Preschool fun: “G” for goose week

Since we have our own little goose family growing in our backyard, we decided to do G is for goose. Here is a roundup of our G week:

~ G is for goose coloring sheet and writing sheet

~ Goose coloring sheet which we did using glitter (for g, of course!)

~ Damian played with these cute egg shape sorters that we took out from our local library (our library provides these awesome “story bags” that come with a set of books on a given topic, along with corresponding puppets, puzzles, and other related toys. LOVE our library!).

~ Connect the dot number sheet

~ We read through the Canada Geese page on National Geographic Kids and on Animal Planet

~ We met our own backyard baby goslings when they hatched.

~ Goose label/color sheet

~ Do-a-dot Gg sheet – we have to do this for every letter because Damian loves the do-a-dot sheets and markers!

~ We built our foam G, used our g sandpaper letter, made Gg playdoh letters, and made Gg’s on the peg board.

~ We did this cute letter g craft from Homeschool Creations.

~ We used various parts of Jolanthe and Carisa’s Bird Preschool Pack.

~ The boys put together and played with their Playmobil farm complete with a goose family (oh, and a sea serpent, of course, because all farms have them, right?)

And of course the end of the week would not be complete without adding Gg to our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Tree!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5K too

And here is the rainbow felt alphabet!

Last week I posted about our rainbow felt numbers, and promised to share the alphabet when it was finished.

You will notice the whole alphabet is in repeated rainbow colors, except I made the vowels light blue, just so they would be highlighted.

Hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5K too

Musical ABC cards (printable)

In follow-up to my post yesterday about how I am trying to channel Damian’s learning more through music, I wanted share these ABC cards that I made for him last week.

He loves singing and dancing, watching concerts and videos on You Tube(like Yanni, Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bochelli, Enya, Celtic Woman, the Riverdance, etc), but he is also very fascinated with instruments and how they make music. Some days (most days) he will line various objects up from pots and pans to toys and drums and use his tapping sticks to play music on them. He will walk around the house using his hands or tapping sticks to hear the sound that various surfaces will make. Really a musical beat is just coming out of him all the time it seems.

So anyway, back to the cards :). I thought what better way to appeal to him, when learning the ABCs and phonics, than to do a set of alphabet cards that are instrument themed. Now let me tell, finding A-Z in instruments was not easy! I made them a mixture of classical instruments and folk instruments from around the world. I had to cheat a couple of times and use musical terms instead of instruments, because I could not find an instrument with the short vowel sound of the letter. And let’s face, X is near to impossible. I decided to go with xylophone, even though it is not the correct first sound.

You are welcome to download the cards, I suggest laminating them before cutting them out, to give them some durability. Here is the link, enjoy!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5k too!

Preschool fun: a review of our letter F week ~ all about fish!

We did our letter F week a few of weeks ago. Since then Damian I have taken a little break from our usual routine to focus on space related activities as a part of our solar system unit. All of which I will share with you in my summary post on the unit.

Our letter F week was a quiet-ish one, actually. We spent a lot of time reading fish themed books together, since Damian has, really just wanted to read a lot lately, and I am going with that. Since he is only 3 years old, I am very low key and easy going with his work, mostly doing something a little more formal because he loves being a part of our school time. I did not do any sort of planned school work with Rylan at age 3.

We did a couple of the activities from Confessions of a Homeschooler’s letter F. Damian played with this magnetic fish game, which he had a lot of fun with.

We also played this game together several times. Although it is, sadly, not a well constructed toy, it is really great for developing fine motor control and my boys both love it.

Both Rylan and Damian got to paint fish from this Melissa and Doug set. They love painting these animals, we have done them before with our letter D for dinosaur week.

We also spent a day at the zoo to see real fish in action! This is the tropical fish tank, all the fish we used to swim with every week. It makes me happy just to see them, but also a little “home” sick for Hawaii!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5K too!

