Weather Words

This week we are learning a little about the weather! Every morning we talk a little about what the weather is like today, but since we don't live in a place with 4 seasons, I decided we'd spend a week talking about weather. We had 8 activities today, and Big Monkey was still asking for more. I only have 10 workboxes. I think I'm going to be adding playground time, music time, and stuff like that to each day so he feels like he is getting more school time.

So our worksheets this week are the fall theme from 2 Teaching Mommies. We started today reading the book "What Will the Weather Be Like Today?." Big Monkeys comment about the book was, "I like this story rather much." Yes, he really said it just like that. No idea where he is getting some of these phrases from.

Then we moved on to our Scarecrow maze. A great prewriting practice activity without it feeling like a writing activity. He loves that I laminated the sheet so that he can use the dry erase markers. He had me erase it 3 times so that he could do it again.

Then we did a size sort. Big Monkey has "big" all figured out, but "medium" and "small" seem to always throw him for a loop until I put one of each in the right category.

We transferred some "snowballs." These were cotton balls from one of my bathroom vanity jars that has some potpourri underneath. During the entire activity Big Monkey kept saying. I don't like these, they are stinky! Haha. Too bad he also had to use them for the next activity since I couldn't find our fresh box of cotton balls. To his credit, they made me sneeze too.

Then we did a glue craft with glitter pens. We made clouds with rain and snow. Big Monkey enjoyed the glitter pens a lot and they are a lot less messy than traditional glue and glitter.

The most favored activity today was putting beads on a pipe cleaner. I got the beads at Oriental Trading Company and they are the perfect size for Big Monkey.

Then I had him pour beads into a cup from one of my measuring cups. He liked this and played for awhile with it too. Gave me some time to get a few things picked up in the kitchen and to cuddle Baby Monkey who was tired of fending for himself. Off to play the rest of our day away with maybe a few chores and duties in there too!

No More Monsters...

So, tomorrow is the start of a new school week and we are leaving our monster theme behind. It was a whirlwind of a week this past week. We did school every day, but Mama Monkey was busy preparing for the influx of family visitors for Unk's memorial service. So I didn't have time to blog about our activities. We went and picked up our other color printer, so this coming weeks activity sheets will be so much more colorful! Goodbye shades of pink, hello bright, laminated, reusable sheets!

Ok, so here are some highlights this week. Here is Big Monkey with the sock monster we made on Monday. Turns out Daddy Monkey was fine with us using that particular pair of socks.

Baby Monkey spent most of the week doing this during school. We did not have good mornings with Baby Monkey for some reason.

We practiced patterns a lot this week, and by Friday, Big Monkey could finish almost any simple pattern I gave him. I think he's getting the concept. He even started coming up with his own patterns.

We tried these neat numbered puzzles, but it was always a struggle to get Big Monkey to keep going and try to finish. Not sure why. The 1-10 puzzles are not that hard as he can recognize those numbers, but he just wasn't interested.

We tried out these new lacing blocks we found in the Target dollar aisle (they were 2.50). Big Monkey wanted to put one block on each string and swing them around the room. Not really a good idea in my book.

Baby Monkey liked unloading my supply bins.

The Do-a-dot M is for Monsters page was a big hit again. He really likes those markers.

We made jello shapes this week (no photo, sorry) with the jello gigglers recipe and we also made playdoh monsters. That was a fun one!

On Friday while Grandma Monkey was visiting, we all made magnet monsters from a craft kit I got at Oriental Trading Company. It was fun, and Big Monkey did great gluing his own pieces on. I had to help add glue here and there, but he mostly did it himself. They are now hanging on the side of my fridge.

This is by far not an extensive list of everything we did this week, just some of the favorites. We also did a lot of story time this week. Overall a busy, but successful week.