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:

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.

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. 

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. :)

I also set out a dot painter page from here with tweezers and a small container of pom-poms:  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.The 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:

Then had fun hunting them in the backyard:

Then went to grandma’s house and did it all again:

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! :)

The Preschool Corner – April 4, 2010

M is 3.5 years old.

This is my first post for Preschool Corner; how weird is it that I’m totally excited about that? :)

This past week we had unbelievably gorgeous spring weather, and had a relaxed week just spending time outside and enjoying being together. M was still recovering from his pneumonia, but by the end of the week he was totally back to himself, which made for a very relieved mama!

We’ve been doing a lot of dinosaur-themed activities lately, and I hope to put all of it in a single post sometime soon. For today though, here are some of the other things we’ve been up to…

PLAY:

We had such beautiful weather this week, and our first picnic in the backyard!

M has been able to spend time outside each day, and has spent a lot of it doing this: Ack, the photo is horribly blurry, but he keeps pulling extremely heavy logs off our woodpile, dragging them to the patio and then chopping the bark off of them with his little plastic axe. :) All our wood looks naked. :)

FINE MOTOR SKILLS:

This was on M’s activity shelves and he got it out every day… it’s the hammering shapes set from Oriental Trading. This is a “castle at night with the moon in the sky, but the sun is coming up because it’s almost morning”:

The beloved Spiderman slippers were washed and came out full of lint. This bothered M to no end, so I gave him the lint roller and he learned how to use it!

LITERACY:

He cut these Letter N pictures out and made a collage with them.
On our recent car trip I brought some workbooks along with us to give him something to do in the car. I’m not a huge fan of worksheets, but M loved them and can’t get enough. Here he is cutting out rhyming pictures and using tape (his new love) to put the rhyming pairs next to each other.
He did almost every letter in his homemade Build-a-Letter kit (also out on his shelves all week):
SENSORY:
I put together a sensory bin full of only soft things for M this week. It had squares of fleece, feathers, pom-poms, cotton balls, and squares of velvet. I added in some plastic eggs to use for scoops and some plastic salad tongs, a new thing for M (the kind that have a fork and spoon that move together). Here he is first taking a look at it:
The salad tongs were a big hit! He started using them right away:

The next time I looked, this is what I saw:
This was a lot of fun for him. He found that he could blow the pom poms and feathers around the room and he did so for close to 30 minutes! He said “I’m just like the wind, Mommy!” :) He spent time tossing the feathers in the air and watching them float down from various heights. He also just sat and examined each soft thing, occasionally rubbing it on his cheek (so sweet!).

For more Preschool Corner posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School

M is 35 months old.

I felt really behind all week, nothing was planned (and I am nothing if not a Planner), and both M and I were a little cranky.  Sigh.  Motherhood isn’t always pretty I guess.  Anyway, we did only a few things…

We played with M’s foam bath numbers and he matched the number to the correct pile of erasers that I set up:

He did this pretty well, with only a little guidance from me.  We switched it and he put the number of erasers down next to the appropriate foam number (does that make sense??)

One day he wanted to “do school” when I wasn’t able to, so he got out the little erasers, a pair of tongs, and a bowl from the kitchen and did this all on his own :

 

I found a copy of the Moveable Alphabet here, printed it out and put it in our pocket chart (from Target dollar spot – you knew I’d mention it at least once, didn’t you?!).  Then M matched up his letters from his See and Spell.  I thought he would have fun putting things in the pocket chart, but he really was not all that interested.  I do think I’ll try it again though, it could’ve just been that we had a bad attitude all week. ;)

M matched paper clips to colored pieces of cardstock.  He did great with getting them on this time, something he’s really had a hard time with in the past:

 

He did some scissor practice using the pages I printed from here:

We did a dolphin puzzle, which was a real struggle… I know he can do this puzzle, he just lost interest halfway through.  I made him finish it, but I’m really not sure why.  Normally if he isn’t having fun we just skip something. 

We made a blue, yellow, blue, yellow pattern with his blocks.  I did this with him and kept asking “what comes next?” and he kind of got it eventually, I think.

We finished up with an activity that’s always fun and puts both of us in a good mood.  We got out his songbook and we played his instruments and sang several songs.  You can’t see his box of instruments in this picture; we have a harmonica, a triangle, a shaker bottle (pictured), jingle bells, tambourine, and the bowl and wooden spoon (pictured) that he uses like a drum. 

I’m hoping to make next week a little more fun and interesting!  I hope you all had wonderful weeks with your tots!!

Have a beautiful day! :)