The nursery rhyme of the week is Hey Diddle Diddle the Cat and the Fiddle and I will post our activities in the Tot-School post, but I couldn't resist putting up Kimberly's performance early.
For your information, Kimberly turned 2 in May, and I have never had a little one as verbal as she is--we may be in for some trouble!LOL
Between visits with Grandpa at the hospital, Pat and I finally had the chance to visit Matt at "his" house.
The kids were very happy to get this special time Matt. It also was very practical to take only two children at a time, since the house Matt lives in is beautifully decorated with many gorgeous antiques-it seemed much safer with only two....
Kim was excited because Matt has a tv and turned on Curious George for her.
He then magically started a fire without even using a match---the wood didn't even burn---it was amazing!
Gracie enjoying the warmth of the fire.
We then gathered around the marble island in the kitchen to enjoy a treat.
Matt gave us ice cream for a treat. What a great brother to have!!! We all love you, and thank you for a fun evening!!
I am going to print out a copy and use it to replace my very young child version of the Liturgical wheel with this beautiful older child version.
We recently finished our read aloud, Trumpet of the Swan. We all enjoyed it. After we finished it I thought it would be interesting to have the kids watch a movie based on the book. I found this movie....
They were very excited about this movie, but quickly became disappointed. They enjoyed the book much more, and immediately noticed how much the movie left out. Some of the favorite scenes in the book were omitted from the movie, and quite a bit of the book was changed to fit the movie. We do not recommend this movie-sorry.
We do recommend trying your hand at drawing trumpeter swans. I have some of the Draw Write Now books, and I found this website that happened to have a Draw Write Now sample swan drawing lesson.
These books are very elementary and the lessons very simple, but for a momma with absolutely NO artistic talent (crafting with a pattern-yes-drawing-no) these books do the trick.
I am very proud of Mark and Grace's "Louie the Swan". It was a fun ending to a fun book.
It was another busy week of Tot School , even with real life happening around us, I tried to find some activities to keep the "tots" learning.
Auntie Kim got the kids this alphabet puzzle which Kimberly and Luke both enjoy.
Luke can tell us how to spell his name now and can always recognize the letter L and sometimes the other letters. I do need to mention to Auntie Kim that we may need another set of these letters so that both Kim and Luke can spell their names at the same time--(we now need to share the K)
Keeping with our Nursery Rhyme theme, we learned about Jack Be Nimble this week.
Gracie helped by painting our candle-a toilet paper tube. After painting the tube, I cut slits in the bottom of the tube, this is how I was able to glue the base to the tube securely. It needs to be pretty tough for when someone doesn't quite make it over the candlestick during a jump.
The flame is yellow foam sheets, cut to flame shape and glued at the top. I discovered this book, Over the Candlestick, at the library. It is a real gem. It has very cute illustrations for the littlest kids among us, but it also explains the meaning behind some of the most popular nursery rhymes. We have all enjoyed this, from the age of 2 to the age of 42.
Here are Kim and Luke demonstrating how they "jump over the candlestick" We sing, "Kimmy be nimble, Kimmy be quick, Kimmy jump over the candlestick." This was a BIG hit this week.
This was an important week, because this week was the first time Luke did this Bead Sequencing Set successfully with no help. He set it up himself and then followed the pattern perfectly. Way to go!!
I also introduced the My First Leappad to the kids this week. They both enjoy it, and have spent quite a bit of time with it. I sat with each of them individually and showed them how to use it. They caught on quickly. At the ages of 2 and 3 it is educational when I do it with them and discuss what they are working on. When they use it alone at the table, they enjoy just listening to the different results they get from touching different parts of the page. 
We need some extra prayers right now!! Thanks so much!!
her second front tooth is out!!
Grandpa is doing great at 18 hours past surgery. You wouldn't believe he is 80 years old. He has been getting up out of bed-alone-against all the rules, and he has required NO pain medication at all since the surgery. 
Grace and Mark had a chance to visit the hospital this afternoon. They spent a good deal of time before their visit making beautiful cards for Grandpa.
Mark printed a picture of Our Blessed Mother for the cover of his card, and Gracie adorned her card with all of her new heart stickers. We also brought our picture of St. Michael for Grandpa's room. Grandpa knows the St. Michael is his personal Guardian Angel-and St. Michael has always done a wonderful job taking care of Grandpa.
Gracie has finished reading the whole Dick and Jane Storybook Treasury. 
At least once a week, and sometimes more, we visit out local small library and pick out many books to accompany "Tot School".
A few weeks ago I discovered the author Sandra Boynton, and in doing this, we have found another wonderful author that we all enjoy tremendously. She has many, many books, most of which we haven't seen yet, but we are really looking forward too them from our interloan library service. 
We talked about about living and non-living things this week. I have a matching game that has many, many photo pictures, so I picked out 10 sets of things to look at. First we talked about each picture and decided if it was alive or not, and then the child picked up the match and put it in their pile. Luke, 3 1/2, caught on very quickly, he even was correct when I added plants to the mix. He said, "Yes, they are alive because they grow and you feed them water."
Kimberly, 2 1/2, on the other hand, doesn't quite get this concept yet.
Kimberly is still having fun with her favorite book, Brown Brown Bear, What do you See?
We have had a lot of fun fishing this week. You can see this fun here.
New this week are our Hands on Learning Counting Mats. This has the cutest little foamie fat fish that you put into fishbowls. We used the numbers 1-3, the numbers we are working on.
An added bonus that Luke discovered is that it also is a great (and hard) puzzle. The fish came in the box not removed from their packaging. Luke found the foam in the garbage, got it out and proceeded to spend 45 minutes fitting tricky, similarly shaped fish into the form-he amazed me and accomplished this after a lot of hard work.
would only use a pencil (like the big kids) and carefully followed the maze, (usually correctly) and then asked for more. I may need to figure out the cost of color copying the pages out of these books, or just buying new copies every now then. 
If you could also say a pray for this lovely family who started the Tot-School posts. Carisa's husband Frank was diagnosed with cancer this week, so they can use all of our prayers. Here at Ten Kids and a Dog we know that prayers can lead to miracles. Carisa is also expected her and Frank's third child-so say a prayer for everyone, including this little blessing. 
First I cut different color fish out of foam sheets, and then inserted a brass brad fastener to make a fish eyeball. This fastener is also what is attracted to the magnet on the fishpole.
I used a circle magnet for the "hook" and embroidery floss for the line. The kids have since broke this line, so I am going to try regular yarn next. 
Luke enjoys "reeling" his line in. This takes a lot of patience on his part, but he takes his time and succeeds.
Everyone has been having fun with this. Above, Gracie appears to be helping someone catch a fish.
I have added the letters of Luke's and Kim's names to the fish, along with the numbers we are learning (1-3) and some different shapes.
I have all sorts of ideas for other "fish" we could make. Basically anything we are learning about could be made into "fish" to help in learning, such are little felt animals, or we could even make pictures of stories in sequential order that the kids could catch in the proper order. I'm thinking it would be simple to laminate small pictures and just stick a paperclip on them to catch the magnet. 
