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The Legend of the Easter Egg Bag Book

Preschool and Kindergarten Community at Homeschool Creations

Leave it to a friend to remind me about The Legend of the Easter Egg, a well-loved book in our house, and the lapbook that I put together many years ago and shared at Homeschool Share. Yes, it’s true – I forget some of the printables I make. My brain must be getting old.

Legend of Easter Egg Bag Book

Instead of making a lapbook to go along with The Legend of the Easter Egg, we made a bag book. Curious what a bag book is? It’s super simple, I promise:

  1. Lay a stack of small paper bags on top of each other  {we alternated four bags top to bottom}
  2. Fold the stack in half {so they form a square booklet}
  3. Punch a few holes along the fold
  4. Tie a ribbon to hold the bags together.

The bags make a small book of sorts and then we added in fun clip art and lapbook pieces to go along with our book. {Here’s an online tutorial for making a bag book}.

While we didn’t use every lapbook piece from the Legend of the Easter Egg unit, we did read the book together almost every day and then picked a few things daily to talk about in more detail: weather, language, feelings, science, etc… It was a great way to talk about Easter and learn together – and most importantly, have fun!

The Parts of an Egg

examining an egg shell

We have plenty of eggs in our house, so we pulled an egg or two out to crack open and examine. This was a great hands-on time to look at a few parts of the egg: the shell, the yolk, the egg cell, the chalazae, and the albumen {the white}, and that tiny little air sac. There is a great go-along printable for the Legend of the Easter Egg lapbook that we used to label the parts after we poked and inspected our own egg.

EggSperiments

eggs in vinegar experiment

There were three egg experiments that we worked on together. First we hard boiled a LOT of eggs {had to save some to color later in the week!}.

  • Experiment #1: Which spins faster: a hard boiled egg or a raw egg? We made predictions and then ran our experiment. I can’t tell you the answer – you need to try it for yourself!
    the soft shelled egg that popped
  • Experiment #2: What happens when a hard boiled egg soaks in vinegar for one day? We actually soaked a hard boiled egg and a raw egg in vinegar to see if there would be any difference. Kaleb thought the squishy eggs were MUCH fun to poke, especially when the raw egg ‘popped’ and the shell was all limp on the plate.
  • Experiment #3: What happens when the egg from Experiment #2 sits out of the vinegar for 24 hours. We’re still waiting to see the results of this one, but Kaleb is checking it faithfully!

Weighing Chocolates

weighing chocolate

The little boy in story, Thomas, wakes up one morning in a candy shop {literally}. Every child’s dream, right? We pulled out our Chocolate Fix game and used our bucket balance scale to weigh the different chocolates and also compare their weight to other things around the room {crayons, paper clips, etc…}.

We also talked about the symbolism of the Easter egg, telling time as well as days and months of the year, winter weather {hail and freezing rain}, and quite a few other things that we pulled from the book The Legend of the Easter Egg. Overall, a fun week and we’re definitely going to make another bag book again!

 

This Week’s Featured Posts

Here are a few fun posts from families that linked up last week to the Preschool and Kindergarten Community. I love seeing your ideas and so appreciate you sharing with others!

bunny playdough mat

To go along with the book The Little Rabbit, Angelue from Nestpirations used a cute playdoh mat to work on 1:1 counting with her daughter. She has some other great ideas as well to go along with their unit.

125 Easter Egg Basket ideas

Need some last minute idea for Easter baskets for the kids? Moms Have Questions Too has 125 Inexpensive Easter Basket Ideas to share – and many are things that are non-Easter related, but things your kids still need and use.

Easter Egg Word Hunt

Tara from The Magnolia Barn shares a fun egg hunt for sight words that she put together for under $1 for her daughter. Games are a great way to make learning fun!

Resurrection Garden Tutorial 2

 

We loved putting together this Resurrection Garden last year {this year’s plan to make one got sidetracked when we all came down with a bug}. This is a no-fail way to grow grass and it sprouts quickly!!

