Teaching Triplets Tuesdays: Week One

  Last week I started some of my own lessons for the kids.  I had been having troubles finding lesson plans that cater to one year olds so I'm doing my own.  The purposes of these lessons are to help my children develop and learn, but mainly they give me the opportunity to bond with my kids and they also give me something to do with them.  I don't claim to know what it would be like to have a singleton, but I feel like these lessons are ways that I can focus their attention all at the same time.  I've devised my lessons into 'chapters' and this chapter is on body parts.  This week our focus was on hands and I used the basis of the Littlest Learners concept; morning prayer, calendar time, weather (something I added), phonics about the topic, songs about the topic, a short video on the topic (again something I added), a short story about the topic, and then a topic related activity.  I'm pulling my activities from "Slow and Steady Get Me Ready" and I'll probably use some that my sister suggested; theletteroftheweek.com, abcjesuslovesme.com, and DLTK kids.  So here is what our week looked like:

Prayer:

Lord I give you today

All I think and do and say

All my work and all my play

This I give to you today

Calendar Time:

(Tune to Farajaka)

Today is Tuesday, Today is Tuesday

All day long, All day long

Yesterday was Monday,

Tomorrow will be Wednesday,

Oh what fun, Oh what fun

(Tune to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)

When we do the calendar

We learn the month, date and year

Every week day has a name

And there's lots of numbers to count the days

So let's begin to show you how

We'll learn the calendar right now

Weather:

For this I cut out different icons to represent the weather.

I then allow the kids to stick the icon to a large desk calendar for the corresponding day.

I talk to them about what the weather will be like.

Phonics:

This week I showed and taught the kids the word 'hand', repeatedly

I then did the same with the Russian version 'rooka'

I also taught them the signed version

Songs (we watch these on YouTube):

Our Chapter Song is "Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes"

For hands we used "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands"

Video (again we used YouTube):

Kermit Talks About Hands

Story (if they haven't gotten too restless):

This week we did the story of Doubting Thomas from the Bible.  I really don't have time to go to the library, so our story selections are limited to what I can find on the internet.  I broke the story up into sections for each day.  

Activities(we didn't have time to do many this week):

Day One- We traced our hands on paper.  Later we used these as flash cards for phonics

Day Two- Hand prints. They were too young for the kit I was going to use, but you can also use the play dough hand prints I previously posted about

Day Three- Putting on and taking off gloves

We repeat everything except for the activities and the story every day.  The activities change daily depending on how much time we have.  It seems to be working out great!  The kids especially love calendar time.