Wordless Wednesday: December 18, 2019 (w/linky) - First Time Ice Skating

For Physical Education yesterday the children got to go ice skating for the first time. They had a wonderful time. Even Harold, after he finally got on the ice.

Looking forward to seeing your Wordless (or not so wordless) Wednesday posts this week.

No button currently, and there won't be one until I can figure it out seeing as Photobucket has changed things. Feel free to still share the picture in place of the button on your Wordless Wednesday post or in a list of Wordless Wednesday linkies. Just link it to my Wordless Wednesday permalink please.

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Toddler Ideas Tuesday: March 25th, 2014

Welcome back to Toddler Idea Tuesdays! I am so sorry for the lack of a post last week. Between having co-op a day early and then being sick I ended up having to play catch up with a lot of things. I just decided it didn't make sense to post Toddler Idea Tuesdays later in the week. Unless things like that come up, Toddler Idea Tuesday will be a weekly party! So, have you been busy with your young children?

This week I would like to share what I think is a neat gross-motor activity. I did not come up with this idea, but I saw the potential as the children were playing. Teaching a toddler to catch a ball will take some work and they need to be physically ready to do so. Think about it, they can throw a ball, but to have to catch the ball there are so many thing they need to do at once. They need to be able to judge when to grasp the ball as it comes to them, they need to physically be able to grab the ball as it flies at them and they have to keep a hold of the ball. 

This neat activity was started by Amelia and Harold, but of course Tabitha wanted to join in to help her brother learn to catch a ball. The older girls would roll the ball across the table for Harold to catch. Then he would toss it back to them. This was a great opportunity for the older girls to work on their aim and to try to figure out how much "oomph" to put behind their roll. If they didn't roll it fast enough it would roll off the side of the table, but if they pushed it too hard it would be too difficult for Harold to catch.

He loved being able to catch it and toss it back to them.

This worked best for "catching" practice if he was standing away from the table. If he was too close he would just grab it as it came close to him while it was still on the table. However, if he was a couple of steps away from the table it had to start falling off the table and he had to actually catch it.

Now onto:

Toddler Idea Tuesday Features

1. Steffany from Spit and Sparkles shared a great idea for Mess-Free Toddler Art. Little ones love creating works of art, but mommies don't always have time for the clean up that will take place afterwards. Yes, there are times for children to get their hands dirty, but if you would like to give your toddler a fun painting activity that can be used for different topics or holidays you will want to check out Steffany's wonderful idea.

2. Lisa from Our Country Road shared her Montessori Preschool Frog Theme. Even if you don't really follow a Montessori philosophy, your children can enjoy learning with these great hands on, skill-building activities. We just finished our frog unit a few weeks ago and I wish I had seen some of these ideas first. The activity pictured above is a color matching activity. There are also counting and hand-eye coordination activities, with links where you will be able to find the activities. 

3. Rebecca from Raventhreads shared a yummy Bible-based activity with her Tower of Babel Snack Stacks.  Children of all ages will love to make there own snacks and the younger ones will be working on their fine-motor skills. We will be learning about the tower of Babel later this year with our My Father's World 1st grade curriculum and I will definitely be having the children make these!

4. Monique from Living Life and Learning shared her Fine Motor Activity With Straws post. This is a fun fine-motor skills idea along with some ways to extend the activity.

What sort of activities do you do with your toddler? 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.

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School Time Week 27 (Gg lessons concluded)

This week we focused on the letter G.  We didn't get any of the art lessons done this week, except for a shape hunt (and I didn't get any pictures of that).  We started the week with our G Muffin Tin:

Then they made their G collages. Our words this week were: glasses, guitar, gate, grapes, goat, and gorilla.

This next project wasn't very original, but we had fun.

I drew some dotted G's:

Put dots to show the girls where to start tracing:

Then they traced the G's:

I applied glue to their traced lines and they added glitter:

Amelia wanted to use her puppet to put on a puppet show of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Unfortunately I couldn't find the book so I botched the story up a bit, but Amelia didn't mind.  Then because the love seat cushions were already out I decided to put together an obstacle course.

Up and over the cushions, around the rocking chair, balance on the wrapping paper tube

Around the chair, around the chair

over and over again

And under the table

(Yes I led them and went under the table and followed them on their turns as leader and crawled under the table.  I had a lot of energy that day)

Then we got to the end:

Each time we did it the girls had to write "The end."  You can see we did it a few times.

We spent some time on worksheets.  Here are Tabitha's Gg's from the BeginningReading.com site:

Amelia used her wipe off ABC workbook.

While Tabitha worked on some counting worksheets. (Also from Beginning Reading)

I finally pulled out the sensory tub I made for Valentine's Day that I never made time for.  I am so upset with myself.  They LOVE this activity.  I got some Valentine's erasers and red pompoms.  Then I got 5 heart containers and numbered them 1-5.  They have to make sure each container has the correct number of gems. I added some measuring cups and a lid for scooping and they have added baby food jars.  They've made pies (cinnamon, soda, chocolate and fairy dust pie).  They also filled the jars with rice and called it milk (well... I used to drink rice milk)

It also gave a great opportunity to practice our practical life skill of 

SWEEPING:

I added the tape square on the floor as I learned at the Montessori, that way the child knows where to sweep to and they are not randomly sweeping all around the room:

I also found a great idea over at Free Kid Crafts.

We made gumdrops out of Jello and water.

We poured the Jello into a bowl

Made a well and poured a drop of water into it.

Then we rolled the water and the Jello around in a ball until it was saturated:

They were to harden for 15 minutes, so we had them after lunch.  Pretty yummy, though sweet.  It is straight Jello after all.  It did make more than this, but I was just making a few for lunch.

I then decided I wanted to make a Grass Head Family (I was going to do this for E and make them Egg Heads but I couldn't find the grass seed)

We used milk jug lids for bases:

Then the girls each got 4 egg shell halves that I cleaned out earlier.  (We eat a lot of eggs and I believe these were from the quiche for Breakfast For Dinner Thursday).  They drew faces on them.

Amelia learned that the consequence of not listening and playing with the shells when told not too means one might break and she only gets 3.

Now we are patiently waiting for the grass to grow (fingers crossed) so we can give them a hair cut.

And I found some neat color-by-number gumball activity sheets over at Confessions of a Homeschooler

And we played a "Greater Than" game with dice.  I will share more about this later.

And I needed to get back on track and make a g shaped craft.  I have completely been neglecting this for the last few letters.  I found a lot of different ideas over at The Attached Mama's Ultimate Alphabet Craft Collection. I decided I liked the one found at The Ramblings and Adventures of a SAHM

Tabitha cut out her own guitar body and then they glued them together and we added 3 yarn strings:

Of course they had to have some fun with daddy and their real guitars they got for Christmas.

And we made "goo."  This is one of the activities out of  60 Quick and Easy Science Experiments With Everyday Items I am reviewing.  Last week we did gravity and this week we did goo.  I even turned it into a math activity.

And the girls had a blast all week with our diaper.com box.

It was a car, a crib (and the girls took turns being mommy and baby), a cave and a house.

It even became a "real" crib for a sleepy girl.

Speaking of the sleepy girl, here is some special Tiny Tot Time:

Hannah is really enjoying coloring lately:

In order to keep her occupied during lessons one day I gave her an empty puffs container

and some ping pong balls.

Here she is squatting and coloring:

She's getting really good at standing from that squatting position anywhere and everywhere.

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