Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have revised our objectives to really hone in and focus on specific skills Carter will need to master before kindergarten and are appropriate to his age and development right now. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. I have added working on his name as his teachers at school have asked us to work on it at home and I want to remember to include working on it in some form during each of our learning themes. I'm also adding in a section for Elise now that she is a year old. I don't considers her bullet points objectives, they are experiences I want to make sure to expose her to frequently. Her experiences are listed below Carter as bullet points rather than numbers.
The highlighted objectives below are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:
- Begin to organize and focus on writing. (Dictate stories, plan out a story, draw pictures and scribbles to create a book).
- Understand same and different.
- Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.
- Use age appropriate scissors. (I'm moving on to looking for a thumb and forefinger grasp with writing tools and holding scissors appropriately)
- Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)
- Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).
- Count with one-to-one correspondence, begin to identify numerals, being to use ordinal numbers (first, second, last).
- Recognize the letters in name, arrange them to spell name, begin to write name.
- Play make believe/Imitate the behaviors of others (adults and children).
- Know the names of and be able to point out body parts.
- Groups things together by size or color/matches like objects, understands hard and soft.
- Names common objects and is able to point them out.
- Begin to hold writing tools and scribble spontaneously. Can draw a line. Differentiates between a circle and square.
- Follows simple instructions (focusing on words such as in, on, beside, under).
- Others: counts to two, refers to self by name. These I want to start to expose her to, but she isn't quite ready to master then yet.
- We started the week off by writing the word birthday on a sentence strip. Carter pointed out the letters he knew and told me their letter sounds. I chunked the word into birth and day and then he blended them together. We talked about how his birthday was coming up and he told me his birthday is December 14th. We then looked at our calendar and counted to see how many days until the 14th. We did that each day throughout the learning theme. Carter got so excited on December 13th when he counted and realized the next day would be his birthday.
- I pulled out green and red balloons and had Elise sort them based on color. As we worked I really emphasized the words green and red. She still refuses to say any colors other than yellow and blue. If I ask her to say red, she'll emphatically tell me NO! Then she yells out yellow or blue. She's a stubborn one, that's for sure. But man, if it's not so stinkin cute! We counted to see how many balloons we had of each color and Elise loved yelling out 2 when I got to 2 as we counted. I then blew the balloons up and wrote the letters of Carter's name on them. I told him his name was spelled out on the balloons and he searched and found each letter of his name and set them out in order to write his name with balloons. I wrote all the consonants on green balloons and the vowels on red balloons. I pointed that out to him and told him the vowels are a, e, i, o, and u and that you can't make a word without a vowel unless you have y which sometimes pretends to be a vowel. We then counted the red balloons to see how many vowels he has in his name. I'm not trying to get Carter to memorize the vowels right now, I'm just introducing the concept since he knows letter names and is starting to understand how words are made using letters. The kids had a blast playing with balloons and Elise's big thing was setting a balloon on the ground and then sitting on it. She did it over and over but I never managed to catch her sitting on one in a picture, I always just missed it!
Carter was proud to show off his name written on balloons. - For Carter's 1st birthday his Great Uncle Kelly and Mary got him a special book that had his name on each page along with one thing. We read the book and Carter identified his name on each page as well as the one thing in the picture. At the end of the book there was a page with different sets of items along with numbers. Carter counted to see how many of each item there were and then pointed out the corresponding number.
- We put together a sensory bin like last year with a party hat, confetti, candles, and streamers. This year I added in party favor bags left over from last year because I thought the kids might enjoy filling the bags with confetti and then dumping them out. We used the thankful strips from our Christmas countdown chain to make the confetti. Each day when Carter pulled off his chain I read it to him and saved it. Then we used scissors to cut the strips into confetti. He is really becoming confident with scissors. On his birthday at 5:58 I had him stand up and I dumped the confetti down on him as we sang him Happy Birthday. That is one of my favorite traditions we have started for birthdays.
- On Carter's birthday I set out his presents from us. He looked at his presents and then put them in order based on size. Once they were in order he picked one to open and guessed what was in it. I had him share why he thought it might be what he was guessing. He was able to guess the books correctly and said it was because of how they felt and looked.
- On his birthday Carter asked me to help him write Happy Birthday. It worked out really well because a friend at school has a birthday the day after his so we used it to make her a birthday card. I wrote the words Happy Birthday and then he traced the letters with marker. He talked about what letter he was making as he traced them.
