Which ball is missing?

We started our day off with a little activity with our mat. I like to play with Spielgaben, read books, and do physical activity.
I had the kids do silly things on whichever color I shouted out.

They all really enjoyed this activity. 

Here we lined up all the balls and said their colors. KK is really beginning to know them, which is really exciting. Isn't that the goal of all these fun times!?

We put all the balls in our lunch box. This is an activity in the Spielgaben play guide. They suggest using cups, but I just imagined Buddy crushing them all, so we used the lunch box. 

I would shut the box and then sneak one out and ask her which one was  missing. I am glad she knows her colors but the goal of this was not color knowledge it was to be able to figure out which one was missing. She would need to remember what was in there and then figure out what was missing. We took turns being the person to hid the ball. 

Then we got silly and added food to our lunch box. Hey why not right?

With the two big girls (Buddy and KK came in and out on this one) We just discussed the calendar. I wanted to just refresh the girls that the calendar tells us about the month, date, year, and day. I also wanted to teach Roo that there are 12 months in a year and each one gets a number. 

Here is Doodle's 3. 

We added them to the top of our calendar. 

Then we decided to make some designs that would go with the month of March. 

here are some flowers. 

I made this one for March's weather, rainy, cloudy, and sunny. 

We read these books to tie in with our lesson. 

A little bit of our day

Do you even wonder if we just play Spielgaben all day? As much as I love it and sing its praises, we do other education activities as well.
Roo is home schooled, but also goes to Classical Conversations. Its a great home schooling program. Check it out....www.classicalconversations.com Its nationwide in America (I'm not sure if its elsewhere) So we do a lot with that - maybe I will post that in another post.
Doodle does some phonics and math.
With KK we do our Spielgaben, calendar time, numbers, and letters. You see what we do with Spielgaben and letters.

Here is the calendar we use. We start by saying this is a calendar it tells us about the month, the date, and the year and the day of the week. We count the numbers and say this is the 27th . What month is it? March so today is March 27th 2014. We say the days of the week and I tell her what day it is. Then we do weather. She looks outside and picks the matching cards with that weather on it. A lot of times its just me saying the calendar activities, but we believe its good for her to hear it.
These are Roo's number charts, but I sing it with all three girls. The songs come from her Classical Conversations class.

After that KK sings the Abcs while I point to the letters on the wall.
Then we do our letter work and Spielgaben. With Spielgaben sometimes we do the worksheets and sometimes just the activity sheets. I really believe both are amazing!

Can you believe we did more with colors?

For Buddy and KK we continued to discuss colors.
My goal this day was to continue colors with these two littles. Well...Buddy found our Itsy Bitsy Spider song book and has been obsessed.

 He brought it to me and I read it about half a dozen times. Instead of demanding him to look at my color books, we read this one and picked out some colors in it every time we read it.  Better to adapt what we had planned and keep him interested!

After reading the book numerous times, we decided to make a spider out of yellow. Since he really likes the color yellow and picked it earlier this week we stuck with that.

I'll admit our first attempt at a spider looked like a sun -as my two big girls pointed out!

We ended up putting eight legs (the yellow sticks) into a yellow cotton ball. This seemed to be the best I could do. Buddy enjoyed playing with it while I read the book again.

Doodle and Roo joined in, I love that even the simple activities they want to be a part of.

KK also worked on Bb is for bear. For the other girls we put coffee grounds on the bear for his furry hair. This time we just colored him because we were in the basement and I didn't want the coffee all over down there.

We then brought up our "train" and matched up our homemade clay to the colors. We had blue, yellow, and red.

Here Piper put a half yellow half blue one on the in between part.

I also had the older girls tell me which colors to mix to get purple, orange, and green.

Also brought letter learning into this by having KK make a Bb out of her clay - its not the best but at least she's working on letter knowledge.

We are introducing Spanish to our children; I put this cd in, which has a colors song on it.

Thanks for joining us and letting me talk more about colors! 

Octagons

This wasn't today but I haven't had a chance to post what the big girls did this week. 

We made the birthday cake from the Spielgaben worksheets. 

We have discussed octagons and counted out the sides. 

We didn't have enough big triangle prisms to make two big and two small octagons, so we improvised and used little ones and some of the curved ones from another set. 

This is Roo's finished cake

Doodle lit her candle on her own, which I think showed some good thinking. 

Then we got silly and put lots and lots of sprinkles on them. We also sang Happy Birthday. 

The goal here today was to have fun, figure out how to build something from simple blocks, and learn about octagons-what they look like and how many sides they have. 

More Colors

Today was filled with more colors as we continued to explore the cotton balls.

