Mammals Day 1

We did our usual warm up stuff, our book for our new letter, our path, writing our letter and then our new number, counting and writing.

For our topic, we talked about mammals.  We read a book from the library about mammals and talked about what makes a mammal.  We looked at pictures of animals and tried to determine if it was a mammal or not.  (This is really hard for a 3 year old).  haha

We then made marshmallow mammals!  :) Idea found here.  She enjoyed this, though I'm not sure if she enjoyed making the mammals or eating the marshmallows more.  Haha

(Can you tell what they are??  haha)

Birds Day 2

I know it has been awhile.  This past month has been crazy busy.  It seems like every one of us was sick at some point and then there have been appointments and out of towns and warm weather...  So school has been on the wayside.  I guess you can say I took a long spring break.  Haha.

We did finish up birds a few weeks ago.

We started with writing her name (tracing it), matching upper and lower case letters using this site,

then our letter building puzzle (she LOVES this and asks to do it just about every day.  And even though she has lost half the pieces, they are easy to replace!!).

For numbers practice, she rolled 2 dice and counted/added them up.  Then we flipped over the card showing the total of the dice until we had done them all.  (Idea found here.)

She then decided to be done with school for the day, so we didn't do the other bird activities I had planned.

We were going to dissolve an egg in vinegar so we could see what an egg looks like on the inside (it takes a week+ so be prepared to wait to see the outcome!)  You can find this online in a hundred different places, but here is one with step by step instructions.

We were then going to make bird's nests using stuff we have around the house based on this activity.  I also had a bird's nest book to go with it. We read the book, but that was it.  And that's fine by me!

Animals: Birds Day 1

Ok, back on track.  Ready for some school this week, since it is my spring break from teaching, so I'll have a little extra time.  Since it is April, we moved on to animals!  (I realize I never did summer, but I couldn't really think of any activities to do with summer and we did do the seasons tree activity at the beginning and read a book so at least she got some exposure to it.  I'm ready to move on).

For this first week, we are going to be talking about birds.  Or course we did our usual Letter and Number warm up for the letter L and the number 12.

Then on to birds.

We read Birds by Kevin Henkes (the same author that wrote Lily's Purple Plastic Purse).  Super cute book.  It gave a good, basic introduction to birds.

We then made a picture of birds following this template.  (The link doesn't work for me, so I just saved the image, opened it as a word document and printed it from there).  She colored, then cut out the pieces and assembled it herself, following the small picture.  It looks awesome!  We talked about all the pieces as we were putting it together and what else a bird has that is not in the picture.

We then focused on bird beaks and did a little experiment.  I got four bowls of "bird food" (mini marshmellows, raisins, chips, and water) and four "bird beaks" (toothpick, tongs, tweezers, and a straw).  She then had to try each beak on each food and see which one worked the best.  We looked at some pictures of bird beaks and talked about how they are different and why they need to be different.  She had so much fun!  And she loved eating the chips and marshmellows when were done.  And yes, she continued to use the "beaks" to eat them.  Haha.

Letter Puzzles

Thursday I had planned for all this fun Easter stuff to do.  I wanted to read Curious George, The Story of the Easter Bunny and then make toilet paper roll bunnies and stained glass flowers  and torn paper easter eggs.  I also had some fun ideas for working on letters and numbers, but frankly, it didn't happen.  Like I said, I was overwhelmed last week.  So maybe we can do some of these things later, we'll see.  Or next year.

I did make a super cool letter puzzle game for her and she LOVED it.  I got the idea and the blackline here.  I used some craft foam I had to cut out the pieces, then put all the pages in pocket protectors in a small folder and let her go to town.  She did an awesome job and loved doing it!  (Note, the page says to cut out two of the small rectangles, but the "E" will require 3 small rectangles, so cut out and extra!)  Have fun!

Seasons: Spring

Last week I kinda had a burn out.  It's amazing how going from working full time to part time and I feel like I am busier now.  I shouldn't complain because I know there are tons of amazing moms who work full time and still make it through the day.  I know it's hard, because I've been there.  But lately I have felt bogged down with... stuff.

Anyhow, last week we really only did one full day of school (besides regular preschool.  That's what is pulling on my motivation...).  And, I didn't take any pictures.  Lame, I know.  So I'll at least let you know what we did and give you the links so you can do it yourself!

