H is for...Hands-On Halves

Cristi from Through the Calm and Through the Storm and Meg from Adventures with Jude are hosting this great weekly party called Blogging Through the Alphabet. All are welcome to join in, just make sure to keep your posts family-friendly. I am determined to stay faithful this time around. I might not always post on the same day of the week, but I have every intention to post something each week.

Here is how I decided my "theme" for this round of Blogging Through the Alphabet. As I was going through old blog posts recently, I noticed I have some neat ideas for activities and crafts that I did with in the past. Unfortunately, I always included them in my weekly wrap up posts or more recently in Poppins Book Nook posts, so they sort of got buried. I can't really share them as individual activities or create pinnable images to promote them and share my ideas, which is why I started this blog in the first place (to share my ideas with others who work with children). So, I am going to make new posts for these ideas.

I have found there is a huge benefit in this strategy. I am remembering  ideas that I had forgotten, which means I can now do these activities with the younger children. I will be sharing the old pictures and possibly sharing new pictures of the younger children participating.

Several years ago, during our letter H week, I made the girls a fun, beginner way to play with fractions.

H is for. . . Hands-On Halves

I originally called this activity "Matching Halves" but Hands-On Halves sounded better for an "H is for..." post. I made some square and rectangle boards that included half of the image blank, while the other half had construction paper attached. I did this by cutting the construction paper into either a square or rectangle. Then I traced it onto a piece of white paper (in hindsight, cardstock would be more sturdy). I then cut the shape in half and attached half, while leaving the other half for the girls to use to find the matches. No printer required.

I laid the white half bases in a circle, placing the colored halves in the center and they had to match them up.

Toddler Ideas Tuesday: March 17, 2015

Welcome back to Toddler Idea Tuesdays! I hope you will join with me again in sharing the fun activities, crafts, and lessons that you are doing with your young children. 

We have been going through the alphabet with Harold and Hannah during our preschool time. Each week we have been focusing on 2 letters. Today I wanted to share our H project and some other H crafts/meals from the past.

After doing the worksheets I printed out from ABC Twiggles, the children made Hand Print H's

Several years ago, when I was doing letter of the week with the older girls, we made a craft for each letter in the shape of that letter. Here is what we did for the letter h. 

Through the years we have also had the following H muffin tins:

Now onto:

Toddler Idea Tuesday Features

On my last Toddler Idea Tuesday post, there were 2 wonderful posts linked up. I will be featuring both of them today.

Featured Post #1

Shecki from Greatly Blessed shared Pre K with Katie. Check out her post for some fun learning tray activities.

Featured Post #2:

 Jen from Chestnut Grove Academy shared Easter Themed Workboxes for Tots-Preschool. Don't forget to stop by for some fun Easter ideas.

I would love to have you join in this week! What sort of activities do you do with your toddlers and preschoolers? Do you have some favorite activities you would like to share? I invite you to link up below. I will be pinning posts on my Toddler Ideas board and I would love to feature some of the activities each week from what is linked up. Please know I may share a picture from your post and link back to it, along with sharing how we used your idea in our toddler time. By linking up you are giving me permission to use a picture from your post. I will ALWAYS give credit and link back. Additionally, if you choose to try out any of the ideas with your toddler, please make sure you give credit where credit is due.

Linky will be open through Sunday night, to give me time to check out all the posts and get the Features organized. Please take the time to visit some of the other wonderful posts linked up.

<a href="http://totsandme.blogspot.com/search/label/Toddler%20Ideas "><img alt="Tots and Me" src="http://i597.photobucket.com/albums/tt58/kewkewphoto/ToddlerIdeaTuesdays2.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a>

School Time Week 22 (Hh concluded, houses and more hearts)

I guess my last school type post was my Valentine's Day post.  We really didn't do much more that week for some reason.  We've had two more muffin tins

Our "Mommy can we have a muffin tin today" tin.  I made it a H/red tin

hot dogs

H shaped ham and cheese

Red veges (beets, grape tomatoes, red peppers

honey mustard

honey wheat pretzels

red ketchup

heart shaped pb&j

Last week was the first week of no themes over at Muffin Tin Monday.  We chose to have a muffin tin for breakfast for the first time.  I mean, we've had a breakfast muffin tin at lunch time before, but this is the first time breakfast at breakfast time was ever served in a tin.  And it was all at the request of Tabitha.

