Preschool Corner Archives - Page 51 of 84

Preschool Corner ~ The Pinterest Edition

Sep222011

September 22, 2011 by Jolanthe 22 Comments

If you haven’t joined Pinterest, consider this your formal invitation! :) This has been a great tool for me to visually sort my online finds and discover some great crafts, recipes and more. Today I wanted to share a few things with you that I think you all would enjoy much and invite you to browse around.

Airplane clip via parents.com

We have a few birthdays coming up this month and next and two little boys that are Star Wars all.day.long. I’ve been gathering party ideas, favor finds, and some other great ideas on my Star Wars board, but here are a few favorites.

Light Saber Popsicle Cozy via Rips in My Jeans

Light Saber party napkins via Catch My Party

And with fall now here, it’s time to start planning some fun fall activities. I’ve been gathering ideas on my Fall Theme board and cannot WAIT to do some of them with the kids!

You know these acorns treats from Little Nummies are the cutest, don’t you?

My favorite find today ~ this colored pumpkin seed mosaic from Our Little Nature Nest. Oh…I would scoop pumpkin guts to do this!!

Don’t let me stop you from browsing around. There are some great ladies on Pinterest sharing their great finds ~ it’s a virtual bulletin board chocked full of great ideas!

More Preschool Links

ABC Printables
Color and Shape Printables
Preschool Packs: Policemen, fireman and more!
Math and Counting Printables
Phonics and Reading Printables
Preschool Planning Pages
Preschool Resources Main Page

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Caps for Sale Unit ~ Preschool Corner

Sep162011

September 16, 2011 by Jolanthe Leave a Comment

Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina was much fun for us to read and act out together. This also is now one of my favorite weeks we’ve spent learning together because of a little something that happened during the week ~ you’ll have to watch the video below!

Everyday we did the following {before we started into our workboxes} ~ read the book Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina together and talked about the animals in the story using our Animal Classification Cards. Here’s a peek into how our workboxes for the week:

Bible

The peddler showed a varying range of emotions in the story, ending up stamping his feet and throwing his cap on the ground. We talked about Proverbs 29:11 ~ “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.” During the week we talked about different reactions we had to situations at home and how the verse applied to us.

Math

Measuring ~ We measured stacks of caps from the go-along printables. The hardest part was remembering to put the bottom of the ruler in the right spot. Had I thought of it, I would have pulled out our Inchimals to use instead of a ruler.

Graphing ~ Kaleb LOVES graphing, so the coin counting was a big hit. We colored the coins to match real coins and then started rolling away to see which coin would win {quarters did}. This was a great way to talk about the names of different coins and how much they were worth. We also used our Melissa and Doug play money to match up with the pictures {we don’t have all the coins, but matched up what we did}.

Money ~ The coin we focused on primarily this week was the ‘cent’ or the penny. We used the coin counting sheet to count pennies and matched them up 1:1. We also hung all of the caps on our tree from the printables pack {I wrote a ‘cents’ amount on the back of each cap}. Kaleb picked hats from the tree and then used his play money to buy the caps from me. :)

Language, Phonics and Reading

In addition to our beginning sound cards and the vocabulary words we studied, we tried something new that was not only a huge success, but resulted in something else that made everyone excited.

Reading ~ After sorting the words into the –at and –ap word families, we tried sounding out the words. This is the first time that Kaleb has attempted sounding words out. Here he is sounding out his first word {‘cause I had to grab the camera for this!}…

Story Summary ~ This is a part of the printables that I am really beginning to enjoy with Kaleb. His summaries are getting much more detailed and often hilarious at the same time.

Pretend Play and Other Fun

We had fun stacking caps on our head to see how many we could balance up there and acting out the story together.

Additional Caps for Sale Resources

~ Caps for Sale Printables

~ Read! Build! Write! cards for Caps for Sale

~ Caps for Sale resources from Homeschool Share

~ Book unit ideas from Delightful Learning

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Camping Preschool Unit ~ Preschool Corner

Sep92011

September 9, 2011 by Jolanthe 3 Comments

We were hoping for another camping trip to wrap up our unit on camping…but it’s not going to happen. We could try our backyard, but truthfully, I’m a little wary of doing that after having the bear wreck our composter that is right in our backyard.

