Gross Motor Moon Phases Lesson

6 Replies

The picture book Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me teaches about moon phases and encourages kids to get up and moving!Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle is a fantasy story about a papa and his little girl who loves the moon and dancing. One night, she thinks about dancing with the moon and asks her papa to get the moon for her. Naturally, he gets a ladder and climbs it to the moon. Then the moon explains that he will be smaller soon. So, Papa waits for the moon to get small, and then carries it down to his waiting daughter.
What a perfect way to introduce the concept of moon phases to a little one! As a bonus, the book suggests that we dance. A gross motor activity during reading time is a perfect combination for preschool!
Continue reading →

Creating Animals with Hearts: Picture Book Preschool

5 Replies

After counting all the hearts in the animals in My Heart is Like a Zoo, we had to try our hand at making our own heart animals. Strawberry also made her own blue shape monster.My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall was an interactive picture book for us, just the way a picture book preschool lesson should be. The author, who is a graphic designer, has created a zoo full of animals, each one created using hearts of all sizes. The text provides similes comparing ones’ heart to the animals (such as “eager as a beaver”). Strawberry loved counting the hearts on each page, and we made our own heart animals. Her favorite page in the book is the hippos drinking apple juice. Continue reading →

How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World Activities

6 Replies

We learned about where food comes from as we read How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World.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 →

Learning about Color Mixing with the Color Kittens

2 Replies

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.
We practiced mixing our own colors after reading The Color Kittens. Then we painted our own pictures with "all the colors in the world." Continue reading →

A Simple Continents Preschool Lesson to Introduce the World

5 Replies

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!Our simple introduction to the continents included finding our spot on our globe. I think her favorite search was to figure out what street we're on, as it required a walk. Continue reading →

A Fun and Flexible Way to Practice Spanish Sentence Building

1 Reply

My son and I have been studying Spanish together for about four years now. He has done many lessons on Visual Link Spanish, and we’ve taken a class at a local co-op. I have sat and reviewed grammar and vocabulary with him in game format and as we read picture books together. We practice praying in Spanish. All of the things we’ve learned have prepared us for an inevitable step: getting comfortable putting Spanish words together to build basic sentences.

We select three vocabulary cards (noun, adjective, and verb) and put them together in a "silly" Spanish sentence.
Continue reading →

Our Favorite Hermit Crab Preschool Imagination Game

6 Replies

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.
My daughter loves pretending to be a hermit crab when she climbs under an empty laundry basket.
Continue reading →

Refreshing Coral Reef Games for the Pool

6 Replies

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!

After learning about the coral reef, we love to take our play to the pool for swimming coral reef games!

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.

Continue reading →

4 Surprising Lessons from Our Gross Sewage Treatment Plant Tour

Leave a reply

Last week, my son was playing with a fortune teller that he found in an activity book. It predicted what amazing vacation he had in his future. It had destinations like Disney World and Paris, but his destination ended up being “A smelly sewage works.” This was hilarious to us because last week we actually had a homeschool group field trip to . . . our local sewage treatment plant!
201605 science field trip
At the water treatment facility, we had a full sewage treatment plant tour of the various water treatment cells, as well as introduction to the science lab where testing occurs. My son and I had read the Magic School bus book about the trip to the waterworks in the past, so some of it was delightfully familiar! We still learned so much from the tour! While it was, admittedly, rather smelly, it was eye opening in so many ways.
Really, everyone should experience a science field trip like this at some point! The good thing is that every community is sure to have a wastewater treatment facility. My only caveat is that younger kids must be restrained so they won’t run around, as there are huge 20-foot deep containers of gross waste water being treated around every corner. For this reason, I left my super-active 4-year-old daughter at a friend’s house this time around. She probably would not have appreciated the tour as much as a school-aged child.
Here are the things we learned from this super gross science field trip.
Continue reading →

Review Area and Perimeter with a Flower Garden Plan

3 Replies

We are working on multiplication a little bit each week these days. I also discovered this week that my son could not remember the difference between area and perimeter! This week, I decided to give him a design challenge: plan a flower garden. It turned out to be a fun way to review area and perimeter!

I gave him graph paper and some flower clip art to get him started in his "plan a garden" activity reviewing area and perimeter.
Continue reading →