Tot School Tuesday - Valentines

In honor of Valentines Day, we're focusing on love for the next few weeks... and throwing in some fun Valentines crafts for good measure!  We are talking a lot about Christ's love for us as well as our love for others...

To celebrate our love of neighbors, we invited a few of our favorites over for some craft time.  I got the great idea for crayon hearts from Jill at Meet the Dubiens.  When it comes to great food themes and easy crafts, she's a go-to!

It took neighbor mommy Barrett and I a while to get the crayons all grated up, but the work was well worth it... the kids had a blast!

They cut and sprinkled away!

And the end result was SO beautiful with the light shining through the window!

BIG BROTHER TIME:

Stone has been rocking Big Brother Time lately... I'm trying to ease into some more structured and themed activities and am pretty sure I'm going to buy into the Raising Rockstars curriculum at 1+1+1=1.  We own the Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler and I love it, but I think Stone is ready to move up.  We've been supporting with other workbooks, but I think I want to do more.  He is in "school" in the mornings, but they are focusing so much on speech and social skills that a lot of typical pre-school skills are missed.  He's so super smart and I really feel he needs to be challenged, especially when it comes to reading and math.

He worked on coloring his pages from private speech.  This week they focused on N, M, D and B.  I didn't get a good picture of it, but as I was putting the color sheets away I noticed something written on the B is for Balloons page.  There were two balloons on which he had written UP, totally unprompted.  What a smarty!

Stone really enjoyed this number matching activity from the 1+1+1=1 love lesson. I had to slow him down a few times so that he counted correctly, but he knows his stuff!

BOOK BASKET:

We pull aside a few special books for each unit to help enforce our theme.  Most we already have on-hand, but I often put things on hold at the library as well.

I keep the books in a special spot next to the fireplace so the kids can see them and explore them freely outside of reading time.  The books we're using for this unit are I Love You Through and Through, I Spy Little Hearts, I Love You Because You're You and My First Read and Learn Bible.  The greatest story of love is God's gift to us through His son... the kids love the story of Jesus' birth and his example of love for us. It's been a great tie-in to our scripture memory.

I also pulled out several "homemade" books for this unit.  These are mainly Shutterfly books that have pictures of people who we love.  I wanted to make it a point to teach the boys that we don't just love family members.. that we are all family in Christ, regardless of skin color, age, etc.  They love reading these books because they love the people in them!

SCRIPTURE MEMORY:

I got these prints from 1+1+1=1.  Aren't they great?  We're focusing on 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 and 1 John 3:16. They really love the hearts in the middle poster that break down all of the aspects of love from 1 Corinthians.  Cash really loves using the pointer to point to each as we read them through... always the teacher!

MISC:

We've pulled out our Valentines Little People.  These are some of our favorite because they have a mailbox and letters!  I so enjoy having all of the special Little People sets to share with the boys.  Such a special treat to have something that's only pulled out once a year!

Next week we'll continue our love theme and introduce some Letter V activities to celebrate Valentines!