Street Signs

Little Boy is obsessed with cars.



So I knew this idea from The Mailbox magazine would be a big hit with him.



I looked up clip art of different street signs...



and taped them to some of his blocks. He was already using his blocks to make roads, so I don't know why I didn't think of making street signs on my own.



This was several weeks ago, and he still uses them. And now he points out all kinds of street signs when we're driving around.

That is, when he's not pointing out every car and truck on the road.

Brushing Teeth!

But not really.

Before we get started here, I have to tell you about The Mailbox magazine [this isn't an ad--I just like it]. My preschool-y friend told me about it one day, and I checked an issue of it out of our library. Oh, man. It's geared toward PreK teachers, but most of the activities are totally adaptable for a smaller group of kids--or for one kid, if you're like me.

So you're going to be seeing a lot of ideas here that I got from The Mailbox.

Like this one!



Here's the idea: print out a big ol' picture of a tooth. Put it in a smooth page protector, and scribble on it with dry-erase pens. Then explain to your kid [ahem, your student] about why we brush our teeth--and then give them an old toothbrush and have them scrub all the marks off the tooth.

I brush Little Boy's teeth regularly, but we don't spend much time talking about why. We're usually in a hurry to brush and move on to whatever's next. So this activity was a good reinforcement of why, exactly, we brush our teeth.

Little Boy's New Obsession

Little Boy loves tracing...everything. I thought he was going to color the worksheet in the photo, but he traced it instead. We have a book full of trace-able shapes and letters, and it's almost his favorite activity ever. His very favorite is the "cutting book," which deserves its own post. Later.



(In case you couldn't tell, the blobby thing he was tracing is a stegosaurus. It just didn't have any spiny-thingies on its back yet.)

Preschool Math: M&Ms and Graphing!

Little Boy loooooves numbers. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that before.

A few times.

We don't do math activities as often as I'd like. We both liked this one--him, because he got to count, and both of us, because there were M&Ms involved.

I just now decided that M&Ms should be involved more often.

Anyway, I got these M&Ms Graphing worksheets from Sugardoodle--but I can't find the exact link now. If anyone else finds it, could you let me know?


So, first he had to sort the M&Ms by color. Cute worksheet, right? Yeah, I wish I could take credit for it. But...really, I just print stuff off the internet.


And then we went through, color by color, to count them up and then color in the appropriate number of rectangles on the graph. I had never heard of preschool graphing skills! Makes me feel all proud of him.

(Really, he's pretty ordinary. So I try to feel proud as often as I can.)

And I bet you can guess what we did after all that counting and graphing. I'll give you a hint: all that work made us hungry.

...Which is why, if we do this activity again, we'll have to buy new M&Ms.

Reading: Bob Books

(This is not a paid review. I'm not nearly that cool.)

So, early in our little homeschool adventure, I heard about Bob Books. We were still working on letter sounds, not reading yet, so I kinda forgot about them.

Then a friend mentioned that she was using them with her kids. I think she got them from Amazon. Anyway, it was perfect timing, because Little Boy was just about ready to sound out words.

My mom happened to have the first set (which was weird; I had no idea that she had it). We've gotten the rest of the sets from the library--Little Boy wanted to read as many as he could, and then...we got to some that he couldn't quite read yet. So right now we're trying to catch up.


Anyway, Bob Books are small and easy for little hands to hold. The first one only has a few letters in it, and each book is a little more difficult than the one before. (The one in the picture is the last one in the first series, I think.)


On the Bob Books website, they have a little catchphrase: "I read the WHOLE book!" I thought that was kinda cheesy, but it's true--Little Boy really liked having a book that he could read to me.