March Tot School

March was a busy month with the arrival of our little Ellie! Jay took this photo of her.

This makes my heart sing: my little ones LOVING their books!

Grandma came to visit and made Jay this quilt for his new bed!

Lots of time on the piano for Jay :) He loves to play for Ellie and is good at picking out tunes. He loves the sound of the Westminster chimes most!

St. Patrick's day rainbow colors activity with skittles

A penguin manipulative made from a cereal box. Jay puts together subtraction equations and then groups raisins to match the numbers; feeding the ones that are subtracted away. He loves this!

Gymnastics class for Jay and Kay

Little Ellie was born and loved much!

I made an plastic eggs alphabet matching game
They look like this when they are matched:

We made a maze with paper towel rolls and magnets and rolled mini plastic eggs down it. It was a great engineering/gravity/art activity.

A transferring activity with mini plastic eggs and a tiny basket.

I've been reading the book: Montessori Play and Learn. I was inspired by the ideas about what little people can learn to do and how they can take care of their space. I've been implementing that into our "education." Kay is sweeping up a mess she made :)
We've had a great time learning together!

February Tot School

February was a busy month for us because we were getting ready for our new baby to be born, in addition to other activities.

We had fun separating candy hearts by color into the right "heart" and then counting to see how many there were of each color and which color had the most/least.

Jay and Kay made at least 30 valentines for friends and family. We made a variety, including these, and used them for art and writing practice for the first half of the month.

We LOVE to learn new things!

Jay and Kay had a great time string beads and pieces of cut straws onto these metal hearts (which I made by pulling a hanger apart for each of them).


We learned the months of the year song (to the tune of 3 blind mice) and talked more about seasons.

Jay continues to learn the violin and is able to play fingers on the strings now. He loves the rhythm "Mississippi Hot Dog."

Kay gives concerts like this regularly. She loves to sing and play the piano.

We did many snowman and gingerbread themed activities. Here is our snowman activity from rice krispies and marshmallows.

Jay is reading well enough that I made him a scripture tote so he can take them to church with him. He reads scriptures for his class.

Kay is trying out the baby's car seat.

Jay made a special baby rattle for our baby that started with his artwork.

These two sillies can climb into the crib and read and build forts for hours. Jay can think of 101 things to do with a slinky!
Kay continues to fine-tune her speaking skills. And loves to read books right now. They are both very excited to have a new little baby in our home next month!

January Family Academy

I'm behind in recording our activities...here are some of the things we've been working on:

We focused a bunch of activities around gingerbread cookies. Here the kids are putting mini m&m's on their peanut butter-covered gingerbread sandwiches.

Jay learned to count by two's with gingerbread and I put them to the song of "Jack and Jill." We read Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby books and they loved them.

I printed out a bunch of gingerbread printables from makinglearningfun.com. We did number recognition for Kay, number spelling for Jay, color-by-number addition with gingerbreadmen, shape matching with gingerbreadmen, etc.

We also started counting by fives to the song "Ten Little Indians."

Jay is getting really good at reading the calendar so we learned a song about the months of the year to "Three Blind Mice." They both sing the days of the week song (Clementine) ALL THE TIME!

Our green rice sensory box got a lot of use. I put gingerbread buttons in it along with other winter items and they scooped and played to their hearts content :)

Jay decided to write all the numbers from 1 to 100. He's gotten really good at counting and reading the time on the clock. This was something he did all on his own. I love self-learning! Since he loves clocks he did them circular.

We had a great time visiting with cousins and aunts and uncles. I found some fun manipulatives at a scrapbook outlet. Here they are sorting by size and object and making them stand in the carpet.

We went sledding and enjoyed snow and family when we visited Utah.

Jay was thrilled to see and get inside a real helicopter at the SLC children's museum. We went there to celebrate his birthday with their uncles and Grandma.

He also celebrated his birthday at home with lots of flying fun.

This is a photo Jay took of his beloved "chick."

Jay continues with his violin lessons and learned f# for his first finger-on-the-string note.

Here he is teaching Jumbo, who happens to also be a great student.

Jay can read several verses in the scriptures all by himself now. I made him a scripture carrier and he loves to take it to church and help in his class by reading them.

The numbers that Kay is playing with have been a lot of fun-a great manipulative treat!

I'm realizing I don't have many photos of Kay. She has been working on potty training, learning her shapes, and surprised me by knowing all of her uppercase alphabet! She also started speaking in complete sentences at the first of January-she sounds so grown up now!

She's loving her baby things from Christmas and is starting to realize what having a new baby at our house means (I think).

She likes to climb into the infant car seat. She is a little tease!

We also had fun doing snowman activities. Here we made rice krispie snowmen. It was great for Jay to touch something sticky!

Kay loves to sing and play the piano. She sets up concerts like this:

I often forget to take photos of the kids doing our everyday learning, but I love the record of them growing and learning!

December Tot School

It's been awhile since I updated our Tot School/homeschool activities. This is a run-down of some of our December activities:

Jay and Kay have really enjoyed our advents and Jay says, "twenty-first" instead of, "twenty-oneth" now since we say the date when we do each advent. The advents have centered around the nativity/

Jay is moving forward with violin and I found him giving his elephant a lesson too!

These were fun Christmas cookies that were kid-friendly

He enjoyed this puzzle

This nativity village of Bethlehem has been fun for learning.

We did a bunch of tangrams and a ton of other Christian Christmas activities. Some were from here.

Jay worked on putting the works on this house for about an hour.
Field trip to pick our Christmas tree.

First snow.

Scripture we are memorizing
We've been learning the planets, including the music by Holst.

songs we are learning
7th Article of Faith song

The First Noel (Their favorite this year)

Tot School ending July

The weather has been so great this week for our family.  We spent a lot of time playing in the sunshine.  The kids also had fun playing with bugs outside.  I had to catch Kay with them too...some day she might not think she likes them so much :)
We had some reMARKABLE fun drawing letters.

This is a common scene this week.  Jay loves that his trike doubles as a scooter.  Kay can't get enough of pushing her favorite things around in the stroller.

I love how creative Jay gets with his "tools."

Self-portrait time at the mirror.

Jay finally got to use his violin bow this week.  Here are some photos of us practicing the correct bow hold and then counting down for the "rocket" to take off!

working on that beautiful bow hold.

Kay loves reading books to herself.

Touching trees...not for long...they're sharp!

Jay worked on bouncing and catching the ball.

Everyday my couch ends up looking like this on the floor.  It becomes a nest or fort of some kind.  One day it became a book nook and they both took a bunch of library books in and read for a while...

Jay can read a lot of words on his own.  I heard him reading this book to himself from the library books.

We found mushrooms in the backyard under ours and the neighbor's trees!

We had a fun week at tot school and even made it to visit a our first great lake to play in the sand and water :)  Go see what others did for Tot School.