Learning and Lesson Plans

This week was all about the letter S... and the boys loved it!  You can find our entire lesson plan for the week here.  We'll continue with the letter S next week... you can find our lesson plan for that unit here.

We start each day with our verse.  This week was Isaiah 55:6, which we learned by singing it to the tune of Skip to my Lou.  It's amazing what you can learn when the words are put to music!

We practiced our numbers using the snowman graph and M&Ms.  It's a struggle to get the kids to fully graph before eating, but a motivator just the same!

We pretended our GigaBall was a giant snowball and we spent hours rolling around in it.  Now that the weather is nice, you'll be seeing a lot of the GigaBall... for now it's a snowball, it will soon be a planet for our space unit.  I love multi-functional toys like this!

We used our play dough mats to spell out the letters in SNOW.  We're still mainly focusing on pre-writing skills, but throw some writing in, when appropriate.

The boys worked together to sort upper and lower-cased letters.  This is hard with the letter S, since the two are so similar, but we did some comparisons together and the boys had it down pat by the end of the activity.

Here's Stone working on his writing sheets. He's starting to hold the pen correctly and we're getting some good strokes.

Holden participates in writing activities too!  Although he's not quite ready, he loves to scribble on the sheets. This helps him prepare for writing, as I coach him on proper positioning techniques and guide him (hand-over-hand) in some tracing.

Cash got the game Pop Goes Froggio for his birthday.  It's not related to the letter S, but it is a great moving and matching activity!

The boys did a great job racing to match each card...

and loved running back to stomp on the lilly pad when they found it.  Look at that frog fly!

Now back to the letter S...The boys worked together, taking turns to sort snowmen by size.

And we raced around the house to find everything we could that started with the letter S.

We worked on Beginning Sounds Bingo.  This is a great tool for all of my boys.  Stone uses it for pre-reading, while Cash and Holden use it for letter matching.  I love that they can play it together, but gain different skills through it.

We made an Insta-Snow sensory bin.  The creation of the snow is a great math/science lesson...

And playing in the snow is a great fine motor/sensory activity!  The boys will often explore in their sensory bins for hours.

And left to their own devices they create all sorts of fun games with the items.  What am I going to do with this little one?

The Do-A-Dot art painters are always a success.  And the boys continually amaze me with their ability to keep the dots in the circles.  Each has their own way of completing the task.  Holden goes at the dotting rapid fire...

Stone likes to use a variety of colored dotters to get the job done...

And Cash often holds the dotter so deliberately on each circle that the paint bleeds through the page!

Really people, what am I going to do with this little one?

Last but not least, we did some snowflake sorting and matching.  The boys really loved this activity!

Since we've had such great success moving into a more structured pre-school format, I'm going to start posting under Learning and Lesson Plans instead of Tot School Tuesdays.  The boys love our new routine, which you can see by viewing a sample lesson plan.

I hope that these lesson plans can serve as a source for you, a place to go to get all of the great printables that moms are sharing across the web.  The sites I frequent are great, they include:

- 1+1+1=1

- Raising Memories

- Homeschool Creations

- Musings of Me

- Confessions of a Homeschooler

Don't forget to download our lesson plan for next week by clicking here.  We'd love to have you follow along on our Letter S unit with us!  In the future, all of my lesson plans will contain links (like this one), so you can have a collective source for all of the resources we use!  Sorry I didn't get to that on the first two!