For the last couple of weeks we have been focusing on Christmas activities during our school time.  Unfortunately, we did not end up with much learning time in the past few weeks, so we did not get to very many of the activities I had planned.  Maybe next year!  Here are a few of the activities we did manage to squeeze in.

She made a hand/foot print reindeer.  She got really upset today when she found it in the trash and we had to pull it back out to play with!

We made a reindeer snack with a square cookie cut in half, raisins, jelly bean, pecans and peanut butter.

For this game Mikayla would choose a magnetic number and place that many ornaments (pom poms) onto the tree until she had the tree filled up.

I put magnetic letters in a stocking and she pulled them out one at a time to identify.  She was able to say each letter!  After each correct identification we would both say "Jingle Bells"! 

We also did a really neat nativity storyboard with her handprints.  I can not remember where I saw it, but basically it was four handprints, each turned into an animal that represented the nativity story.  A donkey for Mary heading to Bethlehem, a cow for the manger and stable scene, a sheep for the shepherd and a camel for the wise men.  Then in the middle of the four handprint animals was her fingerprint to represent Baby Jesus.  It was a great learning tool for her to retell the birth of Jesus.  Of course we played with Christmas stickers and did a few other crafty activities that I did not get a picture of.

I am not sure what the coming weeks will hold for our learning time because we will have the twins we cared for in August living with us again.  They will be with us for a month so I don’t expect to get much learning time in!  We will see though.  They are both walking and running and what not now so it will be more like having triplets than it was before!

We spent the last two weeks studying the Letter G off and on.  We did a lot of crafty activities.

Felt gumball machine game.  The idea behind the game was that she would roll two dice and count out that many gumballs to place in the gumball machine.  However, she struggled with counting both dice together.  She wanted to count each dice individually.  We eventually shifted to using just one dice, but by that time she was through playing.  She wanted to just "dress up" her gumball machine (which partially inspired my Felt Mr./Mrs. Potato Head game I made her for Christmas).

Letter G Grapes.  We took a bottle cap and dipped into purple paint to make a grape, then she stamped onto the letter G.  When she was done we glued a green leaf on the top.

We are way behind the blog world on this game, but we balanced marbles on top of golf tees.  She was excellent at this and was able to complete in no time at all. 

We then scooped marbles into a bottle.  This was a little harder for her.

We played a feely bag game.  I took one of her wet bags and put one object at a time inside.  She had to close her eyes and feel what the object was and then make a guess.  She did great and only missed a couple.

We made a picture of Grover by painting a cutout blue and then gluing on the other body parts and letters to his name. 

I wrote letters onto a strip of paper.  Then she rolled two dice and counted over that many letters to identify the letter.  We ran into the same problem with counting two dice at once.  She tends to be a little stubborn so she wouldn’t let me help show her how to count them together!  We ended up dropping the second dice and just playing with one.

Handprint giraffe – it was really cute until she smeared the red paint across his face!

Final letter G Grapes and a gold glitter letter G.

Another letter G giraffe made from foam and the spots are her finger prints stamped.  She had so much fun with this one that she spent the next hour (literally), cutting and tearing scraps of paper to make her own giraffes.  We ended up with a whole pile of "giraffes" by the time she was through.

And of course we had to finger paint with green paint!

As you can see in most of the pictures, Mikayla loves her art apron her Mimi sent her.  If we paint, she wears it for the rest of the morning!  Mikayla says, "Thanks Mimi".  For our cooking lesson this week I wanted to make guacamole, but living an hour from a grocery store hindered us from getting our supplies.  We settled for a Letter G lunch instead – grilled cheese, grapes and goldfish. 

For the next couple of weeks we will focus on the Christmas season.  We will also throw in a few "winter" activities just because they flow well with Christmas, even if we aren’t experiencing the cold here!  We have a lot of "distractions" in the next few weeks, so I am not sure how much learning time we will actually get to.  But we will do our best.

For the past two weeks we have been studying the Letter T and Thanksgiving.  I had a lot of activities planned for the two weeks.  Some we got to, but a lot got missed because we had a couple of days where we were unable to have school (more on that in a later post).  I guess we will just use those for next year.  Here are some of the many activities we did in the last two weeks.

She put Thanksgiving themed stickers onto the letter T.

I made a letter dice out of some of the letters we have been studying and turned it into a letter graphing game.  She would roll the dice and then put a sticker above the letter.  She did great and caught on really quick at putting the stickers in the correct places.  The only downside was that she wanted to keep playing even when we ran out of boxes!

I wrote letters onto the bottom of an egg carton and had her "hammer" the letter down when I called it out.  Thanks Lara for the suggestion, she loved it!

She weaved string around the letter T.

This was a two part game.  Part one, she would choose a number card (number on the front and corresponding dots on the back) and then count out that many turkeys.

Part two, after a few days of the first game she was tired of it so I wrote numbers on the turkeys and had her match them up with the number cards.

Letter T turkey – thanks again Lara!

We wrote letters on the sidewalk with chalk.  I called out the letter and she would run and stand on the corresponding letter.  We did this in between drawing lots of pictures on the sidewalk!

This was one of my favorite activities from the past two weeks.  I laid out some letter cards on the ground and got back out her letter dice for this one.  When she rolled a letter she would go stand on that one and then gobble like a turkey.  The best part was instead of saying "gobble, gobble" she said "cabba cabba" and referred to turkeys as "cabblas".

We played several feather games.  For one game she rolled two dice and then counted out that many feathers.  We also color sorted the feathers.  I also hid feathers around the living room and then she would find them (again, thanks Lara).

One last feather game we played was making a Turkey counting book.  I drew out several turkeys minus the feathers and wrote numbers on their stomachs (and corresponding number of dots in the corners).  She glued on the correct number of feathers to the turkey bodies.

One of my favorite crafts from the two weeks were these turkeys we made for our Thanksgiving lunch.  We started by painting some cardstock with lots of colors.  Then I traced and cut out her hands (three per turkey).  For the body I cut toilet paper tubes in half and glued on the rest!  We stuffed napkins inside and used them as napkin rings.  They turned out really cute.

We also made some textured letters to spell THANKS and made it into a banner to help decorate the house.  We used foil, buttons, pom poms, ribbon pieces, cut up straws and glitter.  I was pretty pleased with how it turned out!

In case you missed last week’s post about the turkey name game, it is yet another idea for a letter T activity.  We also worked on a really fun Thanksgiving song that we will try to post on YouTube for you to see soon.  She sang it before we had our "feast" on Saturday for all our guests.  Precious!  Like I said we had a lot of activities we didn’t get too, but maybe next year!