Life with my Cowboys

A quick post about some wonderful, frugal, easy was to make your own materials for tot school! Pool noodle stringing  from Gratefully Growing in Grace   Velcro matching rods   from Grow I spy busy box from Play at Home Mom Turn bottle lids and popsicle sticks into an imaginative fine motor activity, from Time for Play. Color matching using paint samples or a cute hand version .   Toothpicks and a parmesan shaker from Chasing Cheerios Ribbons in a bottle from Hands on as We Grow  Recycled color sorting from Learning 4 Kids Tonging with age appropriate tongs and fun manipulatives like pom poms, erasers, foam blocks, etc. Pouring using a funnel. Other great Montessoi activities can be found at Montessori Home School . Also check out all of these tot tray posts , they are all inspiring!

Monkey loves our daily board time. Right after we have prayer and devotional, we start our daily boards which is kind of like circle time, only it's just us so I don't call it that. I've recently added some things that he's been enjoying to the back of our corkboards so now have double sided daily boards. We haven't been using our daily notebook since I've just put everything up on boards now.   The back of our calendar board now has a pocket chart for manners, months of the year, music notes, and kindermusik activities.   I love these manners cards from Early Learning at Home .   Monkey loves singing the months of the year song. I printed our these vehicle month cards to go along with the song. I'm thinking about printing out some days of the week cards too.   Listening puzzle from Monkey's kindermusik class. Each time you hear the sound, you add that puzzle piece.   This is the listening puzzle I made for him for sounds th

Almost caught up with tot school posts! Here are the highlights from our third week using the two year curriculum from ABCJesuslovesme .   Day 3 creation wheel, definitely one of Froggy's favorites.   He really got into the dot marker for letter Cc!   I added the star shape to our matching game, he loves doing this! Our number focus for the week was three.   Here is the craft we did together. I cut everything out for him and helped him glue the grass and tree trunk in place and he put the leaves and three apples on the tree. Froggy insisted on adding a yellow piece of paper from his cutting scraps can to our tree. I gave him some flower stickers to put on as well, but one of them fell off when I took this picture.   Tent and tunnel gross motor play and playing our Ugandan drum.   Here's a sneak peak of week four. I redid our Montessori shelves for Froggy's tot tray activities.   Oreo shape matching game (Goodwill $1.91) and paint chip

   Our new time center. I write our schedule for the day on the dry erase sheet (from the Dollar Tree) each day and when we start a new activity, I write the time and draw the hands on the clock, then Monkey makes his clock to match the time.   I've changed our responsibility chart to a character chart. Before bed time, we go through all of the catagories and he gets to add a magnet to that category for the day if he did it. Each category is color coded and has matching prize sticks, so at the end of the week if he has a full category, he can choose one of the sticks from that category and choose his prizes. Easier categories have simple prizes like a new sticker sheet, harder categories have big prizes like drive in movie night.     A simple addition and subtraction game I made for Monkey. I wrote the math problem on the board, then he put that many soldiers down and used his abacus to give me the answer. He loves addition, loathes subtraction.   I made