Little L is in the phase of enjoying cutting a lot. I have also started reading in English with her so I put together a cutting practice where she can practice cutting and initial sound/letter recognition, too.
I hope your child will like it too. The printable can be downloaded free on the link at the end of this post.
Download your free Earth Day Cutting and Pasting Practice worksheets.
Due to the corona virus’ aggressive spread we’re all home to stay safe and decrease the possibility of infections in our community. Schools and kindergartens have closed down, most of my students have cancelled the lessons and my husband has been in home office.
In this post I’ll collect what we’ve been doing this week. Some activities will have a separate post, you’ll find a link attached. I hope this, and the following posts will give you ideas how to kill time if you’re also staying at home with your kids.
School stuff:
E. got her school material early, at the beginning of the week. We’ve been doing the tasks in Hungarian. We spent about 2 hours on tha tasks in the morning and another 1 hour in the afternoon.
Most of the tasks are paper based, supported with online videos, study apps like learning apps (e.g. German word cards), quizizz (e.g. Maths or reading) from the teachers. She does these game-like studying in the breaks of the paper-based tasks. I caught her doing English quizzes too. 🙂
Little L. also wanted to do some “homework” so I took out some of the old activities I’d made for E. when she was little. Thank God, I have lots of stuff, L. was really busy and quick to solve the tasks. (counting, letter tracing, number recognition, sight words.)
E. and I also made her some new activities in her journal.
E. was more than happy to correct the otherwise perfect solutions. Little L. was very proud of herself.
While E. was working on her Roman numbers (put out with matches),
Little L. did some number activities (you can find them by clicking on the link)
E. had quite a lot of writing practice (they learnt 2 new letters this week), maths (additions and take always up to 12), plus reading tasks. As she is more advanced in her studies I gave her some copying of her choice, reading comprehension tasks (a fairy tale) and I also dictated a “short” letter addressed to her teacher. English writing and reading were scarce, much to my disappointment. We simply didn’t have time for it.
L.’s favourite game was the number puzzle game that I hadn’t written about unfortunately. You can find this activity at this reading mamma ( If you click on the link, you can get your own free printable), we did this activity with E. at about the same age as L. is now.
Free time activities:
E.’s got a new hobby i.e. playing the piano. We checked some English children songs online and she learned them to play. She wrote C D E F G A B C all over the keys and practiced a lot. (Old Mac Donald, Rain, rain go away, Twinkle, twinkle little star, Row, row, row your boat, ABC song, This is the way) and some Hungarian folk songs too (Boci, boci tarka, A part alatt)
A part of E.’s crafts studies we prepared our dreamcatchers and put them in our bedroom. You can find a separate post about it on the link above.
As the weather has been beautifully sunny and warm, we spent most of our time outside gardening, playing games, patting the cat or jumping in the trampoline.
Our old Tray Nature Hunt activity was reloaded. I made new pictures of the collectibles that the girls could find in our garden and the hunt could begin. E. didn’t seem to remember this activity, but who can blame her, she was just 2,5 years old when we did it first. (I’m writing a seperate post about it)
They were very excited and were running around the garden.
At the moment the 2 girls are enthusiastically preparing for their Sunday show. We’re looking forward to it. Mainly because it’s in English.
Stay tuned! I’ll come back with some more next week. Until then you can check my earlier posts. Happy reading and stay at home!
Last year we didn’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day but used the opportunity to do a lot of fun crafts and activities with the symbols of Valentine’s day, like hearts, candies, chocolates etc.
This year I’ve come up with a sensory bin idea for this occasion.
What I used:
What I put in the bin:
E. was pretty excited about the bin as soon as she saw it.
She poured in the extra white rice.
She used the bowls to put in whatever she found. (It was interesting to see that she separated them like hearts, round things like pompoms, bells, and beads all by herself)
She also enjoyed mixing the coloured rice with her hands.
After she’d found and taken out everything she asked Daddy to find what she’d hidden. Then they took turns and did the same again and again.
The next day I gave her 2 sheets with the objects she can find in the bin on the top and she selected them in each column. We did a little counting as well.
