Our first day of school with school pictures.

We started school today. Here is J hard at work on drawing his Creation picture and writing his name.



E working on phonics/spelling.



G and W playing with the tot book games I made for Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see?



This is something new I am trying this year. I have found two sites that have lots of fun activities that work with different children's books. W loves Brown Bear, Brown Bear Tot Books has lots of cute ideas on making "tot books" which are a spin off of lapbooks. I modified this so that I made the individual parts of the "tot book" but decided to just keep them stored in library pockets for now. I may change my mind in the future and actually make a "tot book" but it worked better today for me to be able to give W an individual activity rather than all of them at once.



These are the individual games that I made for the books. As you can see, W wasn't the only one that enjoyed these activities.



J was playing with the "head and tail matching game" and came up with making funny animals, like a "cat fish" and a "flying fish". He has a vivid imagination!

Another site I love is Making Learning Fun I downloaded the M&M Sorting mat and also made the "I Spy" bottle for Brown Bear, Brown Bear. W wasn't as impressed with the "I Spy" bottle and we haven't used the M&M mat because I forgot to pick up M&M's at the store.

Overall we had a good first day of school. The boys did great and I figured out I have to do a better job of planning when they will do certain things since I had several incidents of all of them needing my help at the same time. I spent some time this afternoon working on a schedule so hopefully they will be able to rotate working with me and working independently. We will see how that works out tomorrow.

I am hoping to post there "school" pictures Grammy took later this week and also to post pictures of my Craigslist couch score that I am giving a makeover. Lots of fun things going on at our house right now.