This week our theme was "About Me and My Family" so we could reintegrate our family from our six month time away. I always include books (that we pick out at the library together), movies (almost always educational but sometimes "fun"), songs, crafts, activities, foods, letter of the week, number of the week, vocabulary words, shape of the week, color of the week, baby signs, developmental and physical milestones for each kid and physical activity. All of these things go along with our theme, letter, shape or color for the week.
Check out what we did!
Family Tree Activity
Vocabulary Words & Baby Signs
Self Portraits
Another craft we did was to draw self portraits! This is an activity that we'll do all the time, just so I can get adorable pictures that my kids draw of themselves. Henrik is pretty good at drawing people when I ask him to, though he doesn't often like to draw people. Because Theo was with us, I suggested things like, "I have a head, it's round, like a circle, do you have a head shaped like a circle?" and then Theo asked, "circle?" and drew one.
Chalk Play
It's been 90+ degrees here for the last three weeks and we've been outdoors a lot. Recently my boys fell in love with chalk so I decided to take advantage of it by having Henrik draw, or trace the letter and number of the week. I made sure to make the arrows for the letters how I want him to write them. He's not huge on starting at the top like a lot of writing programs suggest, but he is at least learning how to properly form the letters even if he does start at the bottom. This week we studied the letter B and the numbers 0 and 1. Because I'm not 100% sure if Henrik is a visual, oral or written learner (he's not tactile like his brother) I made sure to put a dot above the number 1 and nothing above the 0 and had him count and notice the difference in the two numbers. This would be a pretty simple and fun activity to do on any day.
Pinewood Derby Cars
Last weekend we had a garage sale, we told Henrik that if he sold some of his old toys at the sale that he could have the money to use to buy something new. After the sale, we combined his money from the sale and the money that he earned from doing chores and I took him to the store. It was a really fun experience. I realize that he's kind of young when it comes to totally grasping the idea of how much a dollar or a quarter is worth, but regardless, we talked about how much money he had and what he could spend it on. I made it clear that he couldn't buy something that was a high number than what he had in his bank. So, when we got to the toy aisle, I asked him what toy he wanted, he was so careful and even said, "It's such a hard decision to pick just one" and that's when I told him that we had to look at prices. For example, if he picked this package, he'd get five cars for six dollars or he could pick one car for six dollars. I also showed him that he could combine different cars to equal the amount of money he had. He didn't totally get it, but nonetheless, he was so excited that he could pick out a car that he could build! Long story short, he picked out a pinewood derby car, and since it was family week, I jumped on the opportunity for him to have some quality time with his dad doing something that he loved!
Letter Dots
I've been looking for some fun ways to integrate letters into our daily and weekly activities, after scouring Pinterest and the Internet, I came across Confessions Of A Homeschooler, another blogger Mom. She's got an amazing site with a TON of free printable materials. I came across these wonderful sheets and thought my boys would love doing them. It was especially fun because our shape this week was a circle, so we counted all of the circles in the Bs and then dotted them with our paint blotters. This is a great activity for so many reasons, letter recognition, fine motor skills, counting, abstract letter recognition, and the list goes on.
Color Your Family!
While on Pinterest one day I came across this cool site where you can upload a photo and turn it into a pencil sketch, you can probably do this on some of your own apps on your computer, but I went with easy :). Anyway, I took photos of my boys with their grandparents and had them color the photos so we could send them (along with a letter) to their grandparents.
Pen Pals
Because we live far away from family and we were talking about family this week I wanted the boys to start writing letters to their grandparents. After explaining how letters work and giving examples like, "Dear ______" and then we talk about what's new with us and ask questions about the person we're writing too, I told the boys to start telling me things that they wanted to ask or tell their grandparents. It was pretty cute to sit back and listen to the things that were important to them. I wrote it all down exactly like they said it and then had Henrik write his own name to sign the letter. It was fun. On Monday, I'll have the boys take them to the post office so that they can deliver their own letter.
Who Is Taller?
My sons are obsessed with tape measures so I thought that another fun way to get to know our family better would be by tracing our bodies with chalk and then measure them to see who was the tallest and shortest in our family. We even measured the dog! The boys thought it was fun because we were measuring along and Henrik could guess that he'd be shorter than me and Theo was shorter than him, but what none of us expected was that I measured taller than Eric (Eric must have over traced).
Favorite Foods
Each night this week we had some one's favorite food. On Eric's night, we had pizza, but since none of us like the same kind of pizza, I decided that we'd each make our own personal pizza. It was really fun to have the boys get involved in the food process, usually I just kick them out of the kitchen when I'm making dinner, but instead, messes and giggles were welcome and I think this could be a weekly thing in our house.
Letter Tracing and Writing
Each day I tried to do an activity where I could get the boys writing or tracing letters, I found a site
where you can print off several different free printables, I particularly like the ones that teach the kids how to trace. I let Henrik use a highlighter so that he can see the different arrows and how to make the shapes. After he traced the letters that are on these particular sheet, there is a space for him to write his own letters. He was so proud when he actually made a row of Bs!
All About....
I thought it would be fun to have the boys answer questions about themselves and us in an interview. I figured that I could keep these forever and each year I'd ask them the same questions and see how they varied. It was adorable when I asked Theo the questions, I had to modify it a bit, for example, I knew he wouldn't know which holiday was his favorite, but I could ask him his favorite color and show. There weren't too many answers that surprised me about my boys, but it was hilarious when I asked Henrik to answer questions about me and Eric. I learned that according to Henrik, Eric's favorite thing to do is "put food on the table and work with the other workers" and according to Henrik, I'm the "best driver in the world". Because they obviously couldn't write in their own answers, I had them write their names on the interviews.
I Can See A Rainbow!
The color this week was red. When Theo turned one, I bought him sensory blocks for his birthday and I'm finally getting to use them! The boys loved looking through the colored water and placing the other primary colored blocks on top of it to make other colors. Henrik thought it was awesome, and actually, when I picked him up from school last week he was playing with the color lenses and actually figuring out how to make green, orange and purple. It's stuff like that that makes you feel like you're doing it right. Theo loved to look through them and playing with the ones that had beads in it more than the ones made with water. Either way, they both loved this activity and I haven't put the blocks away yet! You can find these water blocks here and the sound blocks here.
Numbers, Letters and Pictures
Another thing that I found at Confessions of a Homeschooler were these awesome printables. I need to get mine laminated so that I can use them without worry that they will be destroyed, but Henrik and I sat here for about a half hour as we played with this activity.
Playing House
Just because I have two boys doesn't mean I can't play house! While Hank was at school one day I decided to make the Family them more relevant to Theo. I made it simple by doing a few different activities with him without him even knowing we were playing school! Theo loves babies, so when we were sitting in our play kitchen I talked to Theo about how to do things in simple steps. We pretended that his baby was crying so he needed to find the milk and fill up a bottle, just like a mommy or daddy would.
When he got bored with that activity we moved on to some color recognition, for the longest time Theo has been saying that every color is "geen" but today, I got him to finally recognize some new colors! I tricked him into saying the colors about a million times by having him do something he loves! He practiced his cutting, or slicing while I repeated the names of the veggies and their colors as he did it.
One of the last things we did this week sort of happened by accident, Theo found my eye make up and started to put it on, though he missed his eyes. Just before he found it, we were reading a book called, Do You Have A Tail? It's a book about several animals that have different features and it asks the child if they have those features. Some they do, some they don't. Either way, it probably gave Theo some ideas....
The boys were no longer boys, they turned into CATS!
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