Week 9 Winter

Objective: Name the four seasons, and identify attributes of winter

Welcome to winter.  What a great week to teach about winter, the weather cooperated and we had our first snow.

To introduce winter we read Grandmother Winter by Phyllis Root and One Winter's Day by M. Christina Butler.  We discussed the four seasons and that winter comes after fall.  We discussed that winter is the cold season and all the animals and plants go to sleep during winter.

We practiced using scissors to make snowflakes.  My daughter found it challenging to cut through four layers of paper, although she does well with just one layer. We might try this activity again in a year or so.
Here are some other fun winter ideas:
Roll a snowman printable game
Painting snowflakes with pine tree branches

While my sister-in-law was here for Thanksgiving she helped me make a felt Christmas tree, which I found here.  I would recommend using hot glue, my kiddos pulled it right apart with the felt glue.

Week 8 Thanksgiving - Making Finger Puppets

This week we did not do formal preschool.  We spent the week baking pies, visiting family, and being grateful for our blessings.  We did color some printables from First-School. We did the letter S and Thanksgiving turkeys.  Since Christmas is just around the corner I spent some time finishing some Brown Bear, Brown Bear finger puppets.  I'm really proud of how they turned out!

The bear was my first.  I made a pattern by tracing my finger and then giving about a quarter inch allowance on both sides.  They fit my finger and my husband's fingers too.  I started putting them together with hot glue, but I couldn't get my sewing needle through it, so I switched to using felt glue (which looked and smelled the same as Elmers glue).

 I glued the ears to the back piece and embroidered the face to the front piece.  After doing those things I sewed around the edges.  Lastly, I hot glued the eyes on -- who doesn't love googly eyes?  Finished.

 I used slightly changed shapes for the sheep, fish, and horse.  After getting past the learning curve they were really easy to throw together.  I hope my toddler enjoys them this Christmas.

Week 7 Opposites

Objective: Be able to identify the opposite of a word

 If I said tall I wanted her to be able to name short as its opposite. We then read several books. I have since returned all the books to the library and lost the list (it was a huge list).  But we found our books in the Juvenile section 428.1. She wanted fancy and plain to be the opposites on our poster board.

We did read Exactly the Opposite, I liked it a lot because it doesn't have the opposites listed.  We read the other books first, and then when we read Exactly the Opposite. We would look at the pictures and I let my daughter choose which opposites matched the pictures.

Later we worked on counting and writing numbers.  I wrote equations that had the sum of 16 and allowed her to make pipe cleaner and star bead bracelets to represent the equations.  She wore them around all day.  After she added up the stars I had her write 16 in the blank space.

For Thanksgiving we made some turkeys. I wrote numbers on some circles for how many feathers we should glue onto that circle. 

We glued on feathers.  16 feathers was kinda a lot, I would recommend using smaller numbers.  11 worked nicely.

Feathers are fun.  My baby crawled over my leg to try and get some.

Here they are drying.

We finished the turkey by adding a beak and a gobble (not its official name). Then I had my daughter add some eyes.  Lastly, we glued another brown circle to the back (to keep the toddler from tearing off the feathers) and added a magnet. Here's the finished product.  Some super cute turkeys for the fridge. 

Week 6 Rhyming

I think I've said before that my preschool schedule is more like an outline.  This week was another week where I mixed things up.  Monday morning we were having a breakfast conversation about rhyming.  My sweet daughter was pretty adamant that rhyming is alliteration.  That words that start with the same sound rhyme.  So I knew we needed to talk about rhyming this week.

We started with the nursery rhyme "To Market, To Market" and identified the words that rhymed.  We wrote them down.  I then had my daughter underline the part of the words that were the same.  I thought this would help solidify the concept that rhyming words end in the same way.

 

I made a rhyming matching game.  On the back I wrote the word and on the front I put a picture of the word.  She was having a hard time with hearing the rhyme, but when she'd flip them over and see the matching words she could pair them easily.

In addition to the rhyming game, I had her listen to some nursery rhymes on The Talking Mother Goose app.  This app reads the nursery rhymes aloud.  We got a couple stuck in our heads and went around repeating them all week. Another fun extension would have been to speak in rhyme.  I didn't do that, but you certainly can.

Lastly, we read some word family books.  We found them at a garage sale, and I've been using them to help her learn reading. While we read them I pointed out that all the words in the word family rhymed because they ended the same way.

Here we are after we talked about the upcoming holiday Thanksgiving.  We're decorating our windows with turkeys and pilgrims.

Remember that letter that we sent Grandma?  Well she sent back a whole bag of leaves, acorns, and some tree seeds.  Grandma's sure are wonderful.