Messy Fun with Vinegar and Baking Soda

A friend and I recently split a package of Twisty Droppers.  While the Xander had fun playing in the pool and the tub with them, I wanted to do something special also.  Cue the vinegar, baking soda, and food coloring!

 I even let him help me add the food coloring.  He does not quite have the concept of squeezing the dropper before putting it in the liquid, but he is pretty good at getting the liquid to suck up and then squeezing it where he wants it.  I was happy to have him practice with those little hand muscles!

 

 He had a great time!  I explained that the vinegar and baking soda react and release a gas, so of course the rest of the morning he kept saying "I made gas... I mad GAS!"

U for Urchin

We are currently working on our Mommy and Me ABC units.  This week we did the letter U and urchins.  Honestly, urchins are kind of boring, so we did a lot of non-letter activities this week.  Unless otherwise specified, all of the printables are from my Mommy and Me ABC Printables, which are free as we complete them (for a detailed list of all the materials in the printables, check out this post).

 This was his desk setup. On the left is his magnetic calendar.  His white board had some alphabet magnets, and his fridge phonics set.  The shelf had some Us and some U books.

Building Letters

We built some Us using Handwriting Without Tears pieces.

Using tangrams to make a U.

 Letter Clipping

 Letter Maze

Concentrating hard on his letter maze.  He chose a purple Do-A-Dot marker to mark all of the U's connecting the little urchin to the big urchin. 

Urchin Size Sorting

 

   Play Dough

Using his play dough stampers and some cookie cutters to make some U's.  

 

 U Dot Page

Letter U Sensory Bin

 A friend and I split a package of Handy Scoopers.  Xander had a great time using them in his alphabet bin!

Spanish Habitat Page

Xander outgrew his color and shape habitat pages a long time ago.  However, in order to mix it up, and teach him something new, I converted this page to Spanish.  While it was a little bit of a struggle for him, he got a few without any help!  We will work our way up to him being able to do it all on his own!

To learn the colors in Spanish, he has been watching a Little Reader lesson I made.

Other Tot School Activities

Five for Five
Last week I wrote about how we are doing Five for Five reading.  These are the books from this week.  Bear's New Friend and Let's Draw were the big hits of the week!

Bear's New Friend

Summer

Water

Let's Draw (Sight Words Level 2)

Underground Homes

Floor Puzzle
This week's floor puzzle was this great Super Why one I picked up at a consignment sale. He couldn't do the whole thing on his own, but had a great time helping me.

Rainforest Matching

Matching words, pictures, and Rainforest Toob figurines.  You can find the files on this post.

 Investigating

I picked up a Jumbo Magnifier last week (Toys R Us has them cheaper).  Xander had a great time investigating around the house!

 Checking out the water beads before and after they finished growing.

 

 Comparing the beads with and without water. 

Workbook
I'm slowly trying to get Xander used to worksheets.  This week we did this fun fireman sticker page from our Emergency Vehicle sticker book.  He had to go more slowly than he would have liked, but he got all the stickers in the correct places.

 

 

Reading Update: Five for Five

I realized that I haven't updated on what we're doing for reading since we finished the 1500 Book Challenge in December.  I reading post is way overdue!

Five for Five

A couple of years ago I was reading about teaching kindergartners and came across the recommendation that teachers should read them the same story for story time everyday for a week. The idea was that the kids would get more comfortable with the story and vocabulary, make more connections, and usually end up liking the stories better due to familiarity.  The idea seemed interesting, but inappropriate for my infant.

Lately, however, I have revisited the idea.  In addition to the normal reading we do for fun and for bonding, I have made an effort to pick five books a week that we read at least five days.  I have been trying to pick one "story" and then some short nonfiction or sight words books.  I tend to gravitate towards nonfiction with real photographs and big fonts (like these or these) so that Xander and I can read every other page without him getting fatigued by the end of the five books (you can check out this blog post for an overview of how I taught him to read so young).  I also like that these books expose him to concepts and information he wouldn't get from the regular stories we read.  Heck, even I am learning new things from them.

Poetry

I also recently decided to try out some poetry with Xander.  I bought A Light in the Attic with the idea of reading him one poem a night.  I never imagined he would absolutely love them and develop favorite poems (current favorite it is "How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes").  We actually end up reading 4-5 poems a night, although we repeat a lot of them from day to day.  I myself was never all that into poetry, but I am happy to light the spark in him!

I love that my munchkin LOVES to read!  I hope it is a love that lasts a lifetime!

I found him trying to read in the dark late one night.

Rainforest Vocabulary

A while back I was able to pick of the Rainforest Toob pretty inexpensively.  It took me a while, but I finally made some 3 Part Cards and a Little Reader lesson to go with.  Xander loves playing matching games with the cards and the figurines!  You are welcome to download the cards here and the Little Reader lesson here.