Teaching the Twins

I have been teaching the twins for a couple of months now, and now that I have worked out some of the bugs, I am ready to share.  I knew that one of the big reasons that I wanted to stay home with the twins this year was to teach them.  I had felt a lot of guilt while I taught my high schoolers.  I felt like I poured so much effort into helping them to learn, what would happen if put in the same kinda effort with my own kids.  So, here it goes! 

How it started...

I researched preschool curriculum for 2 year olds online and I found a few websites that I liked.  On one of them, it gives you a 26 week introductory curriculum where you introduce the letters, colors, shapes, numbers, and you do a weekly theme.

http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html

However, I don't follow this website exactly.  I tried to initially, and then I realized that it would be less frustrating for me and more meaningful if I changed parts of it to teach them about things that they were showing more interest towards. This website is usually the one I consult first and it gives me my direction. The thing I like the most from this website is the learning poster.  Here are some pictures of what mine have been looking like.

The thing I like about having a learning poster is that we have a place that we go and regroup on what we have been learning.   I like to go around the house and gather up books that relate to the theme. 

 Sometimes I do the themes on the website if I like them.  I did jungle, cats, and eyes themes, but when I got to week 5, I did not like the lighthouse theme so, i just decided we would just learn about different things that started with the letter E.  So, we spent a day talking about Elephants and then we went to see them at the San Diego zoo.  We talked about Elmo and made an Elmo project.  Then there are days during the week that we focus more on the shape or number.  During E week we even dressed up like E items (thanks to some old Halloween costumes....REALLY OLD if you check out my son in the Elephant costume.)  He told me after the picture that his butt hurt.  Looking at the picture, you can see why!

 I will show you were I found these projects we're making on the next blog when I show you how I plan my lessons.  We now save all of our toilet paper rolls and paper towel roles!

 These letter theme sheets come from another website I like.  I will also talk more about them on my next blog.

 Here is the elephant visit!  They were so excited.

As they were exploring this elephant statue,  Jaelyn was very proud when she discovered the ELEPHANTS NIPPLE!   ahahahahah! 

This last week, I really got into the letter F. Monday was Frogs and we did frog projects and pages and read books about frogs. 

 They are so jazzed up about the letter F into talk upstairs that Jaelyn wanted to wear all flowers, and since Kaden has no flower clothes, we wore this flower head band of Jae's from last Easter.  He was pretty pumped about it.

 First we painted the frog puppet that we were making.

 While those were drying, we made our toilet paper roll "classic."  BONUS this one had a fly with the frog (2 "F" words.)

 Once the frog parts had dried downstairs, we pieced them together and the kids ran around the rest of the day saying, "Ribbit, Got you, Fly!"  and snapping it at each other and other objects around the house.

Tuesday, was Fish.  So, we read the rainbow fish and then made our own Rainbow fish out of coffee filters and markers and pasted on 6 scales (since 6 was the number of the week).  At lunch we ate fish crackers (goldfish), flower cheese (using flower shape cookie cutter and some Kraft Singles), and we ate fruit.  We even had fudge for desert.  Then we went to the Koi Pond and fed the fish and walked through the Petco in the same shopping center. 

 This was a cool idea, but I think most of the juice was gone out of the markers.  If we had some newer markers I think they would have looked more like the Rainbow Fish from the book.

 Kaden noticed these "Faaaaa   Flowers."  at the Koi Pond.

They were so pumped when they saw the "Nemo" fish at Petco.

The rest of the week we did similar things with Flowers, and Fruit.  I will talk more about them on the next blog.


Also, I will post more about how I find the projects and letter sheets to go with the theme posters.   I am toying with the idea of posting what we do daily.   Not only would it provide a record of what we did for the kids to see some day, but if there are any other mom's out there that want to "steal" ideas, they can feel free to do so.