We've been having fun with our weekly preschools. Here's what we've been doing so far this year.
January
February
Monkey, Valentine, Presidents, Dinosaur
March
Horse, Insects, Spring, Birds
April
Easter, Frogs
Days of the Week
Looked at the calendar and talked about the pattern (S, M, T, W, Th, F, S, repeat). Rachel can
now look at the calendar and if we point to the date can tell us what day of the week it is and is
more aware of what day is coming next.
Snow
Our favorite part was probably the snowball fight! Well a makeshift snowball fight indoors with socks. But it was still fun. Then we made snow from a kit (it was such a mess). Ashley was not very keen on the feel of it for a little bit then she got used to it and really started playing. We then made snowflakes from q-tips.
Winter
I tried not to focus on snow since we did that the week before but we talked about animals, and weather, and what to wear. Our favorite book is Froggy Gets Dressed by London. We made animal tracks in "snow" our playdoh, had to find the missing match to mittens and pretended to be paleontologist and chip a spider frozen in ice. We even used ice to paint.
Art
We talked about how art is made up of lines, shapes and colors. And that people who create art are called artist. Rachel wants to be an artist someday. And loves to paint, draw, color and create things. The day after our lesson we went to the library that has an art gallery for an art scavenger hunt. This was somewhat successful considering that all they had were pottery pieces. We were still able to find colors and shapes and even lines. Finding a still life, landscape and portrait proved more difficult.
Monkey
We played silly monkey see monkey do games and learned the difference between Monkey and Ape and that Monkey starts with M and Ape starts with A (this was for Ashley). It's sometimes difficult to do things educational for both of them.
Valentines
Was just a fun introduction to what it's all about and how we celebrate it. We played and used conversation hearts for graphing and sorting and of course eating!
Presidents
Since it was presidents day we talked about how our country has a president which up until
now they were oblivious about. We talked about how the president was in charge of the country and who it is. We then talked about two former presidents Washington and Lincoln. We looked at our coins and bills and found them. We even made a log cabin for Lincoln.
Dinosaur
MOMS Club had a trip planned to go to the Natural History Museum which has dinosaurs so we talked about them the day before going. This was in hopes that they wouldn't freak out over the dinosaurs since they are animatronic (?). It didn't work they still freaked out and wouldn't walk into the room which is a problem when you have to go through the room to get to fun kid area. But that's okay we made it through and had a fun lesson and trip to the museum. Which by the end they finally got used to the dinosaurs and looked at some. But on to our lesson stuff... We learned about a couple of them and Rachel alphabetized their names, we looked up how big some were and put tape on the floor for each one and then measured ourselves against it. We acted like dinosaurs popping out of eggs and like a T-rex stomping and roaring.
We used our playdoh to make dinosaur fossils. Pictures of our museum trip are in their own
post here.
Horses
We learned about different horse jobs such as racing, jumping, diving, and farm work. We watched different youtube clips of racing and equestrian and even found an old clip of the
diving horses in Atlantic City. We made a call to Pop-pop to find out what his horses name
was, Pinkie, and asked if he ever got to see the horses dive. Which he watched every summer. We played a race horse game. We even learned how to make a vendiagram and sorted what type of food horses and humans eat.
Insects
This lesson has brought the most continuous conversations and playing. We got a "bug"
infestation and had to find them all. Then the bugs got loose and we had to swat the bug with a certain letter or word on it with the fly swatter. We bought some grow pills that turned into bugs and watched them grow. We also learned how to tell if a bug is an insect and sorted those. We learned to use eyedroppers (actually nose suckers because that's what we had) acting like mosquitos. Then we played mosquito tag and when you tagged someone you put a sticker on them, first one out of stickers wins. We made a ladybug and a click beetle. For treats we ma
de an anthill and then after dinner we made ladybugs with an apple and chocolate chips. We
went looking for bugs and found a roly-poly and ladybug. Rachel has so fascinated that she even made her own bug book. She'd draw a picture of the bug and write it's n
ame. Her favorite fact she learned was that roly-poly's eat their own poo. Hence I learned to give her gross facts and she'll remember something about them. I used this in another lesson to come. When we were finished Rachel took all the bugs and have been playing with them.
Spring
We talked about the changing of the weather and made a weather chart to keep track of the weather for the next week. We kept it simple; sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, or rainy. One day got a W with it because it was windy. We talked about the trees starting to get leaves and
blossoming. We sang popcorn popping and put popcorn on a bare tree. Then we talked about how most animals have babies born in the spring and played matching using mother and baby animals.
Birds
For birds we helped birds fly to their nest by tossing them into a "nest". We used puppets for different songs and poems. We used feathers to paint and even talked about how they used them to write with. We had the girls sit on a pillow "nest" and guess how many eggs they were sitting on and then count them to see if they were right. Then we went and made chocolate
bird nest to eat. We talked about how birds eat worms and played a hide and seek gam
e where one girl hid and would tweet for her mommy and the mommy would find her and give her a gummy worm. If I said this was a favorite would you be surprised. We ended with making bird feeders from dry bread, peanut butter and seeds. Duchess certainly liked it; her video is in a post of it's own here.
Easter
When I started planning this lesson I was trying to teach them the symbols of Easter and came across a blog that mentioned how this teacher enjoyed working at a Christian school because she could teach the real reason for Easter and thought hello! So
can you. So that's what we did. We talked about the fun stuff like Easter Eggs and played with playdoh and beads to make them (which evolved into another activity see Rachel's blog for those pictures) we even made tie dyed eggs with a coffee filter. There's a before picture and I wanted an after picture when they dried because they were so neat but it got windy and I forgot they were drying outside and got blown away and then the sprinklers came on and washed all the marker off the eggs. But they came out neat. We played and Easter Egg Hunt Game and helped the Easter Bunny color a basket and eggs by following directions and helped put the right number of eggs in the basket.
Then we moved to why we really celebrate Easter. We made resurrection rolls as we talked about how Christ died and was resurrected. While they cooked we used the Friend magazine to follow the steps of Christ the last week and we watched a music video of He Sent His Son. I know I felt the Spirit while the girls and I talked about the real meaning of Easter from the tears that I kept getting. And I had the opportunity to talk to them about how they were feeling and that it's the Spirit telling us that Christ really did live and die and was resurrected and is living today. They really got it. The rolls and letting them physically do something really helped.
Frogs
We started by putting frogs on 1 hand of each of us and sang 5 little speckled frogs. Ashley asked me to sing it again and again. We tossed two stuffed frogs on a "lily pad" towel and see how long he could stay on there. They then hopped or tossed their frog on a lily pad I made and we would read a frog fact such as that when frogs shed their skin they eat it and that their eyes help them swallow. See I told you I'd remember to use gross facts later. We talked about what it means to be an amphibian. We worked on sequencing by putting the life cycle of a frog in order. Thanks to The Cat in the Hat Knows Alot About That Rachel already knew that baby frogs are tadpoles and that they have a tail and grow legs and then lose their tail. But we reviewed that too. We talked about how frogs can jump ten times their length and tried jumping as far a frog in a single leap.
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