On the second day I also added the letter of “I LOVE YOU”
With a little help she could put it together.
She’s been playing with it ever since.
-Mommy, we can play with it on the floor, too – she said and continued down there.
TWO other activities to do with the rice:
What are these? Come back later to check them out. I’ll show them to you in another post.
Whenever we go somewhere we MUST collect something. My pockets are full of stones, acorns, berries and conkers, just to mention a few. One day we visited Margaret-island (a small island on the River Danube, Budapest) and managed to collect tons of different fruit of various trees and bushes.
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| Rose hips, conkers, sycamore “rotors”, pine cones, acorns, London plane seed balls, wild pear, seed pods of China tree |
So during E.’s nap time I put together this tray of all kinds of fruits and a magnifying glass. As soon as she discovered the tray she eagerly examined their texture, the surface and the inside of the fruit.
We collected a full bag of conkers and pine cones, half of which we took to E.’s kindergarten. The other half of cones we’ll use for decoration and Christmas ornaments (see a later post) and the conkers we’ve used to play games with.
I put the conkers in a woven basket and placed the number cards on the table. E. needed to put the right number of conkers below the cards.
When we played this game we’d just returned home from the nursery and changed languages. You can hear in this video how she is mixing English and Hungarian, and also, me asking back “Sorry?” all the time in a silly way 😉
I’ve found a super-cute squirrel grid game on prekinders.com and although we didn’t have enough acorns or walnuts that squirrels love eating, we used our conkers as manipulatives for this game.
E., Daddy and myself played so I printed 3 copies of the squirrel grid (of 20 squirrel) and put LOADS of conkers in a bowl. You’ll need a game die. Of course, the youngest starts the game, throws the game die and identifies the number on it. The player then needs to place the same number of conkers on the grid. We take turns and the winner is who finishes the grid first. (You can play it as an addition game with 2 dice if your child is older. If he/she is younger, you can use a special die with only 1-2-3 on it)
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| I’ll be the winner, not you Daddy. |
Name written in conkers
I prepared my daughter’s name, each letter on a different piece of paper. First, she put the letters in the right order, then following the lines of the letters, she placed the conkers along the lines.
What you need:
Not as good-looking as the original idea, but they represent our family: E. mushroom, Daddy mushroom and Mommy mushroom. (from right to left)
Last year we did some conker threading after making a whole on the conkers with the help of a screwdriver. If you haven’t had enough of conkers, check it out.
What do you play with at autumn time? Share with me in the comments.
As a part of our dental project we did some more tooth crafts, experiments and had a fascinating insight into the structure of a tooth combined with some letter recognition. Here they come:
Colouring:
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| yuckie |
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| munch, munch |
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| They are white again. |
Opening the flaps you can examine the inside of the tooth
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| You can make your own lift-the-flap tooth |
We were talking about it both in English and at another time in Hungarian. E. also examined her own tooth crowns and how they sit in her gum. A funny conversation:
M.: – You see how pink your gum is?
E.:- Yes, but why not… purple?
M.: – Because it would mean your gum is ill.
E.: – But mine is beautiful and healthy.
M.: – Sure it is. You take good care of your gum and teeth.
– Mommy, in the book the bad bacteria goed (sic!) into the dentine to eat it.
As she was really interested and amazed by the task above I thought a bit of letter recognition wouldn’t hurt. I made 4 cards and added some Scrabble letter cubes to them.
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| Busy buddy at work – concentration on maximum |
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| pulp |
She needed to recognise the letters and put them in order. I expected her to ask for help or first I thought we should do this activity together but she did it all on her own… 3-4 times, actually. Then I decided to do the same in Hungarian as well.
Much to my surprise, she noticed that dentine (in English) and dentin (in Hungarian) are the same except for the last letter E. She told me this comparison once at dinnertime. Then we had to list a few words that are similar or the same in English and Hungarian. Mind you, we never compare the two languages, it happened in her head totally by herself.
Our dental project hasn’t finished yet, though we’ll take a break (to spend more time with E.’s new craze/hobby/interest i.e. chess).
But I’ll come back with a compelling science experiment, which still belongs to our dental unit.
Non-native Mommy 