The Connett Connection

Another week done.  I did not get very many pictures for this week, but I will share what I have! We are continuing on with our word families, now working on the -an family.  Here is the -an family flower my daughter made.  She was in a hurry to get it done as she was with grandma this day and really wanted to play.  Usually she loves these kind of crafty activities. We also did our -an family CVC puzzles to help reinforce the words and sounds we were focusing on this week. We baked some homemade from scratch chocolate chip peanut butter oatmeal cookies to take to a fellowship time at church.  My daughter was so excited to help until she saw me put in the oatmeal.  "You put oatmeal in the cookies?!  That's disgusting!"  She refused to even try one!  It's ok though.  Her brother was more than happy to eat her share. If you follow us on Instagram , you will know we have started out first garden this year.  My da...

Play dough mats are a great hands on way for young children to learn letter, number and sight word recognition.  You may think play dough mats are just a tool children can use play dough on to make the shape of the letters or numbers on the mat.  That is true.  Children use play dough to form the letters, numbers or words on their mat.  This only scratches the surface of ideas to use with these mats!  Now, lets try thinking outside the box for other ways to use these mats in the classroom, other than the standard play dough! One of the simplest, and cleanest, ideas for play dough mats is to simply let the children use their fingers to trace the letters.  By using their hands to trace the letters, numbers or words, they are creating muscle memory to allow them an easier transition to writing later on. Another fun idea is to use classroom manipulatives to cover the mat.  Above we used the circle pieces from our attribute blocks to fill ...

We had another short week this week as my girl left this morning for a trip to see her great-grandmother.  We started 2 new units this week and had some fun activities to go along with them! The first new unit we started was learning about land forms.  I had not really prepared any in depth lessons on this subject and only planned to introduce the concepts and different types through pictures.  After looking at the pictures I thought I needed a way to at least test whether she understood, so I made these simple sheets for her to draw a picture.  We did 3 land forms on each sheet. Here is another fun craft that I found on pinterest!  She LOVED stamping her hearts to make this picture. The second new unit we did this week was to start our word families.  I plan to complete 1 word family a week with her.  This week was the -AT family.  She made this -AT family flower to introduce the words. We used this -AT family sentence mat ...

We started the week with the flu.  My youngest had the flu all week long and is just now starting to feel better.  I hate when the little ones are sick.  Despite the sickness, we did get some school time in.    We did a variety of Valentine's Day crafts this week!  To learn more about the different projects as well as other Valentine's Day crafts, check out THIS POST ! We started practicing addition fluency this week.  My daughter can answer 50 math problems in 5 minutes!  We started with sums 5 and under.  Next week, we will mix in sums of 10 and under!  Once she can do 50 in 5 minutes we will move on to bigger sums. My two year old was really interested in school this week.  He painted a Valentine's Day craft (see the heart above) and we learned that eyes starts with the letter E!  We use a letter outline to complete this activity.  I cut out the eyes and he glued them on his E! My daughter we...

With Valentine's Day right around the corner, check out some of these Valentine's Day crafts and activities we have been doing at our house! The first craft we did was one my daughter begged to do off of pinterest.  So we stopped what we were doing and started our craft! This cute heart fish was the result of our pinterest search! We used a heart template to create this simple craft.  I gave my daughter pink, red and purple crayons and colored paper squares and told you to make whatever she wanted with these materials. My daughter loved this activity!  I gave her white and red paint with pom poms and had her dot paint all over her paper.  We then removed the paper heart from the middle to reveal this beautiful heart picture! We also made a fun heart card symmetry craft by putting red and white paint dots on a paper heart. We folded the heart in half and squished it together.  We then opened up to reveal our design! With this ...

Sickness hits our home again on Monday.  It was a bad morning but thankfully only one kid was sick and no one else succumbed to the illness. My daughter is quite excited about loosing her first tooth.  She does not even have a loose tooth yet, but since her cousin has lost several she is now convinced she will loose one soon.  I had not planned to playing tooth fairy for my kids, but my niece convinced my daughter there is one and she couldn't be more excited about it.  Since she shares a room with her brother, we decided to make a tooth fairy box so I do not have to sneak into her room and risk waking them both up. We started our Valentine themed activities this week.  Above are sight word cards to practice spelling sight words. I was scrolling pinterest looking for some fun crafty activities and my daughter saw this craft and HAD to do it! She begged to complete the fish from pinterest.  I told her if we have all the materials, we co...