The Tot Box

Maggie has been enjoying Tot School quite a bit. I have found quite a few wonderful websites along the way to give me more ideas and to help create some things that would be much cheaper then if I bought them. Child Care Land has alot of free printables on their website for preschoolers. Including number cards, file folder games, printable table mats and more. I decided to print some lacing cards and laminated them with packaging tape. Yes, you heard that right. Packaging tape. I have found it alot less expensive and just as durable to use as regular contact and laminating paper.
So began Tot Box. Tot Box is our wonderful items I bring out when I am doing school with Maggie's older sisters. This keeps her busy for a little while and for the most part. In her Tot Box I added in the two Tot Books that I have made. Then her lacing cards , traceable sheets which again I laminated with packaging tape and we use Washable crayons. The sheets I found where from Just Mommies.com and Kidzone.com . We experimented with dry erase marker but that was way to messy. Also in her box I included her unifix cubes. Maggie loves to make lots and lots of towers and some paper along with her crayons that we bought at Once Upon a Child. They are neat as they are triangular in shape. Her file folder games are included and her Color Forms that someone from our homeschool group gave us. She loves the Color Forms. I plan on adding more items to her Tot Box but this is what we have so far, and I think we may just need a bigger box. But for now Maggie is enjoying all these fun items in her box.

Christmas For VACTERL

Since this is the wonderful holiday season it definitley is the time for learning to give then to recieve.
Right now a friend of a VACTERL family is running in a marathon in Dallas and she will be giving all donated monies to the VACTERL Network. This is such a wonderful gift as the VACTERL Network is such a wonderful family resource. Every other year families from all over the world (literally) get together and talk and chat and compare notes. Its a wonderful three days to get to feel like your finally not alone in the world and your surrounded by people who totally understand what you go through.
Children with VACTERL are like snowflakes. Each and every single one of them have different health problems. But the one thing that we all do have in common is we understand what it is like to deal with multiple medical things.
So in the spirit of the season please stop on over and donate as much or as little as you would like. It started off being for just our friend's little boy but it has turned into so much more.
Again all money donated will go to the VACTERL Network and all monies will be used to make next year's conference possible and hopefully will keep the prices down to a minimum so that everyone
who wants to be there can be.

Click on VACTERL Marathon to donate now!!

Japan Stick book and Hannah's Sentence Book

Thought I would share a few pictures of our Japan stickbook that we made this week and Hannah's sentence book. These two items followed the K12 curriculum.
For our Japan stick book this is what we used :
1. The cover is cardstock with a red circle traced from an old DVD.

2. The first page is an outline map of the country of Japan. We had gotten this off of ABC Teach .

3. The second page I drew a mountain and had Hannah cut it out herself and we pasted some white paper on the top for snow. This is Mt. Fugji!

4.The third page I coped from Homeschoolshare from their Chose a Country Lapbook. I used the Famous Artist Hotdog book , The Weather Cone Pocket, and the Capital Matchbook and Graphic.

5. Page 4 is our Crayola Kimono girl and a small hotdog book with clip art of different things found in a Japanese home ( shijo, futon, tea table).

6. Page 5 is a cut out of the Bullet Train (Shinkensan) and the three modes of transportation in Japan ( bike, kago, rickshaw).

7. Page 6 is a Japanese Tea Party invitation and I cut out a picture of the girls having a Japanese tea party. Hannah was dressed up in her "kimono" made from bed sheets and they sat on the floor and had a fun tea party.
Also on that page I printed clip art of a Bento (Japanese lunch box) and had Hannah draw on the inside of what she would put in her Bento box. Then again from Homeschoolshare's Chose a Country lapbook use their recipe holder and copied a recipe for Nikujaga ( Meat and Potatoes ) from Kids Web Japan

8. Page 7 I cut and pasted an image ( I googled it) of the Japanese alphabet. Cut it out , laminated it and stapled it to the top of the page. We then copied a shape book and wrote Hannah's name in Japanese (http://japanesetranslator.co.uk/your-name-in-japanese/ and wrote a small book of all the Japanese numbers and their characters and I had Hannah write each word ( 1 ichi, 2 ni, etc).

9. Page 8 I copied a bunch of clip art and we made a collage of the different sports played in Japan. We read on the Kids Web Japan website about the different sports and I had Hannah paste them in her book.

10. Last but not least is the Samauri coloring sheet. Hannah colored that and we pasted it on the last page. (http://www.coloring.ws/japan.htm )

In the end this was a fun book to make and it was hard to give up because it turned out so nice. But hey , we can always make another one and I'm sure Hannah's teacher will really like this.

