When I first mentioned to Strawberry that I wanted to do an activity for each letter of the alphabet, she immediately wanted to do frogs for the letter F. What could be more fun than making her small plastic frogs hop? I added in her garage sale find (a small measuring tape) and added a learning element to her frog hopping activity.
Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathman is a simple but favorite book. In the book, a zookeeper says goodnight to the animals, but the sneaky gorilla grabs the keys and lets himself out. He helps the other animals out as well, and they follow the zookeeper to his home. For our activity, we practiced being sneaky and quiet on our tip-toes, just as the animals had been. Our tip-toe gross motor activity provided an active time after story time that was fun for all. Continue reading
Strawberry loves to make a musical band in our play room. Reading Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb
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Strawberry simply loves butterflies right now! As we prepared a report about butterflies for our recent project fair, we took the chance to act out the parts of the butterfly life cycle. This whole body gross motor play is just how she learns! I know she’ll not forget the details we discussed: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly with antennae and proboscis. These are now ingrained in her memory. Plus, it was tons of fun to act out!
Today, “A is for Alligator” as we used tweezers and tongs to “eat” treats. Tongs are the perfect alligator-shaped mouth, and using them helps strengthen hand muscles for fine motor skills development. Alligator fine motor skills play was “school in disguise.” Continue reading
Before a child is ready to jump into learning to read, it’s important to review basic phonemic principles, such as hearing the parts of words. Rhyming is a fun activity that is ideal for kids preparing to read or just starting out. After reading a favorite picture book, we played a “Dusty” Rhyming Game to practice making our own rhymes. Continue reading
My preschool daughter loves Princess Sofia and her animal friends, so I try to tie in her stories to our learning moments whenever we get a chance. We watched an episode in which Sofia and a friend must design and build their own dream castle, and we read Chris van Dusen’s amusing book If I Built a House. Then, of course, we had to try designing a castle of our own dreams! Continue reading
One subject keeps my preschooler interested right now, and that is princesses. She loves Sofia the First. She loves the other Disney princesses. She loves ponies with long shimmering hair. She loves dressing like a princess and acting like a princess. If I can add princesses into school time, then I’ll get her attention. This week for Princess School, we did a Rapunzel engineering challenge as we built a block tower for Rapunzel to let down her hair from. Of course, then we needed to act out the story with our new scenery. Continue reading
Learning about snowflakes is a perfect lesson for learning about symmetry. When we read Zoo Flakes ABC by Will C. Howell, we got a unique alphabet of zoo animals as well as instructions for making our own symmetrical STEAM snowflake craft. Continue reading