- Something that wasn't planned but ended up being a lot of fun was a special birthday bath. Elise threw up in the morning and I wanted to give her a bath because she had puke caked in her hair so we had a special birthday bath. Carter picked color tablets to add to the bath. He asked for blue and red because he wanted to make purple water. Then we added bubble bath and some balloons to make it extra fun. Elise even wore her pearls for the party, haha!
- Just like last year I did a special birthday interview with Carter. Read his interview here.
- Carter loves to play with Play Doh so I pulled that out and we made a Play Doh cake. Carter counted out the correct number of candles to put on his cake. Then we lit them, sang Happy Birthday, and he blew them out. He enjoyed taking the candles out and hiding them inside the Play Doh after we made the cake. He also used them to build around which was a neat idea.
- We used the height chart that Gma used with daddy and Uncle Paul when they were kids. Carter carefully stood so I could measure his height and record it on the chart. Then I showed him how tall his daddy was at his age. He was excited to see he was about the same size Ty was when he was 4. We talked a little bit about inches and feet as we measured. When Elise saw Carter get measured she wanted to do it too and it was neat to see her Uncle Paul's measurement from a little younger than her age close to hers!
- One of my favorite things to do for the kids' birthdays is to look at their newborn photo book and retell their birth story as we look through the pictures. When we were done I showed Elise the picture of Carter as a baby on the cover. I asked her to point out different body parts on his body in the picture and she did pretty well considering he was pulled up into a ball. She pointed out eyes, nose, and tummy. She wasn't quite sure on leg and then she was done.
- I hung streamers in Carter's doorway the night before his birthday and then greeted him with a marshmallow with a candle in it in the morning. The streamer idea came from a student of mine a few years back whose mom did it for him every year on his birthday and the marshmallow idea came from Carter's Great Grandma Shupe. It is so much fun to have different ways to show him he is special and to carry on these traditions. The kids loved playing in the streamers throughout the day.
- I printed out pictures of balloons and wrote the letters in Carter's name on the balloons. Then I had him glue the balloons to paper in order to spell out his name. He was having trouble getting the balloons to fit on the paper so he asked me to help him. He would tell me what letter to glue down and I'd glue it down. Then he'd draw the string at the bottom of the balloon. While he and I worked Elise drew and I had her practice drawing a line.
Drawing the strings on his balloons. 
Cheesing while working on adding strings to the balloons.
- Last year I had Carter write a book about himself and loved how it turned out so much I asked him to do it again. I showed him what his book looked like last year and then I asked him what he wanted his book to say this year. Carter and I wrote the book yesterday and we haven't gotten around to illustrating it yet. Since the book isn't illustrated yet I figured I'd just type the pages he wrote up rather than taking a picture of the pages with no pictures. These are his pages: My name is Carter Ty Cox./I like watching PJ Masks./I love my dog, Harper./I like drawing./I like soccer balls and toys./I like songs./I like building snowmans./I like being in water.
- I pulled out the plates I picked up for Carter's party and asked Elise how many different colors of plates we had. Then I pointed to them as we counted. When I was done counting she yelled out "2!"
- Something we started with Carter's 2nd birthday is painting a special shirt to wear on his birthday and at his party. I make the number on a white shirt using painter's tape and then he picks colors of fabric paint to paint his shirt. This year Ty made the number 4 on the shirt while I worked on decorations for Carter's party. Carter wanted to paint with yellow, blue, and green. I already had blue so I just bought yellow and then put yellow and blue paint on a plate and then mixed them together on a different part of the paint to make green. Carter ended up painting most of his shirt green. He did a great job and enjoyed it more than year than he ever had before and he's always enjoyed it! Elise was desperate to paint so I got out finger paint for her and let her paint with green and red so we'd have pretty thank you notes for Christmas. She kept yelling out yellow so Carter insisted I get her yellow paint to paint with as well, it was so funny! I wish I'd come up with the painting a birthday shirt idea before Carter's first birthday so he'd have one from each birthday. I'm thinking when he gets older and doesn't want to do it anymore I'll have the shirts made into a quilt. I'll either give it to him if he wants it or keep it if he doesn't and then I'd add Elise's to the quilt as well. I love seeing how his painting has evolved as he has gotten older.
- On Carter's birthday I had him write his name, write how old he is, and then draw a picture of himself. I plan to do this each year now that he can write his name so we can see how his handwriting and drawing develops each year. He wasn't feeling 100% on his birthday so he didn't write with his nicest handwriting but I still love it. I was cracking up that he added a nose for the first time and then made his smile so big, it reminded me of the Joker. His little ears are so cute! While Carter worked I had Elise draw and I showed her how to make a line and asked her to try it. She told me no but then tried it anyway.
