Valentines Preschool Activities

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February 17, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

We had some fun with Valentine packs this week.

Thanks to Homeschool Creations and 2 Teaching Mommies for their beautiful and creative activities!

Valentine’s Week Homeschool

Valentine chicken noodle soup…see the heart noodles?

Heart shaped morning message for corrections and directions.

Valentine math pages for fun

Graphing with candy conversation hearts.

We love these observation sheets!

Reading and beginning copywork (Beatrix Potter)!

Painting roses with celery ends.

We also made and exchanged Valentines at co-op.

We finished our Valentine poetry.

We ate too much candy and got lovely scented soap roses and cute kitten cards.

Hope y’all had a Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Valentine Montessori

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February 11, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 3 Comments

Montessori Fun in February

I found the neatest little heart stencils at Wal-Mart.

The hearts had a spiral gear in them, very similar to the Spirograph! I showed the girls how to use it, and they were ecstatic!

Poetry work. We almost have these memorized.

We’re also memorizing “The Caterpillar” with First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind: Level 1 (Second Edition) (First Language Lessons).

What’s in the box?

math FFG and weaving sea critters.

Play dough girls.

We made pumpkin pie (smells good!) play dough and “snow” (just add glitter) play dough. Get our play dough recipes!

We started a morning message page with calendar time and the girls really like that it’s personal. It encourages them to read and follow directions. Sometimes they highlight sight words or draw a

certain colored shape at the bottom. I always ask for a hug!

Nature art with contact paper and nature-y stuff…We still have snow on the ground, so they really had to hunt for things to make a collage. It was really bright out.

Tori’s finished collage. I love the lines.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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New Calendar Board

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January 31, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

Our calendar board is a work in progress.

I am forever looking for improvements and changing it to suit our needs.

One side is our monthly themed calendar:

The other side is our circle time morning board.

After this picture was taken, I added a liturgical calendar wheel to help us understand the church calendar.

On the left, I have our pledges to the American flag, Christian flag, and Bible.

In the middle is our Bible verse of the week.

On the left is our theme poem of the month.

We have our themes of the week on the green page: letter, character trait, state, animal, shape, color.

We have a clock, temp, and money chart.

We pray using the acronym ACTS:

Adoration,

Confession,

Thanksgiving, and

Supplication.

Tori and Katie have calendar notebooks that they do almost daily to help them understand the calendar and themes and whatever else I throw in there that makes sense to us that week or month.

The kids love to learn during our morning circle time. We get so much accomplished – Bible, shapes, colors, animals, money, time, temperature, months and days of the week. I love how much they learn in just a few minutes each morning.

Calendar Printables:

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Frozen Bubbles

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January 20, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 2 Comments

Winter math and science this week with Frozen Bubbles and Penguins

Feeding the penguin…combination of the game Memory and addition/subtraction.

Pick two cards and work out the math equation and then feed the penguin that many fish cards. They loved it.

Frozen bubbles

It’s been really cold. Why not blow bubbles outside and see what they do? They freeze and shatter!

We also estimated how many snowballs to make a snowman. We found a great template here.

We played a really fun math game called Melt the Snowman. Katie won, but Tori was a good sport. We’ll play it again soon.

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Story Art

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January 14, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

I set up a class at our winter homeschool co-op using the story+art ideas from A Mommy’s Adventures.

story+art=StArt

I have a theme each week and check out books from the library and bring art supplies for a craft. There are about a dozen kids signed up, grades K-2, including my Tori and Katie (for whom I planned the class).

Last week, we read some ABC books and did initial collages.

I had all sorts of collage materials, hoping to appeal to all the boys and girls: moss, rocks, sequins, shells, beads, jewels, stickers…

We all got a kick out of this alphabet book: A is for Salad. The pictures illustrate the letter, but the words say something a little different.

Victoria’s and Katherine’s initial collages:

I did one with Alex at home. He was so proud!

I couldn’t get the ‘A’ to print straight. Oh well, he didn’t mind.

This week, we read about dots and did Do-A-Dot pages.

Those were a real hit!

I got the dot printables from Making Learning Fun. We used the theme of Swimming Creatures to go along with our Apologia Science class.

Resources:

Peanut Butter and Jellyfishes: A Very Silly Alphabet Book
A is for Salad
The Dot
Press Here

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Snow Much Fun!

