A holiday traditions that we have kept up on *most years* is wrapping one book a night to use during our advent time! The kids enjoy opening a new book each night and I enjoy it NOT being candy or some crazy craft/activity we have to do each night. So for the years we want something a little more slow paced, a simple story each night is quick and easy to manage.
Here is a list of Christmas Holiday themed books we can't WAIT to add to our collection. Bear Stays Up for Christmas Dasher: How a Brave Lilttle Doe Changed Christmas Construction Site on Christmas Night A Royal Christmas to Remember Merry Christmas Amelia Bedilia Jesus, God's Great Gift Level 2 The Legend of the Christmas Cookie How to Catch a Snowman
There are SOOOO many more to add, but these are at the top of our list this year.
I typically try to choose timeless pieces that our family will love reading again and again. Occasionally I do add ones that my kids will really enjoy now, even though I know won't last forever. You can find so many of these books at Christian Book or Amazon. Have you read any of these? What do your kiddos think of them? Do you have any other "must have" holiday reads to suggest? We'd love to hear from you below! Check out this post about how I transform our kids nook into a Holiday themed space and display our Christmas books just for the kiddos!
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During our Science Fair theme we got this awesome book from Mother Goose Time, Ingenuity. I am a huge fan of the books that we receive each month and I LOVE that they always integrate so well into our theme. The illustrations are fun and the stories are easy for the kids to comprehend! A lot of the books from Mother Goose Time have different learning levels! From simple to read lines to in depth ideas and concepts to discuss with the children. The book Ingenuity, takes our young learners through many scientific principles. The book teaches them about many of the great minds who established laws of science as well many other great scientific achievements. Here are a few pages about Isaac Newton. The kids enjoy the illustrations because they are fun and inviting! Alfred Nobel I really like when stories have interactive capabilities. For instance this page has a section where you are asked to find the matching pairs of rhyming words. These engage the kids more in the story. Albert Einstein I wanted to note something that I really enjoyed about this story. The authors started each scientist's story out at a point in their lives when they were children. I feel like this helps kids to relate to the scientist and see that they started as kids too and grew into great scientists. Thomas Edison Another favorite aspect of mine in this book... the quotes! There are quotes through the book from each of the scientist discussed. Rachel Carson You can see shortened the sections our "notes bout this book" were referring to. The bolder text are the shortened version of the book that you can read for younger groups. Did I mention I love the illustrations! Too cute <3 I love this "call to action" on the last page! The last three sentences encourage the kids and remind them that they if they put their minds to something they can do great things. What do you think?! I'm so thankful Mother Goose Time sends us a new book every month! The kids love them and I enjoy incorporating them into our lessons.
Next week we will be leaving on a family vacation and I have been planning plane activities and some stuff to bring for L-Bug to do in our room so she isn't bored or always watching TV. I am super excited with the way these actives came out and how simple everything was to put together. It took me probably 30mins to gather all the stuff and put them in the bags! I ended up with seven activity bags but they can all be use multiple times and some have more than one game or activity. I used quite a few different bag types to fit the different materials. The left bag is a draw string bag. I needed a larger bag for this activity because of the size of the mail carrier. This is a simple lacing art activity from Mother Goose Time! Then it turns into a game Bug can play to deliver mail to all of our family and friends cruising with us. On the right I used a random bag I already had. Our vacation week we are working on reading -at words. So I included a Mother Goose Time "I Can Read" book and the Your Baby Can Read flash cards. We have been using these flash cards with our basic reading words and L-Bug has been doing GREAT!
I decided to throw in this fun travel kit I got at Costco. She used it on our last plane ride and it was easy and fun for her to play with. There are dry erase cards(numbers and letters), a work book, coloring pages, flash cards, etc.. It fold ups pretty tight and is easy to carry. Above are all seven bags packed with their activities! Everything fit nicely inside a regular size school bag and I had room in the front zipper pocket to slip L-Bugs Innotab and games into. I used another pencil pouch for all the game so they weren't just loose in there and added extra batteries too. I was inspired by this micro-training video that Mother Goose Time did a while ago! When I was watching it I immediately thought of our upcoming trip and the two long plan rides we were going to be on! Not to mention those times when we will be in our cruise stateroom getting ready for dinner or something and L-Bug will need something to do.
This interactive manipulatives board is seriously one of the best additions to our school room! This month I got the idea to add magnetic pieces to the back of our Mother Goose Time story board pieces. Now the kids can put them on the board and tell the story!
