Summer Days

I have decided that this is our last official summer of Tot School. Raccoon starts preschool twice a week on September 3rd here in the States. Next year we'll be overseas again and starting to homeschool kindergarten, if all goes according to plan. Robin will be starting Tot School at about that time, which is odd to think about now since she's currently 6 months old. At that point she'll be a little shy of two years old. As Gretchen Rubin says, "The days are long but the years are short."

So here's to Tot School and Raccoon's last official post (the pictures are all mixed up time-wise, viva la summer loca!).

Arts & Crafts

My mom gave me these pumpkin sheets when Raccoon 

randomly announced in July that he wanted to make a pumpkin.

He actually wanted to carve one, but was persuaded to do it this way instead.

Thanks to Grama, Raccoon has done many large paintings
this summer, which I have hanging all over the house.

See the tongues sticking out? It's a family thing. Perhaps painting is as well, 

since my mother's father was a painter, among other things. This is the 

beginning of one of my favorites, which I have hanging in my bedroom.

When I see pictures like this, I imagine him as a teen,
long and lean, with his curly hair and gorgeous lashes.


Outside Play

Our wading pool, a yard sale find.

Which became our sandbox, thanks to my mom's inspiration and contributions.

Enjoying play time with his cousins.

 

A lake about 10 minutes from our house. Raccoon calls it the beach.

Mommy and me moments

 

Pensive ladies on shore



Raccoon loves horseback riding, just like his mommy.

 

Raccoon has always enjoyed bouncy houses, but now he gets to play on them
every week at church. This one, however, was outside at the 4th of July festival.



The way life should be.

 
A perfect summer day, jumping on the trampoline in the sprinkler with Daddy and his best buddy, C.

It wouldn't be tot school without a little dress-up.

 River swimming - it's cold!

Building

 

Caleb gathered up a stack of thngs from his playroom 

and informed me that he wanted to make a horse.  

  

I followed his instructions and this is what we built. There 

weren't any spare parts, much to my surprise. It even had 4 legs.

Family

Raccoon's middle name means warrior and he certainly lives up to it with his 

interest in weapons of any kind. His cousin is now his hero for having the 

biggest Nerf gun he's ever seen, and letting him shoot off several rounds.

Grama and Grampa, 4th of July 2013

I think Robin looks so much like my mom.



We are definitely a hat family.

Robin

I like this picture because she glows like the angel she is.

Strawberries to celebrate a long-time friend and SB's turtle,
which has now been chewed on by all three of my babies.

Joy.

 

Teeth!

Robin's first baby doll, a gift from Grandma Millie (90 years old) at church.

Weekly Review - The Earth & RRSP

Raccoon is 34 months

Check out my activity chart for links to the sources since I don't re-link everything in my weekly review. Another fun week of Tot School!

Earth cards - we made up a game using these cards, a lego monster, and Raccoon's velociraptor family. The dinosaurs attacked the monster, and he used different earth cards to defend himself. But those velociraptors were clever and found ways around the weather/earth elements (using an umbrella against the rain, putting out the fire with water, etc). I don't have any pictures because my camera's battery ran out, but these are the cards. I plan to use them in our daily calendar station as well for the weather and time of day perhaps.

Floating Ketchup - I couldn't get the packet to sink so I don't have any pictures of this one. Perhaps my bottle wasn't big enough (I used a small water bottle) so I couldn't squeeze hard enough, and my packets (soy actually) had a large amount of air. We just talked about how it floated instead.

A Gift for Bear - We played museum again, and I laid out the pictures in order, then he had to match the words to the pictures. I read him the sentences and he decided which picture they described.

Our naughty monster stole the pictures and he had to match them to the words. He did really well, but then lost interest when we were going to glue the words on and make it into a book. He came back to color it later though, so we could read it to his velociraptor family for storytime. If I did it again, I would do more "Which comes first, unwrapping the bear or sleeping with it?" type thing.

Roll the Dice & Graph - These were my trolls that I played with when I was nine or so. Raccoon loves having "families" and setting little things up so I recently got them out of storage. We played a game with them, each one trying to guess what they were going to roll. I made an X on the graph with each roll and showed Raccoon how many of each we had. It took seven rolls before someone "won" by guessing what would come up. We also practiced turn-taking, some of the little ones were quite impatient!

Raising Rock Stars Preschool - my printer ink ran out, so I wasn't able to start this week. I hope to introduce it next week, pending new ink. Instead we made a creation notebook at a friend's house and talked about the things God made.

