How often have you looked at my name signature and asked yourself, “How in the WORLD is that pronounced??” Maybe I should have had all of you chime in with your thoughts and pronunciations first, but I thought a video pronunciation would be most helpful. :)

Email subscribers, you’ll have to click over to see the clip!! :)

Now the question is ~ was that how you were saying it in your head? Or have I totally messed up your thoughts now??

Visit these great companies!

• All About Learning Press ~ Spelling & reading programs that are easy to teach and easy to learn.
• We Choose Virtues….tools for inspiring character in children!

 

There are several things that I use quite a bit of ~ laminating pouches and velcro. After the year that I spent what seemed close to a gazillion dollars in velcro dots at Walmart, I went looking elsewhere to find better prices.

A heads up ~ buying velcro in large quantities is not for the faint-at-heart. I found a friend who has an obsession about the same level as my own and we split the cost and the goods between us. For the same price as purchasing about 4 boxes of velcro at Walmart, I had about 50 times the amount of velcro.

Needless to say, I won’t need more anytime soon. :)

Here are some great sources online to purchase velcro in bulk. Typical velcro dots at the store are about 5/8” in size. I purchased the 3/8” white velcro dots for our Weekly Grid Workbox System from Textol Systems. Textol does have the larger 5/8” velcro dots, but we purchased them much cheaper at Feiner Supply {and Feiner often has a free shipping offer on orders over $50}.

A few things to note:

• You need to purchase both sides of the velcro ~ the hook {scratchy side} and the loop {fuzzy/soft side}
• Most of the velcro comes in black or white {I usually buy white}
• The velcro comes with an adhesive back

Hope that helps a few of you out!

Visit these great companies!

• All About Learning Press ~ Spelling & reading programs that are easy to teach and easy to learn.
• We Choose Virtues….tools for inspiring character in children!

 

I’ve had several people ask me if I use all of the pieces that I include in the various Preschool Packs that I put together.

The short answer ~ no.

The long answer ~ not because we don’t always want too. There are many times that I put something together, am absolutely excited about what I’ve created and it falls on unimpressed eyes. :) There are other times that I include something in a pack because I know that others really enjoy it.

At times I alternate on what I print out for Kaleb to do and there are times that he literally begs me to do something time and time again ~ so I just go with the flow.

All that to say ~ the wonderful thing about Preschool Packs is that you can print off whatever your heart {or your little one’s heart} desires to do and work on! If it isn’t a great fit for your child or if you just want to change things around and rotate the things that you present to your child, you can!

Now I have a question for you!!! I’m curious ~ what has been your favorite part of the different Preschool Packs?

Last week I received the following email from a reader and thought it would be a great question to address on my blog ~ just in case one of YOU had the same question.

I was looking through the Transportation pack and was wondering if you could consider picking a different font on the materials that the children actually use? Specifically I’m talking about the letter “a” … I would prefer the “a” version as that’s how they are taught to write it.

Specifically, here are the two different letter ‘a’ styles that are being referenced:

Here are my thoughts…

I realize that I use different fonts in my packs ~ sometimes because I really like a particular font, but also because I think that it is important to expose our children to different letter/font styles. We live in a media rich society and everywhere we look {tv, books, computer, billboards, etc…}, different font styles are represented. While I teach our children to write using the standard ‘teacher’ font style, there are numerous styles of letters and numbers represented in the books that we read every day to our children. My goal is to let my child SEE those differences, know that they represent the same letter, and let them be familiar with them.

For example, I took a picture of four books that I picked off the top of our book basket {Curious George, Tumble Bumble, In the Castle and one more…}. If you look at the letter/font styles, two of the letter a’s are shown in the style that most children learn to write their letters in and two are in the other ‘a’ style.

The bulk of the Preschool Packs that I’ve put together were primarily created for me to use with my children during our school time. Because we’ve enjoyed them, I’ve then shared them with you. While there have been times that I’ve added an activity or switched something around, typically I try to do things the way we enjoy using them so there isn’t a lot of extra work involved on my end of things.

Hopefully that answers your questions! :)