Christmas Traditions

Wow! It's already December 6th! I had all kinds of fun Thanksgiving things to share with you, but here we are, a few weeks away from Christmas, and who really cares about turkey games now? I will share this though as a recap of our Thanksgiving-our Thankful Wreath.

If you meant to do one for Thanksgiving and time slipped away from you, you could always make the whole thing green, add a little holly and make it a Christmas wreath. I'm totally saving this to remember that when Rowin was four, he was thankful for dinosaurs, lions, our vegetable garden, and Rayna's blue eyes. :)

Anyway, on to Christmas! I most likely won't post much this month, so I thought I would just share a few of our Christmas traditions that we've started as a family. Some are traditions from when my husband and I were little, some we came up with on our own, and some I stole from other creative moms. 

Advent Calendar

I spent a good amount of time making this a couple years ago, but now I can just pull it out every year and it's ready to go! I numbered little envelopes 1-24 and printed off several different Christmas activities. Some of them include: Bake Christmas cookies, Read the Christmas story from Luke, 

Write a letter to Santa, Make a handmade ornament, Sing Christmas carols, etc. I got a lot from Life Your Way-you can click through to this link to print some of hers: Printable Advent Activities

I also have some little burlap bags mixed in too-on those days, the kids find a tiny little gift inside (candy, trinkets, etc.). 

It's nice because all of the activities are things I would try to do with them anyway, but the calendar spreads them all out, makes sure we get them all in, and gives the kids something to look forward to every day.

Christmas Books

I stole this from someone last year and Rowin loves it! I wrapped several Christmas books-ideally we'd have 24, but we don't have that many yet-I think I wrapped about 17!? So, starting December 1st, the kids pick out a a book, unwrap it, and we read it together. 

Elf on the Shelf

I don't think this needs any explaining-we're one of the thousands of families who do this, but it is pretty fun! We don't talk much about the whole "Your elf is watching you and reporting back to Santa." It's just fun watching Rowin search the house for Kevin every day. I also overheard Ro having a conversation with him, telling him how much he likes dinosaurs. :)

So those are just a few of ours. I love hearing other family's traditions! It's nice because our kids are still so young that we can add new things every year and turn them into traditions. However you celebrate with your family, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas!

Letter H

Ok, I'm feeling a little stuck. For the last couple weeks, Rowin has had a bit of a bad attitude when we do school. Either he says he wants to do it and then h'e grouchy while we're working or he says he doesn't want to do school today.....hmmm. I definitely don't want to force it. I want him to love school and learning, so part of me says, "Well, let's forget it then." But then a lot of the time, he does love it and it's something fun that we can do together. So, I don't know! Is this normal!? I'm feeling a bit confused about how to proceed. With the holidays approaching, I'm thinking we will at least slow things down a bit-do more holiday crafts and activities and spread each letter out over a longer period of time. If he's not loving it, I think I'll back off for a while.
All that to say, our past week was pretty scattered. I don't know if there was one day where we actually sat down and did everything I had planned. I was trying to figure him out, so it was more like a game here, a craft there spread throughout the week.
So, in no particular order, here are some of the activities we did this week:

Find the Letter Game
I spread out all of the flashcards we've learned so far and then said a letter + it's sound. Rowin had to find the card with the matching letter.

Letter Hunt
He had to find all of the capital and lowercase H's to finish the maze.

Shape Review
These pages were from his Dollar Store workbook. He did square, circle, triangle, and rectangle.

Pumpkin Number Match
Unfortunately, I made this back when I was teaching kindergarten so I don't have a link for you. I'm sure you could find something similar on Pinterest though!

Letter Basket
We found the following H items around our house: horses, helicopters, hamburger, Hans, hammer.

Block Letter
Ro traced it with his finger and then filled it in with candy corns.

Handwriting
We did "air writing" to learn how to write a capital and lowercase H. Then Rowin practiced writing them in his workbook.

House Craft
We made a house out of the letter H and then Ro added people and pets.

Pumpkin Banner
Robin made several pumpkins by making a fist with both hands and sticking his fists in orange paint. Then, with both hands together, he pressed his fists onto the paper to make little pumpkins. This is what our paper looked like when we were done. :)

We added some stems, cut out the pumpkins and turned them into a little fall banner.

