Learning with Toy Story

(30 Months)

I love how wonderful the online homeschooling community is.  They support one another, share what works and are not shy about what doesn't work.  One of my favorite sites is Carisa's 1+1+1=1.  She has incredible preschool theme packs, letter packs and creative art projects.

Since we are working on drawing horizontal and straight lines, the letter T is a great place to start a Toy Story unit.  The kids love Toy Story.  They have several Toy Story books, several of the mini figurines, two of the wind-up toys, and when we flew back home we watched Toy Story together on the plane (Wild One wouldn't take his eyes off the screen, Little Miss watched about five minutes and then wanted to do something else)- so yes, we like Toy Story.  When I came across Carisa's Toy Story unit, I was giddy.  I chose several activities for the kiddies to do, some they loved and others... Well...  Let's first look at what they liked.

Little Miss quickly drew the letter Ts and then asked for "more please".  

She is really good at tracing the lines.  I started reading books about left-handed

writing strategies and was surprised to find out that most children that are left-handed 

form their letters from right to left.  A light clicked, that's why she traces her lines

from right to left.  Sometimes she traces them from left to right, but mostly it's from

right to left.  

 Now we move onto the graphing portion.  Little Miss didn't think it was fair that Buzz had two squares colored when Jessie only had one, so she kept rolling the die until she landed on Jessie.  How cute is she?

We also tried doing some patterning, but she kept sorting the piles of cards instead of following the pattern.  "No Momma, the Buzz goes here, the Woody goes here."  I kept trying to show her that I was making a pattern, but she wanted to sort them instead.  The girl likes order.  We'll put this away and come back to it in a month or two.

We also took out our figurines and I asked which letter does Buzz, Woody, Jessie, Ham and Lotso begin with.  They love that "game".  Sometimes they say the letter, other times they will jump on the foam letter floor tile, or they will choose one of the magnetic letters.

I'm so proud of them!  I love that we learn through play.