Preschool Corner / Weekly Wrap-Up – 5/14/10

M is 3.5 years old

We had a fun week, with no particular theme.  I am trying to have 1 to 2 weeks of theme-based activities, followed by at least 1 week of non-themed activities while I prepare for the next theme.  I’m hoping to get in a bug unit, then we will be DONE.  The plan is to enjoy a nice long break, get some much-needed things done around the house and just spend time having fun as a family.  :)

We started our week with a scavenger hunt.   This was so much fun.  M and his cousin, S, had a blast with this.  In fact, we had to do the whole thing again one evening with Daddy. :)  I created a chart for the kids, with pictures of 12 things for them to find in our backyard.  They took their little charts, a couple of crayons, and some plastic containers outside and began hunting:

My niece was the first to find everything pictured, and was quite proud of herself:

A close up of her treasures, which she insisted on bringing home with her (much to my brother’s delight, heh):I uploaded our scavenger hunt chart and you can find it here, if you think you’d like to use the same one.  It was a big hit!

The weather was awful, so we did a lot of indoor activities the rest of the week…

Fine Motor Skills:
A little fishing game where you try to catch the fish as they go in a circle and open and close their mouths:   
M’s Lite Brite made its way onto his shelves, and he really had fun with it – all closed up in his room with the shades drawn. :)
His little wooden dress-the-bear puzzle was out for him also; he played with it once and never bothered with it again:
Literacy Skills:
I made a little name train for M, and he connected the train cars in order to spell his name.  I used velcro dots so they could stick to each other:
He did his Bob the Builder Name puzzles (For these I use large flat marbles and write the letters on them with a sharpie):
Colors / Sorting:
We’ve had this file folder game forever, and M always enjoys it.  I used Jolanthe’s color cards, and created pockets with the color name cards.  M goes through the stack and places each picture in the correct pocket.  He just loves pockets. :)
Math Skills:
I found these at a thrift store and at first glance I thought they were Cuisenaire rods.  However, once I got them home and took a look at them… well, I’m not sure what they are or what to do with them.  Each single block unit is 1/2 inch.  The rods go from 1 unit up to 12 units, and apparently we don’t have a full set.  There’s only 2 8-unit rods, and only 1 10-unit rod.  Sigh.  Any ideas how we can use these?  Or, does anyone know what they are?  They are not the traditional Cuisenaire rod colors either.  I let M just play with them and explore them the first time I set them out.  I showed him how to create some designs, like a house and a stair (the stair was useful for showing the relation between the rods from shortest to longest).
I hope everyone had great weeks!  I’m linking this up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up.  Be sure to go check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

All About Birds

As we’ve been having our little bird theme, I’ve seen M’s love and understanding of nature blossom.  He has been spending every spare second outside… enjoying being a kid.  He’s gotten more baths in the past 3 weeks than he has in his entire life.  Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but that’s pretty much how it has seemed to me. :)

The first thing he does each morning is look out his window to see if any bunnies or squirrels or maybe even deer are having breakfast:and he can recognize the songs of cardinals, robins, blue jays, chipping sparrows, and chickadees.  He even does a good imitation of them!  He’s picked up the names of many flowers and trees just by… osmosis I guess?  Sometimes I just don’t know how he knows so much!

So – on to our bird activities…

Math Skills:

I found a cute little game here.  The birds are made by taping pennies onto the playing pieces, and there are 3 dice to choose from – easy, medium, and difficult.  We used the medium one which made us go back one space and/or lose a turn once in a while.  The first birdie to hop along all the clouds and make his way to the tree wins. :)

Visual Discrimination:

I put out this bird matching game from Homeschool Share (it’s supposed to be a file folder game, but I just made it into mats).  M loves this and was very interested since he hadn’t seen it in a while.
Here’s a better picture; you match up cards with enlarged details to the correct bird:

Language Skills:

I made a set of bird picture cards of birds we have near our home.  I printed two sets, then cut the name off of one set.  We used these like Montessori 3-part cards. 
M matched up the pictures first, then found the correct name for each bird too.  This was the first time we’ve tried something like this and it went really well.  Some were easier than others, like Mallard Duck and Canada Goose since they have two words in their names.  He usually looked for the first letter, then decided if the rest of the word looked correct.  I divided these up into smaller groups for him (there are 25 in all which would’ve been a bit overwhelming). I made an online list of these birds at enature.com so we could listen to their songs and sounds.  You can read more about the cards, as well as find the link for the enature list in this post.  M really enjoyed listening to the birds on the computer!