As soon as everyone had a little time playing with the board together we sat in a circle around the board and I had one person at a time tell us a story! Some mimicked my picnic story, others talked about Granny taking a nap, and we even had one story with Big Bad Wolf eating all the lunch.... :P
This week the kids were really into stories! So I grabbed up a few of our "I Can Read" Books from our past Mother Goose Time kits and we did a word find. The kids had fun telling me the stories and then hunting for their special arrow word! KK was very into hunting for the word! She was so good at it :) Every time they would find the word we would shout it out! I think that may have been the best part of the activity for some of them! I got the fun idea after watching this micro-training from Mother Goose Time! Within the next few weeks I'll have a post about busy bags like this that I plan to create for my own daughter :)
With school starting up all of the older kiddos have pretty much headed off to school... this brought me to a whole new world of TWO's! It's exciting but kind of scary at the same time. We're taking August to test the waters and see what the kids are going to enjoy doing and I think working with all of our ABCs is the perfect way to get a feel for where everyone is! Tot-School is how I'm looking at this "semester". These guys are all a little young for Preschool material, but tot-school is full of sounds, singing, and sensory! A to Zoo animals is sure to be a hit here at Kiddie Korner! I'm in love with the fun book that was included in our Mother Goose Time curriculum box! And I combined our manipulative counting animals from this month with ones we've collected from previous months. It's going to be fun to pull the box of these out for the kids to play with while I read the A to Zoo story book to them! I really enjoy the way these pages are set up. The letter is big and obvious. The easy to read and understand sentence is in LARGE text "A is for aaah-aaah alligator". For the younger two's that's all they care about! Reading that tiny text to them is a little much... honestly they don't care about hearing too much more about the alligator. Sometimes we make the animal sounds and they laugh and giggle at that. Now, when I have an older crowd (like my daughter), they enjoy hearing the different facts about the animals! So that additional info is great. While we were reading the book I gave the kiddos some of the animals to hold. When I got to an animal they were holding I would say "who has the {Kangaroo}?" Whoever had it would hold it up and repeat the sentence with me. They LOVED this part of interactive story time!
This week we had lots of new friends at Kiddie Korner! I had a full house multiple times throughout the week and we sure did have fun :) The kids got to watch this video of our caterpillars making their cocoons over the weekend. They were excited to see all of our friends tucked away and sleeping!
We also talked about the colorful wings we were already starting to see inside of the cocoons! Sure enough they came out that same day! The rest came out yesterday and a few of the kids were here to watch it. They were in awe of the emerging butterflies. We talked a little about how we got our caterpillars just a few short weeks ago and how quickly they grew, created their cocoons and turned into butterflies! It has been fun hearing the kids talk about their observations and explaining metamorphosis to them. The kids had a blast playing this Mother Goose Time game! I had an "-ug" butterfly and there were several caterpillars in the middle of the table. Each child got one letter, we used their letter to build a word "h" + "-ug" = HUG. We would all sound out the word. The kids had so much fun scrambling through the pile and finding their caterpillars after we built the word :) My little emerging readers! It has also been a hot week! We had a blast at the water park this week. The kids enjoyed running in the water and hanging out in the sunshine at the park :)
The girls learned about pairs this week! They enjoyed a few great activities that helped them to strengthen this new concept. We played a really fun "Mommy & Me" matching game. Here I gave them each the baby animal cards all lined up and then they I asked them to make a pair by matching the babies with their mommies.
Another lesson we had about pairs that the girls both seemed to enjoy was during our Bilingual Book activity! Each month we get a handful of great bilingual resources in our Mother Goose Time curriculum box. They have sparked many conversations with L-Bug about both German and Italian. While we lived there my husband and I picked up a few phrases that just, sort of stuck! I have used them quite often with L-Bug and she has even said them to us at different times. These bilingual activities open their minds to the ideas of cultural differences. We typically pick one of the words from each month to focus on. For instance the word abeja or bee. When talking about bees sometimes I will sub the Spanish word abeja and the girls have begun to pick it up already. Some words are hard for them to pronounce, BUT the fact is that they hear it and they try! So... that was a little off track! Haha Just some great info I wanted to share :) Now onto our activity that involved finding pairs. As we read through and colored our bilingual books we were on another kind of search! A search for letter pairs. On my white board I had written a few words and then I showed the girls how to circle letter pairs. Then I had them looking for pairs on the pages.