My bed is looking rather safe and we’ll just plan on keeping it that way for now, okay?

With some yucky weather, we brought the fun indoors instead and had a blast together. Somehow I managed to lose {or mislabel} a big batch of pictures, so pictures are a little limited, but I think you’ll get the idea!

Everyday we did the following {before we started into our workboxes} ~ read a book from our camping pile {see the carousel below} and sang our camping song together. All printables were from my Camping Preschool Pack.

Language

During the week we talked about different camping words, worked on beginning sounds and recognizing uppercase/lowercase letters for words, had fun with our playdough mat {Ff for fire}, found words in our camping story, and use our camping vocabulary words for our Read! Build! Write Mats {all printables from the Camping Preschool Pack}.

This week we also talked about compound words {flash/light, camp/fire, etc..} and picked one of our camping stories to summarize at the end of the week {Tiny Goes Camping was his pick!}.

Math

We’re working on our ‘teen’ numbers, so firefly counting was big in our house this week. We also put fine motor practice together with reasoning when Kaleb worked on the campfire patterns worksheet…he loves those glue sticks!

Misc

Kaleb loved sorting the Thing You Eat {or Don’t Eat} page and he is a huge fan of the Find the Difference pages too that I put together. He LOVED the maze that was a part of the pack too ~ something I need to make more of for him right now!

Cooking

What camping trip would be complete without s’mores? Because of the weather we made Indoor S’mores {find the recipe here} which were just as yummy and way less messy. :)

Pretend Play

Kaleb and Zachary built a small campfire ring in our woods and had a blast ‘pretend-roasting’ marshmallows. I had some of the cutest pictures of him…and can’t find them. They also set up our teeny-tiny pup tent in the house just for a little added fun.

Kaleb also had fun playing with our Forest Camping felt set. Different days we talked about what we might need camping, animals that we’ve seen while camping, animals we’ve seen in our own backyard, etc…

Crafts

The mini campfire craft was one of Kaleb’s favorite parts of the week. Turned out so cute and he was so excited to show it to Daddy when he came home from work!

Camping Resources

Camping Preschool Pack Printables

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Filed Under: Preschool Corner 3 Comments

Indoor S’mores Recipe

Sep72011

September 7, 2011 by Jolanthe 5 Comments

Sometimes you want to have a little outdoor fun, but the weather doesn’t cooperate with your plans. Time to move it indoors!

The weather was rainy and building a campfire in our backyard a bit out of the question, so we pulled out all the ingredients for s’mores and put them together in our oven for a little yummy indoor camping fun.

You’ll Need

marshmallows
graham crackers
chocolate bars
baking sheet

If your kids are anything like mine, they are going to want every last morsel of food available…

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Put half of the graham cracker on a cookie sheet. Top with a square of chocolate.

3. Place a marshmallow on top of each graham cracker.

4. Bake until the marshmallows are puffy and golden ~ between 3 and five minutes.

5. Remove from the oven and top with the other half of the graham cracker and squish them together to make your s’more.

6. Enjoy!

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We’re Going on a Bear Hunt Unit and Activities

Sep22011

September 2, 2011 by Jolanthe 2 Comments

Can I just say what a difference a week of antibiotics can make in a child? I’m not kidding you when I say that I’m not quite sure I recognize the little boy sitting in front of me this week. He is so FULL of energy and silliness ~ and I am ever so happy to know that the medicine is helping out!

Anyway, we are having much fun continuing on with our literature studies. This week we read {and read and read} the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. Although we did a lot more than I have pictured here, this is a quick look at our week together.

Everyday we did the following {before we started into our workboxes} ~ read the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen together, watched the YouTube video {and read along}, and talked about the animals in the story using our Animal Classification Cards. Here’s a peek into how our workboxes looked:

Bible

I think one of the best parts of our week was singing our Bible verse together each day {Isaiah 41:10} and playing our Seeds of Courage album while we were working. I tried to get Kaleb to sing for you all…but it was a no-go. :)

Language

In addition to reading the story each day, Kaleb was ‘reading’ it back to me the last few days. Each day we also pulled out our story sequencing cards and put them in the right order.