I also made a cute little book with Hannah's sentence assignment. I had her write her sentences for each picture that I had in her book and then cut and pasted them into the book. I took a photo of Hannah and used Microsoft word art to make the title of the book.

I made this by cutting a file folder in half and then tracing on construction paper the outline of the pages and glueing them on to have a nice colorful background. I used the other half of the file folder to go inside the book and I used Elmer's Craft Bond Spray Adhesive. I took a paper towel and cut that in half and put it on both sides and sprayed a small amount in the middle of the book and held the other half down until the new pages stuck to the book.

Hope these ideas stem new ones for all of you.

Hello everyone and welcome to Tot School. You can click on the link of the icon on the side bar of our blog here to go there and check it out.
Today we made our very first Totbook. Maggie really enjoyed making it along with Mommy, and I enjoyed making it with her too.
She really liked it and I think it made her feel big like her big sisters.
Here are some pictures.
We made the Noah's Ark Totbook. I made the cover by using Word Art on our Microsoft Word and then finding the clip art from googling Noah's Ark Clip Art.
The inside of the book I cut out the number cards and we sat and counted the animals and noah. I laminated the cards with packaging tape instead of contact paper. This saves alot on contact paper and is much cheaper and sturdier to use. Maggie had lots of fun coloring her color book in the middle and we read the Animal Book about each animal going in the ark two by two.
My next project is to make her letters on bottle tops from water bottles so that she can match them with her name and other words. I will post that when I am done too.
Also I included some pictures of our Matching Colors File Folder games. These are fun and you can find all types of File Folder games for preschoolers that are free to print out online.
Also for good measure I've included a picture of Hannah working on learning ordinal position (1st , 2nd ,3rd).

Katie's Math Mini Office

Well its not to often I do two posts in one day but we completed Katie's mini office today and she wanted to share it.
What is a mini office you ask? Its like a lapbook but is designed like a small office that has information for the child for when it is needed. Its not a cheat sheet. But a reference so it can cut down on that never ending question ... " Mom what does..... mean? Or Mom how do you spell....? The child has the info right there in front of them to reference, and I can continue to teach my other child without being interrupted. Phew! That was long wasn't it?
This turned out really neat and I do need to get a laminating machine for Christmas because I am not good with laminating paper. But this is our first and I'm sure we'll continue to get better with this as time goes on.

The first picture is that of our cover. I traced Katie's Hands and wrote right and left on them. The picture that I printed out was from Busy Teachers Cafe (www.busyteacherscafe.com/resourced.htm

Some of the pictures inside are a mix from Busy Teachers Cafe and Lapbook Lessons Mini Office link (www.lapbooklessons.com/MiniOffice.html )

The only thing I had to do was write a small square for keywords for multiplying and dividing with word problems. I could of typed them and printed it out. But ink is just getting to darned expensive to print out something I can write out.

Get your Christmas Wreaths here !!!!!

Tis the season to start getting ready for the holidays. Right now we are selling Holiday Wreaths for our organization the VACTERL Association. For each wreath sold $6 goes to our group to help with next years VACTERL conference ( what is VACTERL? visit our youngest's website to learn more.... www.caringbridge.org/visit/margaretreed1 ) This helps cut costs of the conference so that other families can attend. And let me tell you when we went last year it was a life saver. To meet other familes that had been were we were going and going where we had been. The wonderful feeling that we weren't alone in the world. I wouldn't take that back for anything in the world.

So with further adue. Please stop by and order on of these beautiful holiday wreaths. I haven't gotten one yet but I've been told that these are wonderfully made and they last the whole season. They have an extended date to November 7th for orders.
Please be sure to put our name ( Tracy Reed ) on the order form somewhere so we can get credit for the sale.

Just copy and paste the link into your browser :
http://sites.google.com/site/wreathsforvacterl/

Letter Book

Here is a neat letter book we found on a website called Kinder Plans (www.kinderplans.com ) if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and clikck on the Zaner Bloser Book -Another Format this cute little alphabet book will pop up. It also has it in Denealian Style writing as well.
I used this to fullfill her requirements for her monthly assigments for our cyberschool. Plus it was much easier then having her write it on paper and sit there and have to have her space the letters out. This way the letters were spaced and she was able to write them neatly. Plus it was an extra bonus for her teacher , because well , teachers appreciate creative stuff. I was able to punch holes on the side and attach a pencil that I cut to fit the book with a rubber band.