Snow/Snowman/Winter Week

We took it a bit easy this week, although by the number of pictures I have for this post, it doesn't look like we did.....well, I promise we DID take it easy and spent very little time each day on "school" stuff. We DID have a lot of fun though!

Tiny got to play a game of "Capture the Snowflakes" on Monday morning and she LOVED it! Little Bear and I threw the snowflakes into the air and she went around and gathered them up in her little bucket. After a few rounds of this, I hid the snowflakes around the living room and the girls had to come in and find them! Lots of fun to kick off our Snow week :)

After getting dressed in a "normal" looking outfit (wow, that's a shocker for our 3 year old!!!!), Little Bear and I worked on a few pages in her Counting workbook I picked up in the dollar section at Target a while back. She REALLY enjoyed it and even worked on holding her crayon correctly! :)

I think she is going to be my workbook/worksheet queen! I must admit I am not so fond of them myself so it was a stretch for me to do more than one this week with her....she LOVED using a pencil and completing each page though :) Ah, she would be a teacher's dream, wouldn't she....well, lucky for me I get to keep her all to myself! On to business....since we were talking about snow and snowmen this week, we focused on the letter Ss. She found all of the capital and lower case S-es (that looks funny to type) and circled them all by herself...the picture shows just how proud she was :)

The girls played a little game of "Snowman Dress-up" where they could choose different scarves and hats to put on the snowman. If our printer wasn't out of color ink, I would have been smart and printed two sets, one for each girl....let's just say we had lots of opportunities to talk about sharing with this game ;)

Snow/Snowman patterns were next on our list. These were almost too easy, but it was a quick little activity before we headed out for our grocery store "field trip" that morning (and NO, I didn't take my daughter out into the cold in the 6 month size romper she wears as a shirt around the house...and I *think* I ran a brush through her hair before we left also!). I found this pattern activity and MANY other wonderful things you will see posted below HERE.

Time to spell "Snowman!" Little Bear mastered recognizing her capital letters a long time ago and has done a great job recognizing lower case letters also, so I thought I would throw in this activity using lower case letters to see how she would do. She had a little trouble remembering "n," but did great with the rest! She really liked this one!

We did a little tracing out of her Kumon First book of Tracing workbook. Talk about wonderful workbooks if you're into that sort of thing! All of the workbooks I have come across from Kumon are GREAT! We did 3-4 pages of this and she was just thrilled to use her little pencil (which by the way is a recycled golf score pencil, thanks to Papaw Jerry) with a pink gripper on it.

She loved the tracing book so much that we moved right along with some pre-writing practice using a dry erase marker. These little pages, which were found on the same wonderful blog as the patterns, I laminated and put together using a book ring and can be used anytime (although they are a winter theme, but who cares!). If it were up to LB, she would have worked on these ALL DAY LONG! She actually did a very good job tracing the lines and only needed me to do an "example" for her a few times :)

After our pre-writing practice, she did this little paper with me (that I made quickly on MS Word). I read it to her and she dictated to me what she wanted the sentence to say. She then colored the picture of her making a snow angel. If you use your imagination, you can see that she is drawing the "wings" with the black marker. I am looking forward to doing more and more of these little writing activities in the future!

At the end of the week, the girls did a little art project. They each got to use white paint and a q-tip and a tiny piece of sponge to paint with. Little Bear mostly used her sponge and just ended up with a big blob of white paint on her paper, but hey she had fun doing it!

Tiny, however, chose to use the q-tip for her picture and ended up with quite the little masterpiece (it actually looked like dots of snow falling down, but I'm her mother and I'm a bit biased I'm sure ;) This was her "first" time painting if you don't count the Do-a-dot paints we used for the mittens! She sure did have a blast and kept saying "more" and handing me the q-tip when she needed more paint on it. And yes, of course she had to give it a taste right away but immediately realized that was not a good idea. My favorite part about this picture...ahem, let me say that again....my favorite part(s) of this picture are 1. her new pigtails we just found and 2. her little tongue helping her concentrate on getting those dots just right :D

Since we were talking about "cold stuff" this week, I thought it might be fun to do a little experiment with ice cubes. I used food coloring and made some colored ice cubes and Little Bear helped me put them in the jars according to each of the cards. What a lesson in patience this was! She wanted to see results right away, but we discussed that it would take time for the ice to melt. We talked about different ways we could "help" it melt and blowing on them became our favorite way (well, not mine, I just about passed out...1/2 kidding!). While we were waiting for them to melt, I had her guess what the new colors would be and she was right on 2 of them. After dinner that night, we took another look at the melted cubes and she colored in the last ice cube on each card. What fun!!! A book that would go great with this experiment is "A Color Clown Comes to Town," one of the many wonderful books included in the Magic Castle Reader's Set (I have NO idea where I got these, but I had them in my classroom and they are ALL really good!)

Before the cubes melted:

After:

Little Bear and I also had some computer time together on Saturday where we did the Snowman story/game on Starfall. We had done this game a few times before, but it was fun for her to actually use the mouse on the laptop to move the objects without help this time. We did a few other stories/games on Starfall before the "Great Attack of Little Sister" occurred ;) I am just starting to teach Tiny how to push the mouse button, but she's still a little too rough (NO, not MY Tiny!).

And now for my favorite moment of the week....yeah sure, all those activities and games were great, but nothing beats a little floor hugging session between sisters! They did this for at least 10 straight minutes...enough time for me to watch a while then realize I MUST take a picture :)

Our week has not gotten off to a great start today, but I am thrilled about our Penguin theme we'll be doing ALL week long! I have some exciting and fun things planned so I just hope we can all stay rested and injury free for the days to come :) Now, nap time is in full swing for the girls and I am going to take full advantage and attempt to get some shut eye myself!