I also wanted to share my newest little update to our circle time area. I haven't used this blue stand since I got our new wall calendar. But the other day while cleaning I pulled it out and realized it was the solution to one of my biggest frustrations! I have been trying to find a good way to store our monthly concepts where the kids could see them and where I could refer to them regularly. I moved "Mother Goose's Learning Nest" onto the blue stand, the I utilized the plastic slots to add all of our lovely concepts for the month! On the top row I have our vocabulary words. The girls knew 4/6 words when I but them up, but having them displayed here we have talked about them several times this past week and they are now remembering moth and wasp more easily! They may not be able to READ or WRITE the words, but seeing images and the words together help them to build their vocabularies! I also included our friends from around the world, our friendly bee and our shape on the other slots. Behind Mother Goose's nest are our letters as well as our concept builder cards which have our letters, numbers, shape and color on them!
L-Bug is a bit young to start reading words, BUT I think one of the first steps towards reading is letter recognition. L-Bug had such a fun time playing this letter game today where she fed Mr. Elephant leaves. Mr. Elephant could only eat leaves with the letter <E, e> on it. If it was an S, s or Z, z then L-Bug had to put them in a separate pile. Each time she turned over a leaf L-Bug would say the letter and then put it in the appropriate pile or let Mr. Elephant eat it! Even though L-Bug can't read she can match! She loves the little "I Can Read" books that come in our Mother Goose Time curriculum. She loves using the sight word pointers while we read through the book. I have her use her left hand to point to the words as we read the lines and when one of the sight words comes up she grabs the matching pointer and grins as she lines it up! L-Bug loves going to the box in our reading corner and pulling out her "I Can Read" books. Sometimes she pulls out sight word pointers and tries to find the matches in the book, she'll ask me "what does this one say again?" and then she says the word over and over as she searches for it in the books!
Like I wrote a few posts back L-Bug has learned so much during the first half of our 2015/2016 school year. She continues to grow and learn and surprise me! As fun as it is watching her learn it keeps me on my toes. Always looking and learning new ways to challenge her so that she will continue learning! The past few months she has really blossomed when it comes to learning her letters! She can sing nearly 3/4 of the alphabet on her own and she has been recognizing more and more written letters. Over our winter break I took some time to read and learn about children's learning habits and how to expand on them! I'm very excited to begin a few new things this last half of the school year. I'm hoping that they will continue to challenge her learning and help her to grow! One of the things I'm chasing in our School Routine is our Concept Introductions! Each month we introduce a new color, shape, numbers and letters. To make letters and numbers more fun we are going to do different games on Intro and Review Days! I found that because we have used the Mother Goose Time Curriculum for over a year we have built up quite an amazing stock of resources and tools to help reinforce the learning and there are different games for her to play. Our concept Intro today was the letter Ss, so I started out by having L-Bug put together her alphabet puzzle. I told her that one piece was missing. I helped her name all of the pieces as she put them onto the board. At the end she found that the letter S was missing! Next she pulls out her work box drawer and found her alphabet mat, the missing puzzle piece and her Ss stick! I told her we were going to sing the alphabet song. Once we got to the letter S she was going to yell the letter and jump up and down. We did the song three times with a different action each time, i.e. whisper and spin, monster-voice and roll... she loved it and was happy to sing the song again and again. While we sang I had her help me point to the letters on the paper. Then I gave her the stick and said we were going to find the letter S around our school room! Both the alphabet house poster and the letter flip strip are from past months that came with our Mother Goose Time curriculum. It was nice to be able to incorporate them in today's lesson! Her next work box drawer had the letter flag and cards for the month in it! Along with our Phonics sound key. L-Bug loves the letter sound song. I used the letter cards to have her identify the capital letter S and the lower case letter s. Since we had done the SEE part of our learning for the letter S I had her use the alphabet key to HEAR the letter S sound song. Then I had her turn over the letter cards in her box and we talked about words that begin with the letter S: suitcase, star were on the cards. We came up with sun, sky, soup, etc. We sounded out the S at the beginning of each word as we said them. Finally I worked on WRITING the letter S with L-Bug. I used a white board to demonstrate how to write the letter. I had her sit in my lap while I guided her hand through dots that I made and had her trace them. Then I gave her a page to do out of a new fun work book I got for her. A Sesame Street Color, Letter and Number Preschool workbook :) She loved it and was very excited to do it! Our concept intro took up the whole morning half of our school day, but I was pleased with the way it turned out! Seeing, Hearing, Saying and Writing a letter are all important part of learning it.
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Proud supporter of Mother Goose Time curriculum!All the posts in this blog are from real life experiences. We've taken the activities and materials provided in the Mother Goose Time curriculum and modified it in different ways to fit our lifestyle. Enjoy the read!
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