Sunday, April 11, 2010

Preschool Corner – April 11, 2010

M is 3.5 years old.
Since we observe Lent, we waited until this week to do a lot of our Easter-themed activities (except for a few crafts the week before of course!).   In the Catholic church Easter is celebrated for 50 days, so we are just getting started!  We did not get through everything I had planned for this week because poor M is sick again!  I feel so bad for him… first pneumonia which we thought he was totally over, now what seems to be a run of the mill cold… but with a stuffy nose that won’t let him (or me) get any sleep.  Many of the Easter activities I had planned will easily fit into a spring theme, so we’ll just plug away at them as we have time in the coming couple of weeks.  Here’s what we have done so far…

Sensory:blog pictures 031
The picture is not much to look at (I don’t know why I didn’t think to take pictures of the eggs open), but these are sound eggs.  There are 8 eggs total, with 4 different sounds.  M matched the sounds up with no problem and then opened them to see if he was correct.   I used egg noodles, buttons, sea shells, and erasers for the sounds.  There are so many options (coins, beads, pebbles, sand, etc.) and M loved doing these!  I’m tempted to keep this out on his shelf for another week and add in more sounds.

Fine Motor Skills:
I cut a bunny shape and an egg shape from some foam, punched holes around the edges for lacing, and then added in some pony beads.  M laced them, adding a bead in between holes.  He really enjoyed the change that the beads added to this activity. blog pictures 033

I found this egg puzzle at Dollar Tree; it’s definitely advanced for M, but we had fun doing it together.  Each of the stripes separates from the others, and to put the egg back together you have to sort largest to smallest from the center out (if that makes sense?), then match up the little notches too.  blog pictures 036

Math:
M did this Easter basket file folder game I put together for him.  You can find it here.  He enjoyed this, mainly because there are slits in the baskets that make little pockets for the eggs.  He had fun sliding them in, although he did feel bad for the zero basket which got… zero. :)blog pictures 040

I also set out a dot painter page from here with tweezers and a small container of pom-poms:  blog pictures 002 M practiced one-to-one correspondence as well as his fine motor skills by putting a pom-pom on each circle with the tweezers (I’m really lacking in action shots lately, sorry!).  We are doing more and more activities like this with these dot painter pages.  After he’s done with the activity the page goes into his art box for coloring later.

Literacy:
I made some quick egg cards with letters on them to spell M’s name.  We strung them up with clothespins… so much more fun than simply placing them in order!  He has a somewhat long name with a digraph (th) in the middle of it; apparently we weren’t taking ease of spelling into consideration when we picked his name.  He had fun with this, but he’s not super interested in spelling yet.blog pictures 041The lamb has nothing to do with this activity, it’s just a random coloring page he insisted on taping up right there. ;)

Play:
Of course we colored, “stickered”, and “glittered” eggs:easter (3)
Then had fun hunting them in the backyard:easter (9)easter (11)
Then went to grandma’s house and did it all again:easter (14)
This was the first year we really talked about what Good Friday and Easter are all about.   I wasn’t 100% sure that M even understood that people can die, and was a bit worried about questions that might arise when we talked about Jesus dying on the cross for us.  We tried to keep it pretty simple, but of course there were a million questions.  What with all the sickness going on around here, we had no activities to go with the real meaning of Easter this year, but our talks were quite deep for a 3 year old.  And I was so thankful to share the joy of Easter morning with M this year… how beautiful to hear my little child talking about Jesus rising.  :)

I hope you all had a beautiful week!! 

For more Preschool Corner posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)

4 comments:

  1. What eggstra special activities!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poor zero basket. As he grows older it's really fun to see how his grasp changes from year to year. My boys are really getting it this year, and Princess is really starting to as well, but last year it just flew by them.
    Wonderful week!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great Easter activities, and I really liked your lacing bunny. Anna has tons of questions about death - I never tried to sugarcoat the fact that every living being eventually dies. I keep stressing to her when she asks those questions that we are all healthy and have no plans of dying anytime soon, and we also try to stay safe from stupid accidents.

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  4. What great Easter activities! I love the idea of adding the pony beads into lacing!

    ReplyDelete

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