Science:

We looked through some old encyclopedias – old, as in I had them as a child and have kept them for some reason.  M was fascinated with all the exotic birds pictured.
We also looked at some egg pictures and I pointed out the ones for “our” birds:
The encyclopedia also did a great job of covering the various types of beaks and feet that birds have.  
We made these pipecleaner bird feet… the one on the left has three toes in front and one in back.  Songbirds curl their toes around branches (M did this on his finger, and really liked it), and even sleep this way!  Birds of prey (eagles, hawks, owls) also have three toes in front and one in back like this, but they have very, very sharp claws on them (the better to catch mice with – yum!).   The foot on the right is like a woodpecker’s foot – two toes in front and two in back.  They use their toes to dig into a tree’s wood as they climb.

We also took a look at some information I found at the Fernbank Science Center website.  We learned more about bird feet and beaks and did the activity sheets pictured below…

Match the foot to the correct type of bird:
And match the beak to the type of food it’s meant for:
I was searching for ideas to make this a more hands-on learning experience for M, and the next time we do a bird theme, I will definitely use two great activities from The Adventures of Bear.  First, a great hands-on beak activity here, and a bird diagram puzzle here.

Other Bird Activities:

M cut yarn into small lengths (about 4") and we put it out on our doorstep for the birds to use in their nests:
Last summer he planted some gourds, specifically meant for wren houses.  Daddy drilled a hole in one, cleaned it out, and hung it up to dry all winter.  This spring M painted and glazed it and we hung it in a tree.  It looks like a cozy home, and we are waiting for you to move in, little wrens! 
We did some super-fun bird crafts; click on the photos below to go to the post about each one…

Birdhouse Suncatcher:
Shapes Bird:

Paper Bag Bird’s Nest:
To see a list of good children’s books we used during our little bird unit, see this post.
We learned some new songs too!

And we finished it all up with a science experiment about air pressure.

For more preschool posts, check out Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Preschool Corner - Bunnies

M is 3.5 years old.

This week we had an impromptu bunny theme going on.  You can see the many (very good!) bunny books we read in this post.    

I created an indoor hopscotch on an old roller shade:

M loved this.  L-O-V-E-D it. :)  We had a couple of rainy days and it was the perfect game to play inside.  He’s actually gotten very good at hopping in the past week.  Just like a bunny! ;)  This was a fabulous gross motor skill workout – for both of us!  It also is a good help for number recognition.

After we played this a few times, he decided to get out our buttons and count them out onto the squares:

By the way, he really doesn’t wear jammies all day, every day.  You wouldn’t know that from reading this blog though (sigh).

We sorted these “If-Then” cards for The Runaway Bunny: I found these in a lapbook file at Homeschool Share.

 

As well as this patterning worksheet:

And this counting, cut and paste worksheet from Bry-Back Manor:

We also did a leftover Easter activity – a matching egg designs game: I believe this was originally intended to be a file folder game.  I’ve had this for at least a year if not longer, and think I originally found it at Childcareland (check out the free printables there!).  This time I gave all the mats and all the eggs to M at once so he had to sort through everything to find the right matches.  He did great of course, and most likely this won’t be coming out again.


Other activities this week…

Playing Bingo:
And lots of fine motor work, like sharpening crayons:
Sewing yarn through a foam tray:
Lacing beads (and drinking a smoothie):
Putting together elaborate Kid K’nex structures:
Punching holes in foam strips:Sorry the photo above is blurry.  I wanted to share this activity anyway because it was definitely a favorite!

And I put together this little cardboard rectangle and ponytail holder activity.  He really enjoyed doing this also (no action shot, sorry!).  Work those little hand muscles by stretching the elastic bands over the cardboard and pushing them down.  This would be fun patterning work too!  This idea came from Nicole at Mama to 3 Blessings.  She used a star shape; she’s much less lazy than I. ;)  
For more Preschool Corner posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)

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! :)