Some Unplanned Extras

Shaving Cream Planets - I was saving this for next week, but I decided to use it this week to add in some more sensory fun. I didn't do them to scale as in the original post; we only did the sun, earth, and moon. I used shaving gel, so it wasn't as poofy as shaving cream, but it worked just fine.

The gel started out blue, so I didn't add in more blue food coloring, but I should have because it turned out not to be blue enough. We ended up with only yellow, green, and red, making the sun and earth look the same (the moon is the small one). I also should have put more gel on the tray, but I didn't want to use up all of my husband's shaving supplies. Raccoon especially liked mixing the shaving gel with the food coloring.

A Pool Noodle Marble Run - I saw this on the blog Motherhood and Other Adventures a while ago (she has tons of great sensory activities), and Raccoon really enjoys it. Balls of all shapes and sizes were the first toys he fell in love with as a baby,

Mancala Math - Raccoon tires easily of his toys, so the other day I brought out some board games (Scrabble, Othello, etc). His favorite is Mancala, with its wooden board and squished marbles. It's a great game for math, too. We do patterns, addition, subtraction, counting by 2s, and we give them out to his "friends" as money to buy things from Raccoon's homemade store. Sometimes his friends even use the money to go to an imaginary amusement park.

For more fun, check out the day we did some Playing with Ice too.

Playing with Ice

Today was a great day. We did two of my tot school planned activities (body part matching and the ice sensory bin), then we did lots of pretend - pirates, lego farm, and Curious George. I decided to do a separate post for the ice play since it was so much fun.

Raccoon peering at his plastic turtle frozen in ice. I made the colored ice and frozen animals in a muffin tin since I couldn't find my ice cube tray. We talked about whether ice floats or sinks, and what is liquid and solid.

I put warm water in the yellow pitcher, which Raccoon then poured into the small blue pitcher to melt the ice around the turtle and "rescue" him. I also brought out some hot water (carefully supervised) so Raccoon could see water vapor. We watched how much faster the ice melted in the hot water, compared to the warm water, and the cold water.

Then Raccoon poured the water through the strainer and caught the turtle in his "net." He wanted to know why the strainer doesn't hold water.

After we "rescued" all of the frozen animals, Raccoon raided my cupboards for more pouring and scooping instruments. We had an important discussion about how to tell when something is full and what happens if we keep pouring more into it. I had a towel on the table and on the floor, but we both still got quite wet.

To end the activity, Raccoon decided more of his plastic animals needed an icy bath. We talked a little about which animals live in cold water (like the Artic), but he decided all of his friends could be cold water animals for today. 

Tree and Flower Crafts

I decided to try my first post with pictures, the tree and flower crafts listed on my Community and Nature idea chart. I'd like to get linked up to Tot School, but I'm a little intimidated and not sure I'll have the time to create detailled posts.

First, we collected the materials at our local park: bark, twigs, leaves, acorns, rocks, and petals.

Then we made the flower. Raccoon wanted to paint it first, then I put the glue on for him to add the petals. He wasn't crazy about adding texture to his paper, so there aren't as many petals as I'd imagined. He kept trying to brush them off. We talked about the basic parts of a flower - petals and leaves.

He enjoyed the tree much more. We had so many things left over that I quickly drew another tree with markers. He got tired halfway through so I helped more with the second one. We talked about the basic parts of a tree - roots, trunk, bark, branches, leaves, seeds/acorns, and how it gets it food (through the roots and leaves).

Community and Nature Week

Activities
Language	Phonics Cards	Riddle Matching	Worker Memory Game	Music Activity
Science	World Map	Ocean Booklet	Ocean Diorama	Map Activity
Math	Frog Numbers	Make a Tree***	Make a Flower***	Pizza Fractions ½  ¼
Pretend	Dress-up	Guess Who?	Plastic Animal Tracks in Playdoh	Toothpick Art in bananas
# Books Read
Extras	stranger danger role play (w/Bernstein Bears book), threading “fish” blocks, cornstarch sidewalk paint

Just a few notes on how I use this chart:
*I try to print/prepare all of my material over the weekend so that I'm ready to go on Monday. I keep all of the things I need in one folder.
*When Raccoon is in a good mood or I'm looking for something new to play, I pull out whichever activity I think will work at the moment. So some days we do one thing, other days five, it just depends.
*Our big "learning" times are Tuesdays and Thursdays for now, as they are our completely stay-at-home days.
*We do a lot of things in the afternoons because by then we've played all his favorite things and he's often ready for something new.
*This list is probably too brief to be helpful. Right now it's more for my record-keeping, but in the future I will try to put up more links or pictures.

***I downloaded these two printables from the Teacher Express part of Scholastic's website under their "Free Resources" section on the left-hand side.