Saturday, January 31, 2009

Felt Heart Cookies

I found these very cute felt cookies over at Chasing Cheerios and just had to make some for the kids to use in their toy kitchen. They came out sooo cute, and I have the felt cut out and ready to make 4 more during the Superbowl tomorrow. Gracie even helped sew the "sprinkles" on the brown and red cookie. Great job, Grace!

A Snowy Saturday-Operation Playtime-Get Outside

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a montage of images from our afternoon-a real, real lot of images.
If you are from a warm climate you are sure to enjoy the pleasure on the children's faces.
If you are from the cold, white north, you can look at these pictures and commiserate with me. I have given up hope that the snow will ever go away, or that the temperature will ever go above 20 degrees. So today, with the temperature at 19 degrees, I said, "Go outside and look like you are having fun. I will come and take your pictures."
So, here you go, way too many SNOW pictures.































THE END

Friday, January 30, 2009

Landform Cards (Our Geography Work for the Winter)

Mark and I have begun our indepth study of geography. A good place to start is with vocabulary of landforms. I found wonderful printable three part cards for just this purpose at montessori materials. The landform pictures are here and the definitions are found here. I am not using them like true three part cards. I have left a control card with 9 pictures together so Mark can check his work. Another copy of this card is cut up to use for matching.
Mark matches the picture to the term it represents, he then sorts through the definitions and puts them in their proper place. After he finishes the nine cards he is working on, Mark uses the control card to check his work-I have also written the term the definition matches on the backs of these cards.
Mark just loves scrambling up the words and then putting them in their correct place. He enjoys this type of work much more than worksheets and textbooks.
This also helps Mark's reading skills, because he has to read the definitions to match them with the picture.
Great Work, Mark!!!

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Our Money Lapbook

This post highlights the money lapbook Grace and I made over the last 2 weeks. This post is also to show GRANDMA that we do real schoolwork around here and not just play with goo, bubbles, and fingerpaint.
A lot of the ideas for this lapbook came from Carisa, at 1+1+1=1. Carisa has also graciously provided printables for many of the elements seen here.
Above, Grace is simply sorting coins. The strip at the left helps her to remember the names and values of each coin. This was the first thing we did as we began to learn about money.
Inside: a very cute money poem-which has been memorized, a little book about coin value, and pet store money cards-used to practice counting coins.
The link to the Pet Store money cards is here.
Gracie can learn to spell using this element of the lapbook.
Hard at work.
This Piggy Bank Coins book can from
Enchanted Learning.


This book I put on the back of the lapbook. It is also from Enchanted learning.
inside the book
Gracie has a hard time remember the value of quarters, so I made up this little chart to help her.
This little fan booklet shows ways that we can save money written on it.
Here Mark and Grace are racing to put the correct amount of money on the pet store cards.
So, Grandma, if you have read this far, real learning does go on in "the little house".