Mommy School - Our First Week with a New Schedule

Last week I posted about your new schedule and ideas for Mommy School.  I had one little hiccup to start with and that is the printer.  My printer, despite being a color printer, gets an attitude when asked to print more than one or two pages in color - the pages start to get a really odd discoloration and all kinds of streaks.  I had uploaded them to a zip drive to print at an office store but never made it into town to do so.  I printed the best I could and just did a few at a time :-)

I picked my ideas from over at 1+1+1=1 and started right out with the letter

 This little game was one of Josh's favorite.  I printed two copies of the fruit shapes; one I cut apart and than taped to a piece of white card stock before laminating to make a game board.  The second sheet I laminated, than cut apart for the pieces.  I also put circles of Velcro on the pieces/board so that Josh could stick the pieces on easily.  We played a few different ways - first, I just handed him one piece at a time and he matched them; next, I held up two different pieces and would state the shapes, then ask him to pick a specific shape; finally, I just gave him all the pieces and he played for a good 20 minutes. 

 He's so cute!  He really enjoyed matching the pictures.

 One of the things I mentioned in my first post was focused playtime - here is an example.  We pulled out all of the puzzles; Josh and Nate sat together and worked on putting them together for a long span of time one day.  Nate is getting very good at being able to match the pieces too.  One day, we also practiced cleaning up - we used the dreaded Legos - Josh had already dumped them out once so, we cleaned up; then I let him dump them out again and we sang our clean up song.  We are really working on getting the boys to start cleaning up toys when they are done playing - it is not an easy skill to learn ;-)

 Here we are working on our verse that goes with the letter A.  I didn't get a picture of it but we used little snack puffs on each of the words; than as he would eat a puff, I would try to get him to say the word.  On another day, I used legos and would ask him to pick up the "blue" lego - that way we worked with color and on the words as well.

Another page we did was a coloring page.  I laminated it so we could re-use it but, washable markers don't work well on it.  I may need to get some dry erase markers for him to use on these pages.  I made up all kinds of tunes for "A is for Apple"

So, yes, we had some fun this week. I also enjoyed some play time with the munchkin as well as some book time with Nate.  I really am enjoying this relaxed, yet set schedule and find it easier to get things done.  One other thing I learned - I need to order our library books two weeks in advance, not just one week.  I'm planning on finally getting are "a" books today so we can get busy on reading more books!

The weather didn't cooperate a whole lot so we haven't been outside; Wednesday was really nice but both boys have a pretty nasty cold so I didn't want to take them out in the cool air.  Maybe next week! 

Don't forget to play with your kids today!