We read these books as a starter for our lesson. Reading is such an important part in a kids day. The library is our greatest resource for books. Chugga-Chugga Choo-Choo was Buddy's favorite one, we read it multiple times. After we read the books and the lesson is over, we keep the books in a place where the kids can easily access them. 

We semi did the color train from the Spielgaben worksheets. They suggest using milk cartons, which would have been really cool if I had them. ;-) We chose to make a train out of paper instead b/c that is what we had on hand. Again today's objective was to introduce Buddy to colors. I am excited when I ask him a color and he says yellow even if its bright blue because he is associating a color with the question. 

I had him match up the cotton ball colors to the papers. He didn't really do well or see too interested. We tried to do it right and then quickly moved on and adapted our plans to keep him interested and learning. 

We matched up the colors to make a pathway for his train! This was much better and he really enjoyed it. 

KK's turn 

First she is learning the letter Bb this week so I made her a bird house on the paper and she had to put the birds on the house with the Bb's on them.

she really loves letter activities like this. 

She also loves our white board. Any chance she gets to write on it is a special day. I wrote a Bb on the board and just let her color around it and pretend to write Bbs.

KK also got to try her hand at the color train. 

She did really well with this. We took it a step farther than Buddy. I asked her to put the colors on and then asked her to take specific colors off. That way I knew she could not only match them up but also knew them by name. I am really starting to see progress in her color knowledge!

Next we played a color game. She is standing on our roller coaster that has 4 colors on it. The first game she just had to run and stand on the color I shouted out. Next time she had to do something on the color, i.e. put your nose on orange. The objective here was not only colors but listening and then doing what was said. 

Later on in the day we got out our window markers, yes they always make me nervous, and named some of the colors that we were drawing with. Very simple reinforcement and super fun. Kids need lots of repetition. Buddy will look at me with a red marker and say yellow? 10 times before he finally repeats after me and says red.

Now this picture is just pure silliness. A large amount of flour was spilled on the flour by Buddy, we decided to just go with it and make flour angels and flour castles. It brought lots of enjoyment and a very large mess! I am thankful the Lord gives grace for moments like these in our days. 

Back to the basics

Today we went back to our beloved cotton balls. We started here originally and continued on for the older two but the younger two were ready to start over. (They are not quite ready to do some of the smaller sets) Our objective today was not the shape or feel of the ball, we already covered that the first time. I wanted Buddy to be introduced to colors and I wanted KK to start really learning her colors.

I started Buddy off with asking him to get the balls out of the set. I named the colors for him. 

We got a little side tracked and had fun seeing how stretchy the balls were. 

Here I lined up the balls with tails and asked Buddy to match up the other cotton balls.

He really did well with this.

Here he is waiting to get the balls and match them up. I would say the colors as he matched them. 

We also read some books about color. We colored the page with the matching cotton ball. He really enjoyed this part.

Buddy loves cars so we found the car that matched the color of that page. Again our objective today was colors, so we incorporated Spielgaben into our main objective. 

After reading the books, I asked Buddy to pick his favorite color, he chose yellow. So we took his yellow car and made a pathway with the cotton balls. 

He had tons of fun with this. I just kept talking about colors during this time. I also just love how with Spielgaben you can do your structured play time and then just play. It really encourages us to spend one on one time with our little ones. What could be better for them then that!

Now it is KK's turn. She is learning her letters so we made Bb's with our set. 

While making them I kept repeating Bb say BBBB

I also did the books with KK and she enjoyed coloring the pages with the right colored cotton balls also. 

We put the cotton balls on the cans of paint in this story. 

These were the books we read to go with our color unit today. Colors for Zena was really great because it talks about how to mix your primary colors to make more colors (which we are going to talk about later this week)

KK also matched up the balls but we said mommy needs her baby back, find the right color baby to match the mommy. Really when you are working with kids your have to go with what they love. As you can see its the same exercise we did with Buddy but we said balls for him bc he loves balls and babies for KK bc that peaks her interest more so than balls. 

KK then picked her favorite color for today - Purple. So we went on a purple hunt to find all the purple things around the room. 

She wanted to collect them in her basket so that's what we did. 

Buddy wanted to join with yellow in the pan. ;-)

This was Roo and Doodles free play with it. They listened to an audio story and free played. 

They did the lions today, from set 5.

I let them look a the picture when they made the lion and encouraged them to figure it out themselves and also gave them some wiggle room to get creative with the tails, feet and mane. Doodle often looks at it and says Mommy I can't! We have been working on it, we don't say can't we say I will try my best. It seems to be helping. 

At the end of the day, its great to look back and be able to smile because I was able so spend quality time with each child while having fun and learning!!