20 Best Tips

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}.

image image image

image image image

image image image

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.

image




Preschool Corner ~ A Week Off

Daddy was off this week, so we decided to take a break along with him. Good thing, since first thing Monday morning I ended up in the ER with a kidney stone and have {supposedly} been taking it easy ever since.

Or maybe not so much. :)

Meanwhile, we’ve been reading books, watching movies, visiting the Children’s Museum, and having WAY too much fun playing Angry Birds…

Way too much fun. :) Both boys curled up in one of our new Ahh Products bean bag chair to play together and Kaleb was cracking me up. He kept saying the phrase “That is pretty tricky!!!” along with “High five!!” whenever Zachary would attempt or master a level of the game.

IMG_0087

Someone asked me if I could put together a Build a Snowman game, but since it isn’t quite yet THAT cold here, I thought it might be better to do Build a Christmas Tree instead {and don’t worry…I’ll be sharing the Build a Snowman soon!}.

This is just like the Build a Bunny game that I shared before Easter. To play Build a Christmas Tree cut out the pieces of the tree and then use a die to roll numbers. Have your little one count the number s/he rolled and then pick that piece.

image

If you have an older child, you might want to play Draw a Christmas Tree. Use the outline of the tree as a guide and then add in the different pieces. Just a little more involved for older preschoolers and kindergarteners!

image

That’s it for this week!  What have you been up to this week? Be sure to link up below or leave a comment!

More Preschool Links:

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.

 

Jolanthe Signature affiliate button

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.

image

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 ~ Do a Dot Pages N-Z

Great plans…and this week ended up being completely crazy. While we did do lots of learning, it wasn’t all all what I had planned for us to do.

We took a trip to Target {after yet another doctor’s visit} and ended up filling up all of our shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. We wrote letters to each of the children that we are sending shoeboxes too, printed of pictures to include in our boxes, and got them ready to drop off. {Note to self: Next year, make a special date and take each kiddo separately to shop for shoebox gifts. Four kids in Target shoving things in shoeboxes = pure craziness}.

IMG_9375

The do-a-dot markers came out in FULL force this week again, and I printed off more copies of our A-Z pages for Kaleb to work on {his request!}. Since I haven’t shared the second batch of the do-a-dot pages, I figured this would be a great time to do that. :) Here are a few sample pages for the letters N-Z do-a-dot sheets. You can also download the letters A-M do-a-dot set here.

do a dot page do a dot pages

 

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.

image

More Preschool Links:

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.

Jolanthe Signature affiliate button

Customizable Preschool Planning Pages

free editable preschool planning pages from Homeschool Creations

I know that I’ve shared my Preschool Planning Pages with you before, but I am SO excited with something new that I can offer with THIS download.

You can customize and save the pdf planning pages on your own computer!!

What does that mean? This pdf form can be typed in, printed, saved and changed from week to week, meaning you can copy/paste from week to week and save your lesson plans as you go along!!

Preschool Planning Form 2010Preschool Planning Form 2010 2 

If you want to see what my current pages look like, click on the picture above for a close up of my planning form. When you are ready to create your own, click the download button below and start working. The blue areas are all spots that can be typed in and customized to your weekly layout.

Download button