- I drew a picture of a balloon and a picture of a present. I pointed out their differences and then told Elise the balloon was a circle and the present was a square. Then I let her color the picture. I asked Carter how the circle and square were the same and how they were different. When Carter saw what I had drawn for Elise he wanted to draw a balloon too and made a really cool picture of a balloon with a super long string.
Elise coloring the present and balloon. 
Carter drawing his balloon with a long string. - A couple different times throughout the week I got out paints for the kids and they painted papers. I will take Carter's paintings and cut the pages into 4 smaller pieces so we can use them to write thank you notes.
- We went to the store the day before Carter's birthday and he got to pick out whatever cake mix and frosting he wanted along with special decorations. He picked out an orange flavored cake with blue icing that came with fish sprinkles. For decorations he chose sprinkles, sixlets, and smiley faces made out of sugar. On his birthday he helped me bake the cake and then he decorated it.
- On Carter's birthday he got to pick special activities along with all of the meals for the day. His Gma and Gpa sent him a card with a 5 dollar bill. He chose to use his money to take Elise out for lunch on his birthday. Since it was his money I let him splurge and order a lemonade to go with his macaroni and cheese kids' meal. I also let him get Cheeto's as his side in place of the fruit he normally gets. It was a very exciting lunch for him!
Although it looks like Carter was saying no pictures, he actually had just shown me 4 fingers for how old he was. - For Carter's birthday dinner he asked for a penguin pizza. I think the idea came from having a lion pizza at his 3rd birthday party. He helped me make it and was so excited when it looked like a penguin. I shaped the dough to look like a penguin body and head. Then we added the sauce and cheese, topping it with pepperoni beak, eyes, and feet and olive wings.
He was getting pretty tired by the time we ate.
- A long time ago I found a wooden cake at a garage sale. It has served us well and has gotten so much use. I pulled it out of Carter's toy box and put it on the floor by his themed book basket so the kids would see it and play with it more. It got quite a bit of use and it was so cute to see Elise serve the slices and pretend to eat it.
- Of course we sang Happy Birthday multiple times throughout the week. We also sang Tom Chapin's birthday song which I love and remember my parents signing to me as a kid. I also sang Feliz Cumpleanos to Carter. Spanish is the only language other than English I can speak even a teeny bit of so I also played him Happy Birthday in other languages by finding videos on Youtube. One of our birthday books we checked out at the library had Happy Birthday translated into many different languages in the back so I sang them to him the best I could when we read the book.
- We played this awesome birthday candle counting game here. I loved that it gave Carter practice with counting as well as identifying numerals. Carter liked that when he clicked on a candle it lit up. I have been loving the ABCYa website ever since I added the technology component to our learning themes! When Carter had counted all the candles on the cakes he got to decorate a cake of his own with icing, decorations, and candles. When he was done he got to push a button to make the candles light up.
Counting the candles on a birthday cake.
- Carter had a penguin-themed birthday party. He had such a blast. He loved that many of his friends were able to come over to play and he really enjoyed playing all the games. Cake and opening his presents were also big hits with him.
Carter opening a present at his party.
- Birthday Rules by Laurie Friedman
- Guinea Pig Party by Holly Surplice
- Carl's Birthday by Alexandra Day
- Carter is... 1 Year Old
- If You Give a Pig a Party by Laura Numeroff
- Happy Birthday, Moon! by Frank Asch
- The Birthday Queen by Audrey and Don Wood
- Touch and Feel Birthday by DK Kids
- Bunny Party by Rosemary Wells
- Happy Birthday by Sarah Powell
- Scaredy Squirrel Has a Birthday Party by Melanie Watt
- The Birthday Surprise by Ann Lootens
- Happy Birthday, Mouse by Laura Numeroff
- Happy Birthday, Tacky by Helen Lester
- Bear's Birthday by Stella Blackstone
- Curious George and the Birthday Surprise by Margaret and H.A. Rey
- It's My Birthday by Liesbet Slegers
- Happy Birthday, Hamster by Cynthia Lord
- Birthday Mice by Bethany Roberts
- Happy Birthday, Bunny by Anna Schaub
- Birthdays Around the World by Mary D. Lankford
- Birthday Traditions Around the World by Ann Ingalls
- Birthday Customs Around the World by Sarah L. Schuette
- Celebrating Birth Around the World by Anita Ganeri
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