Number Wheel

Chasing Cheerios recently shared this Number Wheel from www.homesschoolshare.com

I printed and laminated it & then went to the dollarstore in search of wooden clothespins that I could write on. Instead I found these adorable plastic ones. And you know? I think maybe a little craftiness is rubbing off on me from all of the blogs I've been reading lately, because I thought of the idea all on my own (haha :) to gluegun these foam hearts onto the clothespins since I couldn't write the number on like you could with wooden ones.


I was pretty happy with how they turned out & I'm excited to see what Talia thinks of them. I'm thinking that when she gets tired of using them to count with, I could teach her about odd & even numbers by the white & pink hearts.

Homemade Advent Calendar

Today we made ourselves an advent calendar!!

I got the idea from Filth Wizardry, and posted about it in my Christmas Ideas post a few days ago.

Preparation:

-On Saturday, Talia & I went to a local restaurant supply store and picked up some plastic shot glasses.
-Over the last couple of days, we've been making paper snowflakes.

Process:

1. I cut a piece of tinfoil for Talia to wrap around a piece of cardboard.
2. Together, we taped it onto the back
3. I cut a piece of blue construction paper, Talia covered one side with glue, I stuck it to our shiny board.
4. We decorated with some of our previously made paper snowflakes (we took turns gluing- she was getting tired of it, but wanted to direct my placement ;).
5. I glue gunned the cups to the paper
6. We took some computer time and we decided who she wanted to make Christmas cards for this year. I told her how to spell their names, she typed them out. We printed the page, I cut the names out. She folded the names & put them in the cups.


7. We got a chocolate advent calendar and had fun opening all of the doors in one shot, to get the chocolates out and put them in our own calendar :)

8. While she napped, I stamped the tissue paper with numbers and glued it onto the tops of the cups, so that she could break the tissue paper with her finger and get out the candy and the name each day of December.

(The plan is to make one Christmas card each day, so that she doesn't get sick of making a bunch in a row.)

Alternatives:

I also thought of putting a paper in each cup listing the activity for the day, but I can guess that we'll end up switching things around, so for us, that wasn't the best choice :)

I have seen this idea used as a way to put left over Hallowe'en candy to use as well. You can use it for the month of November if you're doing that, or make a giant one that goes from Hallowe'en to Christmas!

Calendar

Today's project with my preschooler was to make a calendar.We made a calendar of the days left in September & the rest of October. The point was to show her the days of the week, and to let her have her own calendar that she could count down to special events with.


She chose the sticker colour for playgroup & ballet class and put them on the calendar, then we chose special stickers for friends visiting, Grandma coming, etc.

She chose to hang it on the dishwasher, and is excited to show it off to everyone!


Observations:

She didn't seem to "get" the order of the boxes.

Writing the numbers on each day was an opportunity to discuss counting.

Things I Would Change:

I'm thinking of cutting the weeks out & pasting them onto a separate paper, to help her to understand the order of the days.

Could have let her write the numbers on the days & spent more time discussing the numbers & counting.