With Thanksgiving, some colds and general blah beginning of my third trimester, I didn’t get much blogging done and was pretty relaxed in my approach to homeschooling.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission.
We did our typical weekly activities as the days went on, and of course tried to squeeze in as many outings as possible.
Thanksgiving was the last weekend that African Lion Safari was open, so we made sure we squeezed in one last visit before the season ended. Fortunately, with the extended summer weather this fall, we had a beautiful sunny, warm day to enjoy the animals and activities once more.
We also had a few extra visits to Grandma’s house and had her come visit too. Not only was it great for the kids to have extra Grandma time, but also I got to take some much needed naps! Win – win for all!
I also took advantage of a Groupon local deal sale, and picked up a few discount passes to Ray’s Reptiles. This proved to be an awesome morning trip. We went during the week, so there were only a couple other families there, which gave my kids the opportunity to explore the facility at their own pace and irrational pattern. The kids loved seeing the animals and especially loved the interactive learning sessions. They got to pet spiders, snakes, lizards, bunnies and even a baby sloth! It turned out to be a great day! Of course, it’s totally worth the full price admission, but as a one income family, I’m so glad I bought a few discounted passes, so we can go back again!
Since the weather was beautiful, we took advantage of all the warm sunny days we got, with lots of backyard play!
During this time, my little guy took a keen interest in subtraction and math worksheets. I initially gave him a couple of worksheets to give me a few minutes to get some stuff done, and as it turned out, he loved them. A simple pinterest search of preschool math and subtraction worksheets, gave me a plethora of free downloads that my little guy devoured.
I took advantage of my little guy’s obsessed with Pokemon, to give him lots of Pokemon related activities so he would happily work independently. Of course, he did a number of Pokemon toilet paper roll figures courtesy of dltk kids, but I also gave him a few other things to do.
The first was Alphabet Go from totschooling. Although alphabet matching is something he mastered a couple of years ago, he still loves anything to do with letters, so this was a super fun activity! He loved ‘catching’ the Pokemon by matching the letter on the creature to the one on the ball.
The biggest hit, however, was a Pokemon categorization activity I created. To begin with, I printed off all the Generation 1 Pokemon images found at merryprintables and then laminated them. Then, I simply grabbed some paper and folded each page into 8ths. In each square, I put a different category. So, he had various pages to categorize the Pokemon in different ways.
The first series focused on the colours of the Pokemon. So, he put all of the red Pokemon in one square, the blue in another, the purple in another and so on. This of course didn’t take long, but was fun for him.
Then, he organized the Pokemon by type. So all of the Fire Pokemon went in one square, the Water in another, the Rock in another, etc. This was one he really enjoyed, and I was quite impressed at his knowledge of the different Pokemon types. He also had a lot of fun looking up the types for the various Pokemon he was unsure of.
The final organization was alphabetical. Again, I divided up the sheets and in each square put a letter of the alphabet. He then went through and put all of the Pokemon in their respective starting letter (so all the Pokemon that started with A went in the A box; B in the B box; C in the C box and so on).
After he completed all of the categories I created, he asked me to make him more divided sheets of paper and in each box he proceeded to write a number. He wrote out all of his numbers to 150 and then placed each Pokemon in a different box. He seriously spent an entire rainy day organizing and categorizing Pokemon over and over again.
With the success of the Pokemon organization, I decided to pull out some Counting Rainbow Bears and this printable from momsinspiredlife. Both kids loved organizing the bears by colour and then placing them on the appropriate coloured spot on each strip. The two year old enjoyed counting with the mats, but lost interest before completing all of them. She did however, really enjoy following the colour patterns on this printable from teachingmama.org.
So despite the busyness of a holiday weekend and a nasty cold bug that knocked us out for over a week, we still managed to have lots of fun and learning!