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Preschool Corner ~ No Bells and Whistles

I can tell you all honestly that things aren’t always all bells and whistles here. :) There are weeks when I feel like I pull out all the stops…and then others when we’re doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Not to mention the weather was GORGEOUS this week, so we took a nature walk and got LOTS of exercise!

Zachary was chomping at the bit to go outside every day, so he was literally throwing work on the table and begging to do things ~ as in three math pages a day {thinking he was getting off easily…}.  Because he was so eager…he failed to realize that he was doing some rather lovely subtraction problems ~ and he was doing them well.

Reading well…and learning more verses to finish up his Awana book {he was so proud}.

Little Mr. Kaleb had much fun doing some practical learning this week ~ sorting clothes with Mommy. Short sleeves vs. long sleeves. Shorts vs. pants. Jackets vs. sweatshirts. Girls vs. boys. Lots and lots of sorting. Helping Mommy wash clothes {lights and darks} and organize. The boy loves to help organize! :)

Despite the fact that we’re technically near the end of the year, we’ve switched around our routine a little bit so that the boys are doing all of their ‘stuff’ with me at the beginning of our day ~ after our calendar time. When we’re done, they have a set activity to play together and then have free time while I work with the girls. All in all, it’s working out much better for us all and it’s been one of those ‘duh’ weeks for me {as in, why didn’t we do this sooner?}.

Before I forget, here are a few more alphabet crafts. Click on the picture to go to the ABC post.

Penguin craft Quail craft

Rabbit craft Snail craft

How did your week go? :) Did you conquer a MOUNTAIN of activities or go from day-to-day and have fun together? Leave a comment and let me know!

Don’t forget that we’ll have a bunch of great giveaways linked up here starting Sunday. I have a couple preschool-related giveaways planned, so stay tuned!

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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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Preschool Corner: Peeps and the Real Meaning of Easter

The title really does sum up our week. The local schools were on Spring Break this week, meaning kids were knocking on our door all.the.time and there were many distracted kiddos on hand.

That’s not to say we didn’t actually accomplish the basics, but the rest of our fun focused on learning about the true meaning of Easter ~ and blowing up Peeps in our microwave.

Sad, but true.

Resurrection Eggs

First we used our set of Resurrection Eggs along with the LOVELY printables that Carisa put together to help teach and review the REAL reason for Easter. I had one of the older sets, but managed to lose them somehow, so I ordered a new set this year. We had fun reading the Easter story from different Bibles this week too.

Resurrection Eggs

Both of the boys are really enjoying the eggs ~ and we’ll be using both the eggs and the printables each day until Easter. Kaleb was especially fond of the donkey in the first egg. :)

We also played the Build a Bunny game together ~ Kaleb and I played the puzzle part of the game and Zachary did the drawing part of the game {it’s a two page printable, so don’t panic when you open it!}.

Peeps War

The best part of the week? Blow up a Peep or Peep Wars. We sent a good quantity of poor, unsuspecting Peeps to their microwave demise. Really, it was an experiment of sorts. A very fun experiment.

First, we put two Peeps in together to see how long it would take them to either explode or melt…hopefully not catch on fire. Would the color of the Peep make a difference?  Here is the first round of competitors and their time in the microwave:

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peeps 30 seconds

peeps 45 seconds

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Tasty, no? We had fun doing multiple rounds with the Peeps to see if they would actually blow up or if they heated up faster if just one was in at a time {they did}. The boys were VERY fascinated with the whole process. :)

Additional Resources

Here are some links to some other great Easter resources around the web:

 

Stories & Books We Used

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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Build a Bunny Printable Game

Since Easter is coming soon, I had to share this with you all now!! We have had a lot of fun playing it together and I’m sure you all will love it too!

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To play Build a Bunny cut out the pieces of the bunny and then use a die to roll numbers. Have your little one count the number s/he rolled and then pick that bunny piece.

build a bunny 2

For older children, you can use the second sheet ~ Draw a Bunny. Same idea, but you use the outline of the bunny as a guide and then add in the different pieces. Just a little more involved for older preschoolers and kindergarteners!

Have fun playing!

