Cirkis Challenge

A snapshot of their favorite...

A whole lot of loving going on...

The past few days we have been terribly busy doing one heart project after another. Althought most of them last only for a good 10 to 15 minutes or so, still it is nice to see that everone, including my husband is thoroughly involved with the monthly thematic activities. So just what have we been up to?

We don't have that much wall space so I decided to use our window as our theme board.

The children had a blast looking for the 14 hearts and my husband enjoyed practising his origami skills. Although Katie didn't make the origami heart, she sure was delighted to get one from her father.

We also had fun using the popcake maker for the first time. We used a ready-to-bake muffin mix though just to see how it works and had the children decorate it. Served together with warm Milo (chocolate drink) and some heart shaped marshmallows. Food for the soul on a very cold winter season!

Good thing my husband captured Katie's popcake wonder :) Just seeing their enthusiastic faces is enough to say, well worth the money spent.

There's still a lot in store for the children since I finally got their "mail writing station" done. Bought a cheap plastic heart frames and wrote "Guess how much I love you" in the middle. This will be our picture projects for the next few days. It goes well with the book "Guess How Much I love you"(we have the dutch version) that I placed on a bin together with the heart frame. I'll definitely post pictures soon. Another thing I am excited to do with Katie is the valentines kiddie sudoku that I prepared. I still have to see how she would fare with this activity, a wee bit of a challenge I think but after playing CirKis then I think she will just be fine.

Autumn work table

I did say that I will be explaining what is on the children's work table so here is the first part. For the month of October we focused on Autumn as our theme. The children loved picking up dried leaves and placed them in their season tray (in this case it was a steel bin that a friend of mine gave). To introduce one-to-one correspondence I decided to convert two of my Hors d'oeuvre trays- one I used to place the cut-outs (shadow leaves, small cut-outs of leaves and small paperclips). The other I used as the sorting tray. I used foam number stickers for each container and recycled the expired coffee beans of my husband for their one-to-one correspondence activity. For Katie the learning goal is of course more complicated with the extension activity as counting and then adding two containers.

Here are some pictures of Katie doing the extension activity:
Not a good photo though of her doing the one-on-one counting task :/

In the addition part, I helped her do the first few equations the last one she tried on her own :)



I wouldn't want to finish this blog without mentioning the shadow leaf board and count and clip activity that you can see from the picture of their work table. These activities along with a lot of exciting work sheets on autumn was taken from 2 Teaching Mommies. Be sure to check out their collection of Fun Seasonal Themes!