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool and Kindergarten Community. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

 

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Preschool Corner

 

 

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Bird Lapbook ~ Preschool Corner

Preschool CornerLast week I pulled out the robin lapbooks that the three older kids had done a few years ago. The moment Kaleb saw those three pulled out he wanted to know where his was. After realizing he didn’t have one ~ well we had a project for this week!

Our week started out with Kaleb staring out the window at the daddy cardinal that loves to sit in the tree off our back porch. The pair of cardinals are at our feeder constantly and we love watching them!

For Kaleb’s bird lapbook we used only one file folder and the minit books from Homeschool Share’s Backyard Birds file. I opened the file folder flat and then re-folded it so that there were two smaller flaps on the sides. The above picture shows the front and the back of his lapbook. For the back cover, Kaleb colored a picture of a robin for me. For the front he

Putting the Bird Lapbook Together

Monday: A Bird’s Habitat ~ Our backyard

  • Identifying differences between male and female birds ~ minit book
  • What do birds eat? minit book
  • How do birds find their food? There were several robins hoping around in the yard outside our school window. We had so much fun watching the robins in our yard and learning that they actually see the ground move.

Bird Lapbook-2

Tuesday: Life Cycles/Nesting ~ Getting ready for babies

  • What are the predators of robins? minit book
  • Who builds the nest?

Bird Lapbook-1

Wednesday

  • Baby birds minit book ~ what do bird eggs look like?
  • Talked about where birds build nests
  • Kaleb dictated and then illustrated two robin stories {I did the writing below!!}.
    Here are Kaleb’s pictures and stories:

Birds lay eggs. They sit on the eggs. Then they hatch. They grow and turn into a dad or mom.

Bird Lapbook-4

Birds lay eggs on the ground, in trees, on buildings, and in holes. Robins lay four eggs. They are about the size of a quarter.

Bird Lapbook-5

Thursday ~ Putting the lapbook together

On Thursday we glued the pieces of Kaleb’s lapbook together {and were a little camera-shy}.

Bird Lapbook-3

That about sums up our week. Other than Kaleb asking every single day when we could do another chalk pastel together of a cardinal.

Thinking that needs to be on the list for next week, eh?

How was your week?

Links for Learning About Birds

 

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

 

Preschool Corner

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Astronaut Preschool Pack

Astronaut Preschool Pack Button copy

We’ll be working on our Astronaut Preschool unit soon, so I’ll have lots more to go along with the printables, but I just couldn’t wait to share it! We’ll be using the book On the Moon by Anna Milbourne and Benji Davies {a book we read often and love!!}.

Here’s a look inside the Astronaut Preschool Pack:

  • Name tag strip for front of lapbook or folder if you store your preschool pack
  • Story summary sheet for one of your favorite books
  • Verse printable for Psalm 148:3 ~ Praise Him, sun and moon…
  • Astronaut words
  • Shadow matching
  • Trace the rocket’s path
  • Rocket ship size sequencing
  • Letters to spell the word astronaut
  • Blast Off!! Countdown from 10 to 1
  • Rocket Colors ~ trace the color word
  • Find the letter A’s worksheet
  • Beginning sound word cards
  • Letter M and R word tracing sheets
  • “Climb Aboard the Spaceship” song and printable

astronaut shadow matchingastronaut spelling

You can see more pictures and download the pdf file on my Astronaut Preschool Pack page. There are some additional GREAT astronaut printables available from Maureen at Spell Outloud on her website also under ‘A is for Astronaut’.

Some of the books we’ll be using when we learn…

Gingerbread Baby Lapbook and Printables

Gingerbread Baby Printable Pack Button

I’ll be sharing more later this week about our Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack to go along with the book Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. I figured that the sooner I could get it to you all, the better! We’ll be putting this all into a lapbook folder, but there are some extra pieces to go along with it too. While we’re using the book by Jan Brett {I love her books!}, much of the Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack can also go along with other gingerbread men books.

This just came along spur of the moment, so I’m still printing things off and gathering ideas too, but here’s a little peek at some of the 26 pages of printables in the pack. I’m printing many of the pieces off onto cardstock and laminating the worksheets to use again {I love my Scotch laminator}.

