The New Stuff

Things have felt a bit hectic around here lately, so I didn't get around to updating our blog yesterday. We spent the evening wearing our Pooh Bear costumes and trick or treating and hanging out with the neighbors.

We set up our new room, which basically still looks the same. I added a pocket calendar and a weather chart though, so now we have more of a routine each morning. We sing a song (usually ABCs since it is both boys' favorite), sing about the days of the week, put up the date on the calendar and count up to that number, talk about today, tomorrow and yesterday, and then check the weather. Big Monkey opens the front door to check the weather each day. Yesterday his assessment was "brrrrrrrrrr, it's cooooooldddd" and today "it's hot outside" (even though it was pretty much the same temperature as yesterday). Big Monkey really likes putting the weather card up.

Then we move on to "lessons." We're going to start using the workbox method, once my workboxes arrive. I'll talk more about that when they get here. For now, we're using trays so Big Monkey knows what he needs to do for the day. This week our theme is Fall. We've been reading "Barnaby's Seasons in the Park" fall section and using the Preschool Printables from 1+1+1=1 (Carisa and Jolanthe from Homeschool Creations have great printables for tots, preschoolers, and kindergarten).

So far this week we have done some vocabulary review (above). This involves matching up the pictures and talking about what the item is and what word is below the item (Big Monkey can't match up words just yet). Then we tried some size sorting - putting large, medium, and small leaves in their category. Big Monkey was pretty good with the small leaves, but medium was always "small" and large was a free for all. We'll keep working on this with Mama Monkey's help.

We finished up the day with some fine motor control practice with our new tongs and some pom poms. I started Big Monkey with the starfish tray, and when he finished, he asked for the hearts tray. The hearts tray has more "wells" and Big Monkey informed me that he was missing 3 pom poms.

Today we tried some "shadow" matching and Big Monkey had no troubles at all accomplishing that task quickly.

Then we made a leaf book with the leaves we collected on Monday (did I forget to mention we did that around the neighborhood?). Big Monkey really enjoyed using the squeeze elmer's glue. We'll see how well the leaves stuck tomorrow once they are dry. (*Disclaimer* dry "crunchy" leaves do not work as well for this project as "wet" flexible leaves do as we found out).

The longest lasting activity for the day by far was do-a-dot painting of our "fall worksheets." The entire time Big Monkey kept talking about how A is for acorn and P is for pumpkin. He also informed me all on his own that A is also for ant and P says "puh" like popcorn. He gets the P and popcorn from letter factory, but A is for ant he's picked up from all our reading. I was very proud of him.

We rounded out the day today with a little hammering practice for both Big Monkey and Baby Monkey. Somehow it always ends in this though: