As I mentioned before, we’re following Jamie from Simple Homeschool in her #GiveYourChildTheWorld book club this summer. How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman was one of the first picture books we picked up for this book club. We’ve had a lot of fun doing some activities to go along with the book. Continue reading
The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown is a simple Little Golden Book about two cats, Brush and Hush, who love to paint with colors. There is a hint of fairy tale in their story (as it is the explanation of how the world has so many colors) and the text has a pleasant but irregular rhyme that makes it a delight to read aloud. Brush and Hush’s adventures in making “all the colors in the world” are childlike and loveable. Color mixing and making our own paintings is a natural progression from reading The Color Kittens together.
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It’s the beginning of Jamie Martin’s (from Simple Homeschool) Give Your Child the World book club! The book club goal is to read multicultural books about various parts of the globe to help our kids understand the big picture of the world. Yes, Jamie is doing this book club as a part of a promotion for her new book. But I enjoy book lists and book challenges, and I was planning on doing a basic continent overview with my daughter this summer anyway. This is truly perfect timing!
This week is the general multicultural week. My son was born overseas and has always been fascinated by maps. He’s a visual learner. When he was four, we spent weeks pouring over maps and making our own maps of our home, street, city, and so forth. But my daughter, Strawberry, is a super active preschooler. Making maps and looking at lots of different maps would be extended torture for her. Instead, our continents preschool lesson this week was quite simple and brief, but she’s remembered her place on the map (and the globe) since then!
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Every week, on laundry day, my daughter loves to climb under a laundry basket and pretend she is Hermit Crab from the Eric Carle picture book, A House for Hermit Crab. She asks for a coral or a starfish to put on her “house.”
Last week, she got to meet her cousin’s new pet hermit crabs! She loved how one hermit crab wouldn’t come out of her shell, and one did. She’s talked about it all week. So, the next time laundry day came around, I decided it was about time I provide some hermit crab preschool accessories for her imagination play time! I added in some cut-and-past ordering fun, and she had a great time this last laundry day.
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When my son was 4 years old, he loved watching Finding Nemo, which led to a deep love for the coral reef and all the creatures the main characters in the movie encountered there. Sea turtles, sting rays, barracuda, jellyfish, and, of course, clown fish. All of these coral reef creatures were friends. Whenever we visited the pool for free swim, we had to play coral reef games. Then, together we made our own facts board game to play once we are out of the water too!
Both of these coral reef games are now in their second incarnation since my second child is now four years old!
As we learned concepts about coral reefs, we put them into our water play. Coral reef games and coral reef learning are the most fun in a swimming pool.
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My daughter Strawberry loves finding her name on papers and notes around the house. Whenever she sees a “C”, she thinks it must be her name (her real name begins with “C”). She also recognizes “Mom” and “Dad,” and now she’s finding her brother’s name. (His name starts with a “P” and she loves to say “Popcorn”! when she finds his name.) This week I decided to take our super-fun Leap Frog dominoes and make a game for name recognition with dominoes, using the names of our family members.
Each of the included dominoes cards has about five matches, so this was perfect, since our family has five members in it! Continue reading
My daughter loves making noise and she is fascinated by musical instruments. When I saw a Toob of musical instruments, I knew she’d love to play with them. Hence, here’s my instruments busy bag. It’s not a noisy one, such as you would expect. Rather, it is a quiet busy bag that requires her imagination to make the music. There is a time and a place for the noisy instruments, but today’s busy bag includes matching small, model instruments to instrument cards.
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“You can’t erase pen!” my daughter said as I drew five small circles on the paper and poured the small erasers out on the table. What could we possibly be up to! She loved the mystery.
I made this activity into a tweezer fine motor activity. Strawberry was delighted to find her actual task was an eraser sort challenge: Could she sort the small erasers into the correct circle using only the alligator tweezers?
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I’m quickly finding that my preschooler needs hands on interactive fun. When she gets home from preschool it’s a little bit before lunch time, so without an activity, she’ll whine until the food is served. This week’s favorite activity was a color mixing fine motor water activity using food coloring and a kid-sized dropper. 
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What do you do for fun when it’s too yucky to play outside?
I’ve really been trying to keep the kids away from the tablet and television shows (especially my daughter, who is electronic-device obsessed). One of this week’s activities was “excavating” toys from a deep bowl of rice (aka “dirt”). This easy indoor excavation activity will have kids digging for familiar items in a bowl of rice. 
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