Letter G + Halloween Activities

We squeezed in another letter last week before we left for Nashville for the weekend. We got home Monday night, so this week, we're just going to do some fun Halloween activities. I'll share what we did last week and show you what I have planned for this week. I wanted to share BEFORE Halloween in case you wanted to use any of these this week, even though we haven't done any of them yet!

Last week...

Day 1:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar/Weather
• Sang "Days of the Week", "Macarena Months" and another one of Dr. Jean's Nursery Rhyme songs-I forget which one.
• "Bigger" page in workbook (from Dollar Tree) + had Rowin put several sets of items in order from smallest to biggest

• Reviewed A-F, introduced G
• Letter Maze
  

• Letter Basket

Day 2:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar/Weather
• "Smaller" page in workbook

• Reviewed letters A-G

• Block Letter
• Traced with finger first using the following prompt:"Around the curve, STOP! Cross the finish line."
• Filled with paper clips

• Writing-followed the same Handwriting Without Tears sequence as last week
• I wrote a G on the chalkboard and he erased it with small, wet piece of paper towel
• Next, he erased it again (following directly over the G I had written) with a dry paper towel
• He traced over the "invisible" G with his finger.
• Finally, he wrote his own G.
• He was getting kinda crabby, so after that we called it quits for the day and skipped lowercase g and his writing workbook. :)
• If you did do lowercase g, you could use this verbal prompt, "Around, bump the middle, past the bottom, curve!"

Day 3:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar/Weather
• "Same Size" Page in workbook

• Reviewed A-G flashcards
• Name Practice-just practiced tracing on a sentence strip

• Dot Marker Page

• Goat Craft

Halloween Activities!!
(Sorry these are all really bad pictures.)

• Five Little Pumpkins Book-color and read/sing together

• Halloween 1-9 Number Puzzle

• Candy Corn Counting Mats-fill in the blanks with the correct number of candy corns

• Halloween Pattern Strips

 These two links have free printables for all of the above activities, plus several others that I didn't even use!

http://thisreadingmama.com/candy-corn-preschool-activities-printables/ 

http://lessonpix.com/articles/5/64/Halloween+Fun+with+Five+Little+Pumpkins

Letter F

So this week, I thought, "I'm going to think of some genius idea to keep Rayna occupied." All I came up with was a paint bag (I think I've posted these on here before). Genius, probably not. But I thought, surely this would keep her occupied for a FEW minutes!

Notice how the chair is empty. As soon as Rowin sits at his table, Rayna runs over, climbs onto the other chair, and starts grabbing whatever is on the table. I give up. This girl just wants to do whatever her brother is doing.

Anyway, here's a look at our week with letter F...

Day 1:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse (Deut. 31:6)
• Calendar/Weather
• Tracing Practice (same as last week)
• Reviewed A-E and introduced F
• Paper Plate Letter Game-I wrote different letters all around the edge of a paper plate and then cut between each letter. Rowin had to find all of the F's and fold them down. 

• Letter Basket-Around our house, Rowin found a fish, a frog, a fire truck, a firefighter, and pictures of friends and family.

Day 2:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse (Deut. 31:6)
• Calendar/Weather
• Reviewed A-F flashcards
• Block Letter
• Traced with his finger, saying, "Big line down, frog jump! Across the top, across the middle."
• Filled with wooden beads

• Writing-I learned a new method from my awesome sister-in-law, Abbey, who teaches first grade! It's from Handwriting Without Tears and reinforces the correct way to write the letter, several different ways. Here's what we did.
• First, I wrote an F on a chalkboard, saying the verbal prompt as I wrote it. 
• Next, Rowin erased the F with a piece of wet paper towel, going right over my lines and saying the verbal prompt as he did it.
• Then, he did the same thing again, but erased with a DRY piece of paper towel.
• After that, he traced over the "invisible F" with his finger.
• Last, he wrote an F himself with the chalk.