Tuesday:  Warm-up for letter K.
Letter book.
Writing our letter of the week.
Letter path (we used the stamps again, she loves using stamps).

Then we practiced counting and writing the number 11.

Then on to our seasons stuff.  We read a book about Spring.  I didn't love it, it was mostly about experiments and things you can do in the spring time.  Very wordy and not super explanatory about what happens in the spring time, just what you can do.  Anyhow, we mostly used the pictures to talk about what to expect during the spring time, as well as looking outside and seeing what changes we could see.  No leaves yet, but our plants are going quite well from when we planted them a few weeks ago.  :)

We then used paint and markers to make a thumb print flower.  (Of course, ours ended up with thumb prints all over it, but hey, I was just impressed she was willing to get her hands dirty to do it.  Haha).

Then we made paper towel butterflies.  This was super fun.  I put some water/food coloring in cups, then folded up a paper towel into sixteenths.  Brooklyn got to dip each corner into different colors, the we opened them up and put them outside to dry.  The next day we got some pipe cleaners and scrunched up the paper towel and twisted the pipe cleaner to make the body/antennae.  So cute!

Seasons: Winter

I decided to add a new thing to our daily routine... writing her name!  At this point she will only be tracing it, but it should help her learn to recognize her own name and the more she practices writing the letters, the sooner it will be that she can write it on her own.  I got the tracing from this website.  You can type in whatever word(s) you want and it will produce a tracing sheet.

For our letter practice today we did some shaving cream letters.  I smeared shaving cream all over the table and then she practiced writing the letters in it.  I showed her the letter card so she would have a reference for what they looked like.  I thought she would enjoy this a lot more than she did.  I forgot how much she hates to have her hands dirty.  (She was excited at the beginning.  When I first sprayed it on the table, she yelled, "What? Are you crazy?"  Haha)

For our numbers practice, I wrote a number on an index card and she used a hole puncher to make that many holes in the card.  (This is also good for fine motor skills.)  This was actually a little harder than I thought, since the hole punch is new and very stiff.  So we hole punched together.

After she finished, we then put the numbers in order from 1-10.  Idea found here.

 Our theme was more about the seasons.  It worked out perfectly since it snowed today and I had planned to talk about winter.  :)  So we started by reading A Snowy Day and Millions of Snowflakes.  We then used paper to make some of our own snowflakes.  I'm sure you can tell which ones I did and which ones she did.  Haha, she loved using "mommy scissors" to do this.

 Then we painted a snowman.  My original intention had been to use cotton balls to make one, but apparently I don't have any.  So I used this painting idea.  (I had been thinking of using this paint idea, but found the other one first.  We'll do this one on another day.)

I guess I should have gotten a picture of the final product.  It's pretty awesome.

St. Patrick's Day 2

I know the holiday is past.  But who cares?  Today we talked about some of the legends of St. Patrick's Day.  We read a book about St. Patrick and some of the legends, and did a few more crafts.

Well, let's start back at the beginning.  We are on letter J this week.  (For Jessy!)

We did our usual warm-up.  Calendar, "J" book, "J" path, writing/drawing J's.  (She got really in to this today and made sure to use lots of different colors, then erase them so they were "naked" (haha) and did them again and again.

(For our paths today I bought some letter stamps and let her use the "j" stamp to stamp on top of the js on the paper.  She LOVE this).

We practiced the number 10 and related it to our hands and feet.  At one point she counted her toes and got 11.  Hmmm....

Anyway, for our St. Patrick's Day stuff we made a leprechaun who dances .  She colored it and started to cut it out, but then wanted my help, so I finished cutting for her.  Then she tried using the hole punch and needed some help for that.  :)  Then we got some brads and attached it.  She needed a little help with that, too.  But she still had fun and likes to make him dance now!

 We then practiced some math and got a bowl of Lucky Charms.  She had to pull out the marshmellows, then graph them, then we counted them and found the most, the least, etc.  And then she ate all the marshmellows.  :)
 (We only have the Malt-o-Meal version of Lucky Charms and the chart uses the real kind.  Did you know the marshmellows are different?  I just taped a marshmellow at the bottom of the chart to cover the pictures so she would know what went in each column).