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January 13, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 4 Comments

Our Snowy Activities

We made a snow fort with Dad!

Ice experiment

Making snowball cookies (Danish wedding cookies)

Yum!

These are so fun and easy to make!

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Homemade Play Dough

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December 16, 2011 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

We’ve been having lots of fun with Christmas activities this week…

Tori’s gingerbread play dough reindeer…

Santa paper plate packing popcorn craft. I used googly eyes, a pink pom pom for the nose, and a shaped pipe cleaner for the mouth

Tori and Katie pretend to eat their gingerbread babies…

They pasted their eaten gingerbread babies in their booklets.

We made homemade play dough!

I made gingerbread play dough (with spices smells great!) and snow play dough (plain with sparkly glitter).

We broke out the cookie cutters and played with play dough for quite a long time this morning.

Preschool girls loved playing with the yummy smelling playdough.

Katie did not like to be interrupted for a picture.

Toddler Alex thought all this was just awesome.

Even the Big Girl Elizabeth had to play with the play dough!

She showed off her “cookies.”

Super easy play dough recipe:

Play Dough

Ingredients

2 cups AP flour
2 cups warm water
1 cup salt
2 T vegetable oil
1 T cream of tartar

Instructions

Mix ingredients gently, folding all the flour in, over low/medium heat in a nonstick pan until formed into a ball.
Knead carefully (it’s hot!) until desired elasticity.

Add stuff:

Spices. Sprinkle in some cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger for gingerbread play dough – or apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice – or whatever you love.

Essential Oil. We love using Citrus, Peppermint, or Lavender.

Glitter or Food Coloring. Sparkle and color just add to the fun!

My kids like to play with the play dough while it’s still warm.

How to Use:

We use all sorts of fun tools like real cookie cutters (love these alphabet and numbers cookie cutters!), rolling pins, dough tools that extrude, squish, and cut it.

We have two Activity Centers that provide stencils and working surfaces to keep my floor clean.

Store in an airtight container or zipper bag. We keep ours in the fridge to stay fresh longer.

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Christmas Sensory Bin

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December 12, 2011 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

My husband created a sensory table for us!

I put a Christmas sensory bin in there and Alex LOVES it! (So does Tori!)

I have glittery pom poms, red and white beans, green glass rocks, glitter tree stickers, 12 Days of Christmas and Nativity printables (scaled down and laminated), a tree ice cube tray, two Santa candy holders, jingle bells…

Resources:

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First Day of Summer

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June 21, 2011 By Jennifer Lambert 2 Comments

It’s the First Day of Summer!

Yes, I am a total slacker when it comes to Nature Study. I am a bad Charlotte Mason mommy-teacher.

We love being outdoors and we do talk lots about nature and plants and critters, but I just never seem to document any of it or have drawing pages at the ready. And it’s hard to snap photos while holding a squirmy 30-pound almost 15-month-old (as you can see from the blurry images)!

I have lurked on The Blog for many months and I finally got in gear today to do something productive. We did study dandelions last week, but alas, no photos.

We explored our yard in earnest this morning. Here we have a happy little spider on the spirea. He had lots of buddies hopping around too! Katie just loved him and drew him on her page (see below).

Excited to see our roses about to bloom!

The last of our lilacs. So pretty!

Radishes galore. Katie adores radishes and begged to plants lots and lots. A red lettuce off the side (that’s mine!)…

The girls wanted to do nature notebooking.

We love Productive Homeschooling for printable pages and The Handbook of Nature Study for great ideas.

Here is Tori’s Summer Drawing page. She drew our neighbor’s cherry tree, with a bird’s nest, strawberries, flowers, and radishes.

Katie drew a rose, spider, red pepper, and lilac.

How do you celebrate the first of summer?

I love Productive Homeschooling for notebooking pages.

ProSchool Membership - Productive Homeschooling

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Preschool Summer

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June 10, 2011 By Jennifer Lambert 1 Comment

Well, we’ve been displaced from our school room for almost 2 weeks, but we’ve managed to get some stuff done.

The girls love Funnix and now they’re doing the math one too! Katie actually prefers the “numbers game” and I have to make her do the reading one first and then she can do the math one as a reward. Too funny!

Katie was playing the bingo review from You Can Read. I’d call out a word and she’d say, “I’m gonna catch you, ‘my’!” It was just precious.