• Talk about reinforcing a concept! This was great! We repeated the whole process with lowercase f, using the verbal prompt, "Make a candy cane and across." For the verbal prompts, it doesn't matter so much WHAT you say. It's more important that you just say the same thing every time so that they remember how to form the letter correctly.
• I think this activity + the salt from last week gave him a little more confidence in his writing ability because he actually wanted to do his workbook after this! Yay! :)

Day 3:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse (Deut. 31:6)
• Calendar/Weather
• Reviewed A-F
• Name practice-I gave him several letter blocks and he had to find the letters in is name and put them in order. For an extra challenge, he had to do it before Rayna sniped one of his letters. :)

• Dot Marker Page (link for free printable on Letter A post)

• Number Pancake Flip Game-I think I did a post about this a while back. Ro had to find the two number pancakes that matched and use his spatula to flip them into his pan.

• Frog Craft (see previous post for link to idea site)

Letter E

We actually took two weeks on letter E. I had Lasik eye surgery last week and this week, my whole family is coming in from out of town for Rowin's birthday party. It's been a bit busy, so we just stretched one week into two. It worked out to be about four days.

Day 1:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse: Matthew 22:37-38 (He has it memorized!! I'm so proud of him!! Insert bursting mommy heart-is that an emoji?)
• Calendar/Weather + the following Dr. Jean songs
• Days of the Week
• Macarena Months
• Tooty Ta (Um, he LOVES this song! Hilarious.)
• Tracing Practice-Last week, he was getting frustrated trying to trace the letters, so I found this free tracing printable to practice just following different kinds of lines. I stuck it in a clear sheet cover and had him use a dry erase marker so that we can use it again.

Free Tracing Printable

• Reviewed A-D and introduced E flashcard
• Letter Maze-I have been searching for one of these that I like and finally found one that has capital AND lowercase and it's not in a weird font. You have to find all of the E's to get to the end of the maze. If you think you would reuse these, you can slip them into a clear sheet cover and use dry erase markers. We just used dot markers and then I (secretly) threw it away.

Free A-Z Letter Maze Printables

• Letter Basket-Not a ton that starts with E, but Rowin found elephants, eggs, Elsa, and eggplant.

Day 2:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar Weather
• Reviewed A-E flashcards
• Block Letter (link for free printable on Letter A post)
• Rowin traced it with his finger, saying the verbal prompt, "Big line down, frog jump! Across the top, across the middle, across the bottom."
• Next he filled it in with these fun sticky foam balls that we found at the Dollar Store.

• Writing-Like I mentioned above, Ro was getting frustrated trying to trace letters in his workbook last week so this week we scrapped that. No need to make him discouraged over writing when he's three! I want him to love it! So instead, we did "air writing". We stood up, stuck our arms straight out, like a huge pencil, and wrote E's in the air, saying our verbal prompt as we did it. After we did a few capital E's, I gave him this tray with salt in it, and he practiced tracing them with his finger in the salt. Then we repeated the whole thing for lowercase-first air writing, then salt writing. He loved both of these! The verbal prompt that we said for e was, "Across, up and around."

(I had this little tray from some lacing cards-it was perfect for holding the flashcards in front of him so he could see.)

Idea Credit

Day 3:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar/Weather
• Name Practice-I put a bunch of Post-It notes on the wall, each with a different letter. He had to find the letters in his name and put them in order. After that, I said one letter at a time (for example, "lowercase b") and he had to find it, take it off the wall, and give it to me. (I only used letters we've learned + the letters in his name.)

• Reviewed A-E flashcards
• Dot Marker Page (link for free printable on Letter A post)-Oops! Sorry, forgot to take a pic.

• Eagle Craft-in hind sight, we should have done something that started with a short e sound since that's what he learned. Thought of that too late.

Letter of the Week Craft Ideas

Day 4:

• Bible Story/Memory Verse
• Calendar/Weather
• Reviewed A-E
• Practiced writing A-E (capital and lowercase) in salt (If you're child gets frustrated with writing, this is a GREAT option! If he didn't like how a letter looked after he wrote it, he just shook the salt to "erase" and tried again.)
• Number Matching Game
• I numbered clothes pins 1-10 and had Rowin put them in order. 

• Then he had to clip the clothes pins on the matching number picture cards. 

• Patterns-I started a few different patterns and he had to finish them. This was good for him to practice drawing shapes too. Ha, his circles got a little crazy towards the end. :)