Another really great blog I found!

If you have a preschooler. Check out this blog. She is giving away a great book today until Dec. 10th. I love her free printables. http://www.thoughtsofesme.blogspot.com/. This is her free printable for today.

Christmas Centers

Twenty-two days left. Twenty-two days until Christmas. In our house we are trying not to miss Christmas this year. So we are making learning fun by making our learning centers have a Christmas theme.

Here is one I thought of today. Christmas Ornament Measuring. Everyone has ornaments of different sizes or lengths. I chose 5 ornaments and made this recording sheet.

I will put the ornaments in a box along with the unifix cubes, pennies and a ruler

Another center I have used in the past (more geared for my 4 year old) is a pattern block puzzle. I have found several patterns. www.prekinders/2009/11/christmas-pattern-blocks/ has several wreaths, a tree, snowman, snowflake, and several more.

While I was looking around I found an alphabet center game and an ornament sorting activity that would be great for any preschooler. www.prekinders.com/christmasunit.htm

My first grader is working on vowel digraphs and consonant diagraphs right now so we are going to use this idea that I found at http://thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com/ Mrs. Carroll has some really cute ideas and you can download them for free. We are going to use her gingerbread sorting activity to help us practice the different long o sounds /oa/ as in boat, /ow/ as is mow, /oe/ like in toe.

I am still gathering ideas for next week. We are going to have fun centers to like a happy birthday Jesus puzzle and maybe a make your own nativity scene.

More Pumpkin Math

Here are some more pumpkin math ideas for you!

We started out really simple by making playdough pumpkins and then ordering them by size. smallest to largest and largest to smallest.

Measuring the height of our pumpkin with Unifix cubes.

Measuring the weight of our pumpkin. It was pretty heavy.

Measuring the circumference of our pumpkin.

I cut out thirty little pumpkins using my sizzix machine. I wrote numbers from 1 to 30 on them and had him place them in order.

Then we hung it on the wall to measure how many mini pumpkins tall he is. I had to add a few pumpkins. I found an awesome unit study on pumpkins that anyone teaching kinder or first should take a look at. www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pumpkins-A-Thematic-Cross-curricular-Unit. This study has awesome little books for them to read and tons of other reproduceables. We really loved it.

Welcome with a little pumpkin candy!

Welcome to our little homeschool blog! I am a mom to two boys, ages 6 and 4. I started homeschooling my oldest last year about this time. I started this blog to share and document what we are doing or have done before, and to help anyone else who might be homeschooling and need some ideas.
We started last year with a pumpkin theme. I am not theme teaching as much this year but for the kindergarten year it was perfect.
Did you know you can teach math and have fun and eat candy too? :) All you need is one bag of autumn mix or whatever mulit bag you prefer. Now this is how we used the bag with my six year old today to practice his math facts. He has to show me with our candy manipulatives and tell me the answer.

My four year old is learning to represent numbers with the candy manipulatives.

We love the pumpkins. They don't last long.

Another fun thing you can do with this bag is to take a. big scoop of them and sort them. We did this last year. Notice my son made a pile of the broken ones. He is so like his mom. They never put enough pumpkins in the bag either.

Another skill we worked on in kinder was being able to show one more than or one less than. We lined up the pumpkins to make the task easier and counted them. Then he would make another line to show one more than we had before. If you are teaching a preschooler, another concept that could be taught using candy is one to one correspondence. Have your child match pumpkin for pumpkin, or even pumpkin for candy corn. Every pumpkin needs a partner!

We practiced patterning with the candy too. Make sure to allow them to be creative. It is important they know how to pattern ABAB, ABC, ABC, and ABBA. The above is ABAB.

Here is ABBA.

Little ones and big ones can practice this. After all the learning is over it sure is fun to eat too!