D is for Dogs, Dinosaurs, and Donuts

We're a little behind working on our letters because of the farm field trip and having Daddy home all last week. Slowly we've been fitting in new games to play and creating art projects. Making dots with a Q-tip was fun, and using a nontraditional paintbrush was novel and interesting for her.

I had a hard time deciding on one thing to focus on for this letter. I have a lot of fun D is for Dog thematic lessons but around here all dogs are puppies. I thought I'd give it a try anyway, but I in hindsight it would've been best to wait until Letter P to do these activities.
I found File Folder Fun a few months ago, but haven't included them in our curriculum until now. I think their selection has grown in that short amount of time and I noticed they have more games suitable for older children, like a heart contractions game and if you haven't been by it's worth checking out. You can browse their games by subject and age level so it's easy to find what you're looking for. Oh and did I mention their games are FREE to download and print out?

That's where I got the Puppy Fun Matching Game that she's working with above. You're supposed to print two sets, glue one onto a file folder, and then use the other to match them up. I decided a Memory type game would be more fun.

Um yeah, she's still hasn't quite got the hang of the rules. It's amusing to play with her, you of course won't ever get a turn but you'd rather watch her, right? We played with the cards face up; mainly she grabbed them indiscriminately although she did eventually put pairs together, and wow she is NOT into sharing. If you tried to pick up a picture she got very upset, "No mine, my puppy, my puppy...NOT yours! Give it BACK, I need him. I love him," and on and on.

Brad decided we'd model how to play the "right" way and she just couldn't contain herself. How dare Mommy and Daddy have fun with her puppies! She decided she needed to lay on top of the cards and then pick one and then all the rest until she found the match. So much for that! Maybe gluing one set onto a file folder so it would be stationary would've been a better idea after all!

I actually printed out four sets of the cards on cardstock to give them more durability. We used them to make simple patterns with more success. I liked how a variety of dogs were depicted and how they photos were used as the illustrations.

*****Several of people liked the habitat game I made for our first round of at home farm activities, and I noticed on File Folder Fun in the Animal File Folder Games they have similar type activity using very nice photographs.*****
We made a simple book, called Where is the Dog? using clip art on my home publishing program and a dog die cut I have for my Sizzix Sidekick machine. It incorporates a simple sentence and positional concepts such as in, out, on, under etc. I read each page and she added the dog in the appropriate spot. She's putting the dog on the table, in the photo above. Staple them all together and you're done.
A variation on this type of book would be to have one die cut attached to one end of a piece of yarn, with the other end of the yarn taped to the last page of the book. Then your child can have fun putting the dog in the right spot each time your read the book.

ER enjoyed gluing on the dog so much that I die cut some more so she could make a collage of them for a D is for Dog page.
D is also for Dinosaur! I found this size sequencing game called Dino Size also at File Folder Fun. We have a very nice size sequencing activity from Lakeshore Learning that unfortunately is no longer made. You only have to order three things at a time, so it's much easier than this one. ER does pretty well with it, so I thought we'd have a go with this version. I think you can tell how far we've got to go with this skill from the picture above, LOL. We also dug for dinosaurs in our sand table on the deck, an idea I got at our Zoo's Easter event. I forgot to take a picture, but it's easy and she had fun doing it. I hid several little plastic dinosaurs in the sand and then she had to dig them all out. To add some extra learning practice in, I had a check off sheet with ten dinosaur pictures on it; as she found each one we crossed it off. It was probably a little early to do that with her, so I didn't push it but it was a nice visual to show her how many we had left to find. We counted a few times too, but mainly I let her have fun in the sand. We did this more than once and we also made ABAB patterns with our little dinosaur figures.
For D is for Donut, we sang our Down at the Corner song and ate some for snack. No pictures of that, but trust me they were D-licious☺

I've added this post to Ramblings of a Crazy Woman's Friday Showcase, head over there to see more activities to do with your kids.