Preschool: The letter T and what's on our shelves

I'm writing this post a touch late, so I'm not sure if I will be able to remember what we did on a day by day for the letter T. It was an odd week for us that was interrupted by a doctor appointment and colds. Such as it is, this is what we did for the letter T

Monday: We had a doctor appointment right in the middle of school time this day so we kept things pretty short this day. We had some devotion time with our memory verse and a song. I just introduced our new letter and did a sort/review of all the letters we have done so far. Then the kids spent some time doing shelf work until we had to go to our appointment.

Tuesday: We started with devotions and reinforced the letter T with sandpaper letters. We then spent a great deal of time reading books from our T book basket.

Wednesday: I don't typically let the kids watch much TV, but I had a cold this day and was feeling pretty under the weather. My Preschooler slept in late and I let my tot Watched Daniel Tiger to keep him quite. So we ended up watching a couple episodes in the morning before I gathered them to the table to make a T tiger. Our Daniel Tiger toy even joined us.

Thursday: We got to our science lesson Thursday. I used the Bernstein Bears Science and nature book to learn about Trees and we talked a bit about the parts of a tree.

I feel like my shelves fell flat this week. Most activities were done only once, but this may be more due to everyone not feeling well more than anything else. Anyway, here is what we had on our shelves for the letter T:

Scissor Practice: This week I cut out 1" strips of construction paper and drew a line every inch for him to cut. He loved this so much that I had to make more strips for him.

Book Basket: In our basket we had: Little Blue Truck, Bernstein Bears Blaze a Trail, Tiddler, The Tortoise and the Hare, A Tractor book, and Book all about Trucks. At one point this week I found the boys in their room bent over the truck book with the older child telling the younger what each truck was called. (What boy doesn't love trucks?) 

Color Basket: Green. Our color focus this week was Green. I have found the older boys just aren't very interested in this basket most of the time, but when I got it down and specifically spent time with the baby the older boys got involved. I think they just need someone to get them interested. They loved playing with baby brother with these. In the basket I included a texture ball, wooden nut and bolt, velcro pepper toy, egg shaker and the triangle from the shape sorter puzzle I have had on the shelves the last two weeks.

Lacing card (not pictured) I had a little turtle lacing card from Melissa and Doug

Tool Shadow Matching: In the future I will do many more items for matching, this was easy even for my two year old. I basically just outlined each tool with a pen, nothing fancy.

Train Book Basket: My son LOVES Thomas the Train so, as part of our color study I put together a little basket with Thomas and Percy with a couple other little trains and the book Blue Train, Green Train. It's a simple beginning to story baskets I want to eventually do for the kids for them to reenact stories which is a great reading comprehension activity for little ones.

Playdoh Mat: my 2 yo actually used this for playdoh, My preschooler used as a coloring page with a dry erase marker.

'Salt' Tray. I have some shapes and our sandpaper letters for writing in the tray. This actually is cornmeal though since I'm low on salt.

Worksheets: Still a favorite with the big one.

Tree Stacking game. I thought this would be a big hit with the boys. It wasn't really. I will have to try it again some time because it is a great fine motor activity.

Letter item Sort: This is the same as it was last week, just with the addition of the letter T. I have Upper and Lowercase letters and 2 items with the initial letter sounds for the letters we have learned.

Parts of a tree diagram: This is a little diagram I simply cut out of felt. I have roots, trunk, branches and leaves on a frame with a felt back. It was liked, but very easy and didn't hold anyone's attention for very long. I'm glad I didn't purchase one of those expensive puzzles for this lesson. 

Puzzle: I borrowed a puzzle from my parent's house. It wasn't touched by the kids once.

Bead Bars: For this exercise he had to place a rock to indicate the right numeral to go with the amount indicated on each card. Printable is found here

Circle Basket: Still trying to learn circles, I put some circular items in a little basket: a toy cookie, top, coin and canasta.

Build a Truck with Shapes: I don't remember where I found the printable for this one. It was a basic shape matching activity.