COUNTDOWN TO CHRISTMAS

I love the Christmas Season!  I really enjoy the traditions we have started with our kids! Here are a couple that we do each year and just started today, the first day of December.

I wrap 25 books and put them under our upstairs tree. Right before bed each night, the girls take turns opening up a book that we then read together snuggled in Punkin's bed. I always buy a brand new one that I make sure they save to open on Christmas Eve.

I used to do a separate Advent Calendar and Countdown Activity chart, but this year I combined them!  My Countdown to Christmas chart isn't as elaborate or decorative as some I've seen on Pinterest, but I didn't have time this year to go all out. :) At any rate, I printed out the advent Bible verse cards from HERE and then also wrote a fun Christmas related activity on the back of each one. Each day, the girls take turns taking the card out and we read the Bible verse together (and then later put it up on our red poster...so each day we will read all the ones we have up there, adding one each day as we go.  By Christmas, we will have verses that tell the whole Christmas story.) After that, we turn it over and find out what the fun Christmas activity is for that day.

Here are a list of the things we are doing this year:

1. Handprint Trees / Wreaths
2. Make a paper chain to decorate bedroom door.
3. Christmas Candlelight Picnic Dinner (on the floor by the tree)  
4. Hot Cocoa Bar
5. Play “I Spy” ornament Scavenger Hunt
6. Make Ornament cake balls
7. Go to Toys R Us to buy Toys for Tots gifts
8. Christmas Party at Aunt Rose and Uncle Bob’s house
9. Make “Peppermint Cocoa Floats” (peppermint ice cream and hot cocoa)
10. Write a Christmas Letter to Great Grandma and mail it
11. Festival of Lights in PJ’s with popcorn
12. Make Snowflakes and decorate with glitter
13. Make gift for SS teachers, preschool teachers, school teachers
14. Make a gingerbread house with a friend
15. Church program
16. School program
17. Make Christmas Cookies
18. Have a “snowball fight” with wadded paper
19. Deliver Christmas cookies to neighbors
20. Sleepover at Grandma's
21. Help me wrap gifts for cousins
22. Unwrap 1 stocking gift early
23. Camp out under Christmas Tree in sleeping bags
24. After Christmas Eve service, give a gift box to the kids full of new jammies, a Christmas video, and snacks. Watch the movie in new PJs with the snacks in mom and dad’s bed.
25. CHRISTMAS!

FALL TOT SCHOOL

Well, I am just not going to be able to post weekly anymore like I used to back in the day.  It may be more like "seasonally" ....  LOL. And our schedules have changed drastically since the day when it was just Punkin and Mommy.  We don't get to Tot School every day and only do it randomly as we can fit it in.  But Firecracker really does LOVE any activities that we have time to do, and is soaking it all in like a sponge!  I love seeing her so excited! Anyway, here is some of what we did this fall with Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Tot Trays

Pumpkin Noodle Pounding. She stuck the noodles in pre-existing holes and then used her hammer to pound them in the box. She loved opening the box at the end and finding all the noodles inside. 

Simple Halloween Peg game I got a few years ago at the Dollar Tree.

She used the plastic spiders and sorted them by color into the pumpkins, then we counted certain numbers of spiders into the pumpkins, and then I had her use tweezers to "tong" them into the pumpkins for fine motor practice.

Pumpkin Transfer using Tongs.

"Mr. Pumpkin Head"

Halloween Activities

Pumpkin / Ghost Bowling

Beginning Letter Sound Sort

Simple Halloween Picture Matching

Playing "Memory" with Halloween pictures

Sorting orange and black pom poms. 

(Excuse the no pants...we were potty training that day!)

Halloween Treats

Cool Whip and orange frosting "parfaits"

Halloween Parfaits

Vanilla Pudding, Oreos, and orange Sprinkles

Fall and Pumpkin Activities

Firecracker rolled the dice, counted the number of dots, and then used the tweezers to put an orange pom pom on the pumpkin that had that number on it.

Pumpkin Size Sorting

I hid the pumpkin numbers around the room for Firecracker to find and then when she found them all, she lined them up in number order.

Using dot markers to find all the P's.

Which then led to making pictures with the dot markers. :)

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Q-tip painting to make fall trees. 

(Punkin was home from school on the day we did this, so she got to make one as well.)

Fall Sensory Bin

Leaf Counting #1

She picked a number card from the pile and then counted out that many leaves onto her tree.