The Read! Build! Write! cards were a big hit again. I finally ordered some Letter Tile Magnets from All About Spelling and bought a cookie sheet JUST for Kaleb to use. Each day we did two of our vocabulary words {reading the word, building the word and then writing the word}. Other language activities included our vocabulary cards, beginning sound cards, and the Read! Build! Write! cards for the story {find all printables here}.

Toward the end of the week, I pulled out the pieces from our Bear Sensory Tub and Kaleb made them a part of our story telling. He put the bear in the cave and then had the bear ‘chase’ everyone back through the snowstorm {covered with cotton balls}, the forest {there were twigs and a small branch there later}, the mud {ummm..not so much}, the river {blue felt with rocks} and then the grass.

Pretend Play

The Bear Sensory Tub was a big hit with all of the kids, although it never made in into a tub. The kids had fun letting the bear fish for food, hide out in the cave and play with her cubs.

Math

I printed off the bear paws from the We’re Going on a Bear Hunt printables and wrote numbers from 1-12 on them. We talked about even/odd numbers and sorted them into the right piles. We also sequenced the bears that we printed off from the pack according to size.

For Fun

Kaleb can some days color for hours. When he’s been too tired to do other things the past few weeks, we often find him sitting at the table and coloring. I pulled some images from the Scholastic website and printed them off for him to color. He set up the book in front of him and set off to color it ‘just like the book’.

We went on a REAL bear hunt…and this is the only picture I have? And if you’ve been reading my Facebook page enough, you’ll know that we’ve had one roaming around our house…so perhaps it wasn’t such a smart idea! Fortunately we didn’t run into any, but it did give us a good reason to talk about what we would do if we DID happen to run across a bear for real.

There were lots of other fun things in our week, but that’s a quick glimpse into our lives. Here are some other great sites to visit for ideas…

Additional Resources for We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

~ We’re Going on a Bear Hunt printables

~ Read! Build! Write! cards for We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

~ Bear Hunt Resources from Homeschool Share

~ Bear Sensory Tub from Totally Tots

~ We’re Going on a Bear Hunt video by Michael Rosen

~ Story Sequencing cards from Sparklebox

~ Unit ideas from Joyful Mother of 6

~ Book unit ideas from Delightful Learning

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Filed Under: Literature Based Printables, Preschool Corner 2 Comments

Field Trip ~ Preschool Corner

Aug262011

August 26, 2011 by Jolanthe 8 Comments

This week was a little off for us again since we spent most of Monday running around town to pick up a prescription for Kaleb ~ but on the bright side, we now have a ‘diagnosis’ that explains a lot of the sickness and issues that Kaleb has been having ~ Lyme disease. For now, we’re plugging away at antibiotics and hoping that nips a lot of it at the start.

We also had family visiting us and that warranted a field trip of monumental proportions ~ Washington, D.C. Fortunately we went the day AFTER our house shook with the earthquake and all of the museums were re-opened.

The biggest hit for Kaleb? The Air and Space Museum!!

There were so many things to see and explore {and I have absolutely NO idea what he was looking at here…}. The boy was everywhere and enjoying every minute of it!

He patiently waited in line to sit in a small airplane and move the rudders ~ even though he was way too short!

The kid’s area in the museum was SO much fun. A ton of hands-on and interactive displays for the kids to learn from.

Amelia Earhart’s plane was one of the highlights for all of the kids. They were fascinated by it! For Kaleb it was a toss-up between this plane and one of the BIG ones that he could walk through and tour.

Later, we had a faraway look at the Washington Monument, now officially cracked…but is it leaning? :)

We took a walk down the Mall, through the gardens and headed to another museum.

And the best way to end the day? On our way out of the Museum of American History, the boys had a mock light saber battle in front of C3PO. Oh how this little man adores a good light saber battle. :)

We did squeeze in some other learning time and part of a preschool pack this week, but this was definitely the highlight of the week for all of us!

How was YOUR week?

More Preschool Links

ABC Printables
Before Five in a Row Printables
Color and Shape Printables
Preschool Packs: Star Wars, camping, fireman and more!
Math and Counting Printables
Phonics and Reading Printables
Preschool Planning Pages
Preschool Resources Main Page

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.

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Filed Under: Preschool Corner 8 Comments