Preschool Corner ~ Playdough Mats

This week has been a little ‘off’ at our house and I didn’t figure out why until early this morning when Zachary complained that his ear was hurting. One lovely ear infection diagnosed.

Fortunately I brought Kaleb along for the visit and our doctor checked him out too ~ and he has one in both ears. Why I’m so slow to catch onto these things is beyond me sometimes…

Since both boys were really in rare form, we spent much time ‘playing’ and learning rather than doing our actual work. Our toy of choice?

Playdough!!

I put together some playdough mats for both of the boys to use {and to share with you all, of course}. I just printed them off onto cardstock and rather than laminating them, I slide the sheet we are using into a plastic page protector. Then we can change it out as we want to!

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Kaleb’s playdough mats are all alphabet based. Each one is 8 1/2” x 11” and has both the uppercase and lowercase letter on the sheet along with a picture of something that starts with that letter/letter sound.

alphabet playdough matsalphabet playdough mat
 

We tried rolling the playdough, but Kaleb preferred snipping, snipping, snipping it instead. Needless to say, we had chunks of playdough everywhere and that is how Kaleb filled in the letters. We talked about the letters, traced them with our fingers, made the letter sounds together ~ and just had fun!

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Zachary’s playdough mats are actually tied into our All About Spelling lessons {I’m sneaky like that}. He said he was ‘too big’ for the letter mats and wanted his own to use. :)

spelling playdough mats

Since we’re using All About Spelling with him, I put together some spelling word mats to go along with most of the lessons in Level 1. Nothing fancy, mind you, but it has been great reinforcement for him on the phonics rules that he is learning each week. Each mat has the lesson equivalent in the bottom corner {i.e. 1.15 is level 1 lesson 15}.

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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Preschool Corner ~ Rainbows and Leprechauns

Notice a difference in the button to the left? Preschool Corner is expanding a little bit to incorporate 5K {or Kindergarten} too! You can read a little more about it in the post I wrote yesterday {and grab the new button too if you would like!}.

Starting this week, I’ll be sharing what we’ve been doing with BOTH of our boys. I’m focusing on one theme each week with them, but will be showing how we cover the same theme with activities geared for different ages or modified so they both can participate.

This week’s fun {a.k.a. learning} was all about leprechauns and rainbows. We had to have a little fun with St. Patrick’s Day! A lot of the activities we did eventually ended up in our Rainbow Lapbooks.

Rainbow lapbook

Bible

Rainbows = Noah. I’m sure that’s not any big surprise! We read the story of Noah from several of our kid’s Bibles each morning, played with our Noah’s Ark set and used this mini-reader as story sequencing cards for Zachary.

We also have some great flannel board punch out pieces that we used on our flannel board to have Kaleb play out the story of Noah this week.

Coloring

Drawing rainbows ~ Kaleb doesn’t often like to sit down and try to draw on his own. This week I asked him to make a rainbow…and he did!! Granted it only ended up with three colors before he hit his drawing limit, but he even tried to make little arches just like a rainbow.

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Dot Rainbows ~ Originally we were going to use our dot markers to make rainbows {til Mommy discovered that she had purchased the wrong set of markers…}, so instead we used this M&M Sorting mat for to Kaleb practice coloring in small circles.

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Cooking ~ Pistachio Pudding

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We were going to make pistachio muffins, but time ran out ~ so pudding it was! Really, the boys could have cared less ~ it was edible. And green.

Fun

The rice box got pulled out this week and a little leprechaun lost a bunch of his gold. The boys had fun digging around and filling up their bowls with the gold {spray painted kidney beans}.

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Math

Counting 1 to 10 ~ We used the same set of cards for the boys, but both did something different. Kaleb is counting from 1 to 10, so we worked on counting with 1:1 correspondence and pointing to the numbers as we said them to help him identify the numbers.

Zachary took the same cards and used them to count backwards from from 10 to 1. We printed off the rainbow numbers from Erica’s site ~ I just printed them off four to a sheet, rather than on individual pages.

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Rainbow Size Sorting ~ Kaleb started sorting the rainbows by size and then lost interest.

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Big sister Laurianna quickly stepped in and had him stomp on the biggest rainbow that was left in the pile to help him finish sorting them. He thought that was hilarious!

