School Daze

My sweet girls and some of their favorite animals.


I know anyone who regularly reads this blog may wonder what has happened to me, but I assure you I am still here. I've had several blog posts about our weekly school activities looming over me for a month now but still have not made time to post them. In an effort to relieve the number of posts and my failing memory I will just post the highlight of the last several weeks and if you have any questions about what you see leave me a comment. Thanks.

Letter of the week: P is for Princess, Q is for Quilt, R is for Rainbow (St. Patrick's Day week) , S is for Spider, T is for Transportation, U is for Umbrella (weather week)

I have not posted all our crafts or activities but just a small sampling of what has been going on.




Examining a nature tray.


My puzzle girl. She loves them and is really good at them too.

Just because. I can never get enough of her eyes and her sweet smile.

Thanks.

Preschool - O is for Ocean

O is for ocean. We had a great week (even if I am behind in posting it). Lots of great activities for learning with an ocean theme. Here is a sampling of our at home learning.


Lydia had a lot of fun with her shell collection. We put pearls in each shell and matched the number word with the correct number of pearls. We also did some addition with the pearls as manipulatives.

Emma sorted large and small shells.


We finger painted an ocean scene and put on ocean themed stickers to complete it. I have to confess, I consider myself a fairly crafty person but this is the first time I have ever finger painted with the girls. I made the paint from a recipe online and the girls used almost all of it. We will definitely be doing this again soon.

We had imaginary play with these mermaid felt cutouts and book but I also used number cards to match the number of mermaids on the board. We played by both finding the right card and/or the right amount of merpeople.


O is also for opposites. Great game I found at the Dollar Tree. Gotta love that store!

Octopus snack made with banana, chocolate chips and marshmallows.


Number word shell match.

I also made a game to match color words. Used some pages from an ocean coloring book, cut them out, colored them different colors and had the girls match the color words to the right color sea creature. I am thinking of making this into a file folder game for our beach vacation this summer.

I had so many different activities planned for the week that we didn't even get to them all. I will have to revisit the ocean again in the near future.

Have fun learning!

Preschool - N is for nest

N is for nest ..... or nightingale. I couldn't really decide since we talked about all different kinds of birds.

Not too original on the craft here but still turned out pretty cute. I just drew a "nest" shape and let the girls put multi-colored tissue paper in it. We added an "N bird" just for fun.


We actually did a lot of activities for bird week including this bird feeding activity but I have almost no pictures to show for it.

Emma matched colors with color words. She is still working on pinching the clothes pins to the card. On a side note: the box provided a great deal of entertainment for her as well. Opening and closing, locking and unlocking.

We also did an activity where we sorted all our stuffed animals into pets vs. wild animals.

Sorry there is not much more in depth review of our week but I really like to have pictures to go along with explaining what we did so just trust me when I say it was a good week but we have little to show for it.

Thanks for reading.

Preschool - M is for Moon

Here is a look at what we did last week for letter M.

We combined our letter craft with our book for stArt and I think it turned out pretty cute.



We collected "moon rocks". For this activity I hid rocks around the room and the girls searched for them. I am always amazed that this simple seek and find game is so much fun but it is always a huge hit even if little girls don't always remember where they hid things when it is their turn. We play a hide and seek kind of game a couple times a month. These kinds of games lead to a lot of counting too.

I cut out a bunch of different size circles (planets) and they girls painted them with watercolors. They turned out very pretty. Lydia insisted on making a mobile and though I ave it a good try in the end I just glued them to a plastic coat hanger. They didn't know any different and I think they will hold up longer this way too.



We placed "planets" (paper circles) in order from largest to smallest and also talked about which ones were the same sizes and which ones were different. Yes there are more than eight planets as some are exactly the same size. Makes it a little bit harder for her.



Number and alphabet puzzles are always a hit.



We sang a planet song and I found a moon poem that was pretty cute.

We blew up a bunch of balloons and learned a song about planets and put them in order. No, the balloons are not in any sort of size order just a visual.



We made another easy bake oven cake, this time a moon cake with marshmallows for the craters. 30min + for 3 small cakes is not my idea of a great time but I am not a 5 year old girl.





We also did some space puzzles and various other space materials I have collected over the years. Counting Coconuts had a great space unit recently and I would love to use some more of her ideas when I revisit space.

It was a fun week learning and playing together. To see what is happening in others preschool home classrooms check out Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

Preschool - L is for Lizard

We had a fun week getting back into the swing of things here.

We had fun doing a few lizard crafts and activities.

We made stArt craft and did a few activities to go along with the books A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and the Icky Sticky Chameleon by Dawn Bently.

Most of the activities I used came from Cindy at Along the Way. (She captured much better pictures too.)

We worked on some sequence cards and writing and counting numbers.



We caught flys on our sticky lizard tongues and did lots of counting.



We played in our winter sensory bin.



Lydia requested to do L is for Ladybug so we made a ladybug cake in her easy bake oven (Christmas gift) and she was satisfied. We read The Grouchy Ladybug to appease her idea as well. I love being able to say yes to my kids because they don't always hear it.



We had a great week and as a special treat we went to the National Geographic Young Explorer website and looked at some crazy pictures of lizards and read through several magazines there. It was a treat and I will definitely be using it again soon. Let me know if you take a chance to check it out.

To find out what other families are doing check out Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

Preschool - Letters J and K

We had a very uneventful Jungle week so I am combining J and K. For Jungle week we did a very simple craft that I saw on Pocket full of Posies. We read lots of jungle books and did lots of puzzles but other than that nothing much.


This week for the letter K I used several printables from Making Learning fun. We painted this simple K is for Kite coloring page and then added popsicle sticks. After we were done with the craft I had the girls form letters with the sticks.



Emma woke up one day and asked if we could do school so we worked on this number tracing sheet.
This shape tracing sheet.


And this number matching sheet.



She was having such a good time that we continued to work on several other school type projects too.



We had a couple snow days, so I started a few of our Christmas ideas this week. We made some gingerbread playdough and a gingerbread man sticker craft. We had an afternoon where we focused on our stART activity this week as well.





We did some other alphabet kite matching upper and lower case letters. A kite magnet page and learned the song, Let's go fly a kite.

We continued our Jesse tree advent devotions in the evenings and read lots of books but none that matched the kite theme.

Thanks for reading! To find out about what others are doing in preschool at home check out Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

Preschool - Letter I

I is for Ice Cream and, lets face it, who doesn't like ice cream!

We had a great week of learning here. We started the week with this wonderful print out which I turned into an art project from Making Learning Fun. The girls wanted to keep decorating their papers and would have put sprinkles on every square inch (which they almost did.)



I really wanted to focus on numbers to solidify #1-10 identification.

I made some ice cream hopscotch cards. The girls called out the number as they jumped on them, then I switched them and they did it again so it wasn't just numerical order but also real identification.



I also used some foam puzzles and had the girls separate numbers from letters.



We stacked "Ice Cream Buckets"



We played "Ice Cream Shop" just for some imaginary fun.



We made an ice cream craft with melted crayons and wax paper.

We did this ice cream cone dot to dot and this ice cream counting/number match.


We read lots of books this week but really, none were specific to our ice cream theme. We did read a couple books in the Rainbow Magic Fairies series, The Party Fairies. Not my personal favorite or even a recommendation but it's what we did.

Lots of fun activities and some serious number review.

Thanks for reading.

To find out what other preschoolers are doing check out Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.