Reflections From An Eclectic Homeschooling Mama of 8

My soon to be 5 year old was struggling with number recognition and counting but as of lately he has improved a great deal. I find that he responds well to tactile activity and I'm always looking for fun ways to connect him to the lessons. During my last trip to the Dollar Tree, I found these paper pockets. You usually find these in the backs of library books or in scrapbooking projects. So I whipped up a quick counting activity by writing numbers on the fronts of the pockets and drawing dots on large craft sticks. He can match the sticks with the pockets and he can also line up the sticks from 1-10.  He'll be able to visually see the quantity of dots  increase on the sticks as he lines them up. 

My 20 month old is a very inquisitive young lady. She's absorbing everything around her and learning very quickly. I attribute this to all of the siblings she has surrounding her teaching her all of the time. I often hear them singing the alphabet song or counting to her during casual play and she absorbing it all like a sponge. We've started teaching her colors and so far she has red , yellow and purple down. To make color recognition a fun hands on experience, I made her a color sorting box made out of 1 piece of foam board, packing tape, hot glue and paint samples. The first thing I did was take a glue stick and glue the paint samples onto the foam board. After that I laid 2 strips of packing tape across the paint samples to preserve them. Once that was done, I started cutting pieces for the back and the diving walls. I didn't take any exact measurements. I made my cuts from sight. To make cutting the foam board easier, I laid it on top of a cutting board and made...

I created a color sorting activity about a year ago similar to this except the children used clothespins with the color glued on the back. It  is a great activity which improves color recognition and discrimination and fine motor skills (pincer grasp movement.) My 4 old enjoyed this method, however, my 20 month old wanted to pick the glued colors off of the clothespins so I wanted to created the same type of activity but would stand the test of time and toddlers lol. Instead of using clothepins, I resorted to self adhesive velcro dots which are my go to for  PreK diy projects. You can them at any craft store like Joanns, Michaels or A.C. Moore. I found a seller on ebay that sells them in bulk so you know i was excited about that.  I created  a simple table using Open Office . It is software similar to Word and has most if not all of the same functions and it's free. I used the table function and created to columns. I split one side into 4 vertical cells and...