We enjoyed a snow day (while the public schools took off for a snow day).

and made our first snow ice cream:

We also started our H collages, coloring our H pictures last week.  Our H words this week are: house, horse, heart, hat, hippo and hand. The collages didn't get put together until this week though.  

This week we were a little more productive.  We watercolor painted houses.  This was another one of Tabitha's requests.  They really enjoy painting.

Then we talked about our house.  We discussed all the different rooms and the different things we do in each room.  I got this idea from a book we read, In Our House by Anne F. Rockwell.  This is a book I had for the older children. Amazon didn't have a picture of it, neither did my library.  Wish the children hadn't walked off with it.  If I find it I will update with a picture.  Each double page spread of this book shows all the different things that the bear family can do in each room of the house.  Though not everyone obviously lives in a house with say a finished basement, I thought it was a cute book. 

Then we made an H house.  I saw several ideas for H houses over at Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection at The Attached Mama.  I was looking for one for a lower case h and I really liked the idea at H is for Homer Horse and Hippo.  I like the way she used the arch under the h for the door. 

Here are our supplies:

We glued the h on top of the brown rectangle:

Then glued the triangle on for a roof

Leaving the top of the h for a chimney.  Then the girls traced my dots for windows.

They colored the windows in with a yellow crayon to represent a lighted house.  Then added stars and a moon because it is a house at night. Oh, and we added a doorknob.

This week I tried something new with our words of the week.  Usually we will use our word cards and match the word to the picture.  

This week I decided to write the words on our little chalk board easel.  I wrote the words one at a time as the girls watched.  When the word was done they needed to tell me what the word was and bring me the picture. After we had done every word, Tabitha wanted a turn writing the words.  I caught some of it on video.  

If I can get it to upload you will get a chance to see it. Otherwise, so sorry for the tease, but I want to get my post posted.

and some of it in pictures.

Then I tried something else new, inspired while I watched the girls erasing words with the wet paper towel.

I wrote one letter at a time:

And had the girls trace/erase it

helping them learn how to make the letter.  Granted Tabitha really doesn't need the help as she knows how to write her letters.  I think this will really help Amelia though.

We also talked about half this week.  I made an activity called Matching Halves.

I showed the girls these squares that were half filled:

And they had to find the correctly sized rectangle half to make a whole square.

Then I brought out the rectangle cards and put them in a circle. Each girl got to find them all on their own.

The girls were calling them "elevators." They were closing the elevators.

Then we made these cute heart shape animals that I found over at Touch of Home Learning.  I will have a separate post for this coming up shortly with a review.

A couple of other books we've been reading these last few weeks are:

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss

Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss

Harold's Circus by Crockett Johnson

Daddy really enjoyed reading the Horton Hatches The Egg book to the girls.  I do love Horton's sense of responsibility and faithfulness while he sits on the bird's egg waiting for it to hatch while the lazy mother bird disappears after tricking him into doing so.  I love this quote that is repeated throughout the book:

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant...

An elephant's faithful One hundred per cent!"

I really do like the Harold and the Purple Crayon books too.  I love seeing the pictures form in Harold's imaginative mind.  In this story Harold draws himself a tightrope and ends up falling onto an elephants trunk.  The elephant is only part of the circus world he creates.

I took out Old Hat, New Hat by Stan and Jan Berenstain, but we never got to it or the hat project we were going to paint.

One other thing I did was draw a couple of pictures on the chalkboard. I had Tabitha write the words herself, sounding them out.

Then Amelia wanted to write.  Her H's are pretty good.

(No, really, it is a hat)

I'm linking up to