "plant" her carrots in rows. For this particular activity, I put one carrot at the beginning of each row with a shape on it, and she put the others with that same shape in it's correct row.

I created this shape and color viewer for Peanut by laminating two printouts I made back to back. On one side it says "A carrot is shaped like a triangle. Can you find more triangles?" Flip it over and it says "A carrot is orange. Can you find more things that are orange?" Print the shape side here, and the color side here.

The kids all tried out being wheelbarrows.

Peanut dipped cut carrots in paint and stamped them on her paper to fill her carrot picture in.

She practiced tracing triangles. You can print this triangle tracer out here.

She also practiced cutting triangles.

We used one of the triangles she cut to make a carrot for our book cut-out this week. We added a top to the carrot and glued it on along with a teeny tiny carrot seed.

This was my first time making printables to go along with our theme. I never intended to make them available to the public, so I had to change some of the images in order to share them. I figured out how to share what I could, but the others have copyrighted images on them, so I couldn't share those. Enjoy!

Other sites with great ideas for The Carrot Seed:

Delightful Learning

Walking by the Way

Homeschool Share

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