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Cereal Sorting/Graphing ~ I had all the pages printed off, the Lucky Charms cereal ready to be sorted ~ and then two little boys snuck into the kitchen and ATE THE ENTIRE PROJECT. So much for our Lucky Charm sorting activity.

Roll a Rainbow ~ A fun number recognition activity where you roll the die to get pieces and build your rainbow. We ended up gluing ours onto Zachary’s lapbook.

Roll a Rainbow

Rainbow Graphing ~ These were meant to be large printables, but I just changed the print settings and printed off 2 sheets per page so that we could add it to our lapbook. Zachary had to count the rainbows and then graph how many there were on a bar graph. This was the first time he’d really done graphing and he was so proud of himself! :)

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Roll a Leprechaun ~ I thought this might be a little hard for Zachary, but he was so excited to play this. Basically Zachary had to figure out the number on the die that he had rolled and then draw a specific part of the leprechaun. He was so happy with his {girl} leprechaun that he wanted her put on the front of his lapbook.

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Phonics & Spelling

Zachary had fun playing this great shamrock phonics sorting game. He read each of the words and then put them into the word family they belonged.

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We also worked a little more on All About Spelling {Level 1}. While it may not seem rainbow related, we tied it in by using some rainbow colored M&M’s as rewards for Zachary’s spelling work. When he finished the lesson he made a rainbow row and gobbled them up. :)

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Science

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Color Mixing ~ Even though we’ve done this before, it never ceases to interest and amaze all of our kids. We just used water and food coloring in small plastic bowls.

We first read the book White Rabbits Color Book and then set up our three primary colors {red, yellow, blue}. I filled those containers up with more water and left three empty ones. The containers were each on a foam sheet that represented the color in the bowl {none under the ones that weren’t filled yet!!}.

The boys each guessed which color would result when we mixed the two choices together and then Kaleb put down the right color square for our new color to go on. We put our colors in a circle shape, similar to the color wheel that we added to our lapbooks.

Color Words ~ We named and wrote the colors in this minit book for our lapbook. Kaleb colored in the squares and named the colors {I wrote them} and Zachary wrote in the color names as I spelled them for him.

Songs and Rhymes

Color Songs ~ Carisa has some great printables for color songs that we sang this week and then added to our lapbook.

I’m a Little Leprechaun

{Tune: I’m a Little Teapot}

I’m a little leprechaun

Dressed in green

The teeniest man that you have ever seen.

If you can catch me,

So it’s told,

I’ll give you my pot of gold!

Additional Resources

Here are links to some of the great resources we used this week! I’m all about using what is already available is someone has gone through the trouble to put it together and it fits what we need!

R is for Rainbow ~ Erica has some GREAT printables all about rainbows. We used several of them this week. Don’t forget that you can make the printables smaller {i.e. fit more than one on a page} if you are worried about printing off too much.

Rainbow Lapbook ~ printables and links from Carisa @ 1+1+1=1

Little Laplinks {April} ~ Links to some lapbook printables and other sites that have completed rainbow lapbooks

Lucky Charms Graphing ~ sort cereal and graph the results of what’s in your bowl.

Shamrock File Folder Games ~ a variety of different file folder games. Pick one to use with your kiddos!

Roll a Leprechaun ~ Whatever number you roll allows you to draw another piece of your leprechaun.

Rainbow ideas from Making Learning Fun

R is for Rainbow ~ Michelle @ Delightful Learning linked up with her preschool rainbow ideas ~ she has some great ones to share!

Stories & Books We Used


 

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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Preschool Corner ~ Adding 5K!!

There have been quite a few of you asking me if it would be ok for you to continue linking up with the Preschool Corner because your child had turned 5.

YES!!! Please do! :)

We’ll be transitioning our boys in the upcoming weeks and BOTH will be included in the Preschool Corner.  It will continue  to be called the Preschool Corner, but in honor of adding a ‘step-up’ level, I put together a new button for you all to use.

Those of you who already have it linked in your sidebar might have noticed the little change. Otherwise, here is the new button and code for you to use if you would like to grab it for yourself!



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If you have any questions, please leave a comment or click the ‘contact me’ button in my sidebar and I’ll do my best to get back to you right away!