Leaf Counting #2

She counted the dots on each leaf and then found that number on her tree.

Beginning Sound Letter Sort with Leaves

Thanksgiving Activities

Corn Counting

(When I did this with Punkin we used candy corn, but I had run out this year, so we improvised and used Reeses Pieces.)

Capital / Lowercase T turkey sorting

Beginning Sound Letter Sort with Turkeys

Making Easy Pumpkin Muffins for Thanksgiving morning.

I used the recipe from HERE. However, we used yellow cake mix instead of the spiced cake mix....only because I didn't have the spiced cake mix on hand.

TOT SCHOOL FOR FIRECRACKER - CHICKA CHICKA BOOM BOOM

Firecracker is 27 months.

I  made several attempts with Firecracker to do "Tot School" from about age 1 on, and unlike her sister, Punkin, she was NOT interested.  Then, suddenly one day I noticed her identifying letters and counting things, and I decided to try again. Well, something clicked, and now she LOVES Tot School! Due to schedules, we can't do it every day like I did with Punkin, but we enjoy the days that we do get to have Tot School while big sis is at Kindergarten.

 Our Tot School area the last couple weeks.  We read and re-read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom over and over again!

 And she LOVED (as did Punkin) the Chicka Chicka video from HERE.

 We said the ABC's and as we did, Firecracker found each letter and lined them up on the floor.

 She loved lining up the letters.

 I printed THIS PAGE from Making Learning Fun and gave her a specific color (one at a time) and had her mark the letter I called out.  I also said a sound and had her mark the letter that made that sound.

Finished product!  Her fine motor skills still amaze me!  She did the stamping all by herself!

 One of her favorite activities was digging for her ABC letters in our Rainbow Rice bin and then putting them back in the puzzle.

I printed out these cute Chicka Chicka lowercase letters from HERE and spread them all over the living room floor.  Then, Firecracker went and found them in ABC order.

And she brought them over to the couch where she lined them up.

I made a letter matching activity by printing out coconut trees and labeling "coconuts" with lowercase letters.  Then, she used her uppercase bottle cap letters to match uppercase and lowercase. (You can download a copy HERE and write in your own letters, or numbers, or whatever skill you are working on matching.)

Firecrackers knows her colors well already, but she loved looking at the color word (identifying it by the color of the print), and finding the matching tree as I read the words to her.  She thought it was so fun to put the trees in the pocket chart!  LOL!  You can download my file HERE. (I simply cut apart the sentences, colored the blank trees to match and cut them out.)

To review shapes, I had Firecracker make this shape tree as we identified the shapes she used.  I lightly drew lines on the paper where the shapes should be (roughly) glued.  It was also very good fine motor practice as she used the glue stick to glue down each one.....which she loved being able to finally do like Big Sister, Punkin!

We also practiced using more fine motor skills, as well as practicing how to spell her name by finding the letters in her name on stickers and putting them on a Coconut Tree.

We used her Bottle Cap letters again to practice spelling her name, matching the capital letters to the lowercase letters.

More uppercase / lowercase letter matching using THIS SHEET.

For Sensory Play one day, I put a bunch of plastic letters in a sink full of bubbles. She had a blast trying to find the letters and "fishing" them out of the water.  I made her tell me the name and sound of each letter as she put it on the counter. (And yes, I took her shirt off since it was getting soaked!)

We also briefly worked on numbers after reading Chicka, Chicka 123.

We used her shape tree that she had made as her workmat.  She picked a number from the cup, had to identify the number (with help....as we are still working on number recognition), and then counted that many "coconuts" (cheerios) onto her workmat.

We also laid down a coconut tree on the floor and then stood back and threw a handful of foam letters.  She had to then run over and count how many of the letters landed on the tree mat. (Which usually was only like 1-3.... the rest usually went flying all over the room!  But that was part of what made the activity fun for her!)

We made a fun handprint coconut tree craft one day and then Firecracker stuck ABC stickers on it one by one in ABC order.

It turned out so cute!

We had a couple fun Chicka Chicka Boom Boom snacks / lunches as well.

TOT TRAYS

Leapfrog Jr. ABC book (and other books as well)

Making "Alphabet Soup"

Finding lowercase letters to make words

There were also ABC puzzles and a big Letter Matching floor puzzle in her trays, but I didn't get pictures of those.