Fall Curriculum Week 4

I’ve noticed, in the four weeks we’ve been doing this, that we have rarely done the activities on their assigned days. It’s good to have a plan, but some days Joe is more interested in finding bugs and others he wants to pretend we are monsters, so I juggle things around a bit.

Every day we learn our letters, practice numbers and look up facts about a certain bug…these special activities are a bonus. So rather than have this be a schedule for us to try (and fail) to follow, I’m turning it into a hot sheet of activities. Here we go!

Math Activity
We were eating at a restaurant and I was making a taco for Joe. I was scooping taco meat into the tortilla and heard Joe go “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7” and then I stopped because the taco was in danger of falling apart.

This was a big lesson for me. Normally he only gets to 3 and starts calling out random numbers like at a bingo hall, “5, 7, 19, 17, 419!” If I show him a number, he will tell me what it is, but getting him to count is frustrating for both of us. Apparently when he’s not told to do something, he’ll do it on his own.

So…since he loves chopsticks, I am going to take an empty egg carton, some colorful poms and a pair of chopsticks and ask Joe to count each pom he gets in the carton. He loves picking things up with his “popsticks” so this will help with hand-eye coordination too.

Language Activity
Joe has shown a big interest in tracing letters. He surprised me a bit when he was able to write his name on his Thanksgiving placemat. Granted, the handwriting was worse than a doctor’s and the e was backwards, but the scribbles resembled the actual letters I told him too much to be a coincidence.

He loves tracing letters and got upset when he finished all the letters in the Sesame Street Elmo Letter book we have. With my husband’s help, I made a slide in PowerPoint of the entire alphabet so he can trace to his heart’s content. 

Alphabet PPT

Science Activity
I had forgotten about all of the books I got at garage sales and from friends over the summer. I found one full of science projects so I’m going to pick one of them to do with Joe this week. They are all pretty simple but fun for a 3 year old and his mom.

Craft
Since it is Thanksgiving week, we are going to do hand print turkeys as our craft. Messy and fun, we will put these on the back side of the Thanksgiving placemats we made last week.