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Download the Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack here.

If you are looking for some other great preschool Christmas printables, be sure to visit Carisa’s Christmas Fun page and also see Erica’s Christmas activities too.

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Preschool Corner ~ Pirate Unit and Pirate Lapbook

Our pirate lapbook ended up being closer to a three week learning time. Kaleb loves pirates.

L.O.V.E.S. them. He has a colonial hat that he loves to wear, a sword constantly stuck in his ‘gunbelt’ and we have read the book On a Pirate Ship more times that I can remember.

With as long as we were doing the unit, you would think that I would have actually managed to get more on my ‘idea list’ covered…but that didn’t happen. :) I’ll share the lapbook here with you all and also all of the ideas that I had ~ and let you know which ones we did manage to get around to! I don’t have as many pictures this go-round…go figure.

The Pirate Unit

I’ll break up the things that we did by topic/subject. We read the book {over and over again} every day and did a few activities from the lapbook each day and also did 3-5 activities from our unit study.

Bible

  • Verses: The first one we talked about was ‘You shall not steal.’ {an obvious choice, no?}; our main verse was Matthew 6:21 ~ “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Kaleb isn’t one to ‘perform’ much, so this was a BIG deal getting him to say his verse on camera. :) I know he sounds like he’s muttering, but really he’s ‘singing’ it like on our Seeds of Purpose cd. {lapbook piece}

 

 

 

Language/Spelling

  • Vocabulary {words from the book}: enormous, steer, twinkling, clings, glittering, fearless, tricky, adventure
  • Pirate words: anchor, jewels, treasure, boat, sails, sailor, parrot, map, canon, doubloons  {lapbook piece} Hint: print off an extra page to use as a matching game!!
  • Uppercase/lowercase ABC matching {lapbook piece}
  • Tell what happened in the story and favorite part of the story {lapbook piece ~ front of lapbook}

Math

  • How many bags of gold? counting up to 10 {lapbook piece}
  • Pirate game ~ identifying numbers and moving correct number of spaces {lapbook piece}
  • Pattern with ‘jewels’ ~ I had planned to buy some fancy jewels to use for this, but we ended up just patterning 1” circles from paper.
  • Size sequencing ~ we sequenced pirate ships from large to small and small to large {lapbook piece}

ScienceIMG_9877

  • Animals ~ We printed off word card pictures of all the animals in the story and put them on a jump ring so we can add more animals from other stories that we read. We also sequenced the animals by the order we saw them in the book.
  • Direction ~ We had some fake compasses that we used to talk about North / South/ East / West
  • Weather ~ we talked about storms and calm seas, how you could tell a storm was coming in the book, etc..

Crafts

IMG_6643

  • Make a periscope/telescope. We used toilet paper tubes and paper towel tubes covered with saran wrap on one end and tinfoil all around for ours. HUGE hit.
  • P for parrot craft
  • V for violin craft {one of the pirates is playing the violin}

Fine & Gross Motor

  • Write name ~ actually traced it to put on the front of our lapbook {lapbook piece}
  • Walk the plank ~ we did simple balancing outside along the edge of our playground area. You could also tape a line on the floor and walk the line.

Personal Hygiene

  • Brushing teeth ~ one look at most pirate’s teeth and you realize the importance of brushing well! :)

Art

  • Stripes/dots ~ we looked through our book to find all of the stripes on the pages and then all the dots {there are stripes on almost every page}

Fun Stuff

IMG_9876

  • Puppets!! We printed out the puppets from our lapbook kit, stuck them on popsicle sticks and had fun playing with them
  • Dig for buried treasure!!! A sensory bucket filled with dirt and we had fun digging for gold coins in the dirt.

