Day 156: Pom-Poms as Erasers (success).

Pinterest pin and website link.

My kids love to use dry erase markers and this pin looked like a quick way for them to easily erase their work if they made a mistake.  This was easy and worked -- simply hot-glue gun a pom-pom on the bottom of a dry erase marker.

The only negative was that my son kept losing the marker cap (since he usually sticks it on the bottom of the marker while in use), but he was occupied for quite awhile with drawing and erasing, so I count that as a success!

Verdict: SUCCESS!

Friday Favorite: "Lift and Peek" Teaching Clock.

Pinterest pin and website link.

My son is suddenly super interested in telling time, but is getting so frustrated when I try to teach him about the minute hand -- he just does not get it.  I made this clock today, and he was starting to catch on.  It was cute to see his little mind at work!  This was super easy to make using two paper plates, a Sharpie pen, one brad, two small pieces of paper, and some double-sided tape (to stick the two plates together in the center).

Verdict: SUCCESS!

Day 80: Plastic Easter Egg Learning Activities (success).

Pinterest pin and website link.

During my 40 Bags in 40 Days cleanse, I came across loads of plastic Easter eggs that are just collecting dust in our house.  

My son rarely likes doing anything educational with me unless I can disguise the learning really well, and this evidently fit the bill.  He was all over the two activities I chose -- a number match and an upper-and-lowercase matching activity (both explained on the above link).  The only thing I changed in both activities was mixing up the colors of the top and bottom parts to each egg; I didn't want him guessing the correct answer by matching colors instead of actually looking at the numbers or letters on the eggs!

I'll be trying more of these when we get a little closer to learning word families or other pre-reading strategies.

Verdict: SUCCESS!