Other things we wanted to do, but didn’t have time for {based on the book On a Pirate Ship}:

  • ABC’s: Put a magnet on the end of a pirate hook and ‘fish’ for letters.
  • Language/Spelling: spell the word ‘pirate’ using other letters {build words using the word cards}
  • Science: steamy drinks {the pirates are drinking them}, sink the pirate ship {see how many 1” blocks you can put on a foam tray before it sinks}, talk about the the wind {storms at sea, wind blowing curtains on last page}, shadows from how the sun is throughout the book
  • Crafts: make an ‘ocean’ water bottle
  • Art: shades of blue {similar to all the shades of the ocean ~ dark to light}, draw a pictures like the one on the last page of On a Pirate Ship
  • Musical Instruments: the book shows accordians and violins being played

The Pirate Lapbook

The pirate lapbook is a bit of a mix of the unit study and also has standalone Pirate Lapbookpieces. On the front of the lapbook is a tracing/writing activity where Kaleb traced his name {all capital letters}. One of the things that I’ve been focusing on when we read books is having Kaleb tell me what the book was about and what his favorite part. I wrote his ‘summary’ of the book On a Pirate Ship and also his favorite part of the story.

The back cover of the lapbook has a pirate game board taped to it. I laminated each of the pieces and taped them together and to the back of the folder.

Inside the lapbook we glued our mini books {Parrot Colors & Bags of Gold}, added our Bible verse, the pockets for our ABC uppercase/lowercase matching cards and our pirate word cards, and then a big pocket to store our extra stuff {sequencing cards and puppets}. The pocket is just half of a 9×12 envelope.

View all the pieces of the lapbook and download it on the Pirate Lapbook page.

Additional Resources

The verse that was a part of our lapbook was “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also” from Matthew 6:21. It is a part of the Seeds of Purpose cd that we love and listen to often!!

Stories & Books We Used

 

Tools We Use

I’ve put together a ‘preschool store’ of sorts through Amazon that shows many of the tools and toys we use during our preschool time ~ and some of our favorite things.

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Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.

 

Preschool Corner ~ Police Lapbook

Our boys enjoyed the fireman lapbook that we did so much and asked to do one about policemen.

And we did!

Both of the boys are very much into firemen and policemen at the moment, so we took advantage of that this week and I put together a policeman lapbook for Zachary and Kaleb.  A certain little someone was being a little stubborn during some of it and didn’t want to do it all. Zachary, on the other hand, was able to do most of the cutting for the booklets on his own and then I glued it all together for both of them.

paperclip patterns

We did other activities as well during the week ~ made a stoplight craft {included in the lapbook file}, made red/yellow/green patterns using paperclips, dressed up like policemen, directed traffic, played with our cars/trucks and read lots of books too {see below}.

This is a picture of the inside/outside and back of our policeman lapbook that we did. I used a blue file folder {of course} ~ no fancy folding, and just punched it with a 3 hole punch when we were done so we could put it into a binder to keep on a nearby shelf.

Police lapbook

The front cover is a coloring sheet of a policeman that is part of the full lapbook file. On the back we put the P for Policeman letter tracing sheet that we worked on {included in the lapbook file}.

Inside the Lapbook

~ Count the Fingerprints: 1:1 counting up to 10. I’d highly recommend using a washable ink ~ I’m just saying.

~ Shapes in Signs: A look at signs we see all around us and the shape that they are.

~ What Color is the Police’s Hat? A coloring book to identify color words.

~ Police Patterns: Make simple {or more complex} patterns using a police officer and a magnifying glass.

~ Sign Matching: Play a fun game of memory together with street signs {I recommend printing this one on cardstock}.

~ ABC Matching: Uppercase and lowercase letter matching cards {print on cardstock and laminate to reuse!}.

~ Catch the Robber: A tracing activity to use with your preschooler {I would recommend printing this on cardstock and laminating so you can use it later}.

You can download individual pieces for the police lapbook on my website or the full file {it’s around 2.5 MB}. I have a few additional resources on the website too for you to visit. If you decide to do the lapbook with your kids, let me know and I’ll link to you from my website. :)

Stories & Books We Used

 
Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.
 
Please link your exact blog post here and be sure to include a link back to the Preschool Corner. I will delete any entries that do not link back to the site. Thanks for understanding. :)