Preschool fun: Review of letter E week ~ elephants and earth

We actually did letter E about three weeks ago! Sorry, my blogging time is limited these days, but I do eventually get things posted! :)
Since we cover a lot of the same activities every week, simply changing the letter, I will refer you back to our previous weeks to see some of what we have done, such as sandpaper letters, playdoh mats, building foam letters, learning numbers, patterning, sequencing from biggest to smallest, sensory tubs, do-a-dot letters, collages, puzzles, peg boards, chalkboard writing, etc, etc: letter A, letter B, letter C, letter D.


But I did want to share some highlights of this week that we have not shared before:
~ Sorting by first letter sounds with our alphabet box. I laid all the objects from our alphabet box for letters A to E on the ground, and put the drawers for those letters out as well. I asked Damian to pick up each object one at a time, same the name of the object, then say the first sound of the object’s name, then put it in the right letter box based on the first sound of the object’s name. We will do this exercise again periodically, adding more objects to it, as we go through the alphabet.

~ We made elephant masks!

~ We colored a picture of the earth with people holding hands around it (kind of like my “Nurturing Virtue” image) and memorized the following quotation from the Baha’i Writings:

The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. ~ Baha'u'llah

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! I am most happy because my hubby will be home after being away for a week on business. Next week I will be sharing more details on our solar system study, including a printable game, highlights from our fishy letter F week, as well as a special project we are working on to prepare for Ridvan (and other Baha’i Holy Days in general). Hope to see you there!


This has been added to: Show and Tell and Preschool Corner & 5K too!

Jump to spell words game (and letter and phonics recognition for my preschooler too!)

Since my math jumping game was such a hit around this house, I decided to use the same concept in our spelling practice time. I lay out floor letters for the entire alphabet (printed the letters from here), then give Rylan a word or phrase and he spells it out by jumping on the letters to form the word(s). If it is a phrase instead of a single word, as he switches from one word to the next he shouts out “new word”, if the word he is spelling is a proper noun, he shouts out “capital” as he jumps on the first letter of the name. When we use jump to spell for spelling practice, the comment at the end is usually, “Can we do some more spelling, pleeease?”. Got to love that! :)

Of course, not to be left out, Damian wanted in on the action, so he gets to do his own form of letter hopping to practice letter recognition (I call out the letter and he jumps on it) and phonics (I make the sounds of the letter and he jumps on the matching letter). All in all definitely a popular exercise in our home!

Now that it is warmer out, I think we will take this lesson outdoors too. I will have Rylan write out the alphabet in sidewalk chalk and then the jump spelling will begin!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5K too! and Show and Tell

Preschool fun: a review of our letter “D” week

For anyone who follows this blog closely, you will know that dinosaurs are pretty popular in this house! So our D for dinosaur week actually rolled over into two weeks, because we had so many fun activities to do! Many of them Rylan joined in on too. Here’s a round-up:

• We started the week by singing a funny dinosaur version of the hokey pokey we called the dino hokey. Instead of arms and legs we used claws, teeth, tails, and yes, lots of roaring. The boys loved it! And asked to do it several times over during the week…since I was fasting at the time all the roaring gave me a seriously dry, sore throat…ahhh, the things we do for our kids, right? :)


• We practiced the phonetic sound of D using the items from our alphabet box while singing the song from Leap Frog’s Letter Factory DVD for the letter D.


• I put together this dinosaur sensory tub for the boys to play with, using rice as a base. I have done this for them before using sand, but this time there was a lot more in the tub to play with. This sensory tub has received hours of play time during the past two weeks.


• Damian completed this “D is for Damian” collage by filling in the letters using a glue stick and tissue paper squares.


• We made the letter D using our haba peg board.


• We used our foam letter pieces to build D and our sandpaper letters to practice “writing” little d.


• I asked Damian to identify all the Ds on the white board using our magnetic letter set.


• We played letter match up and concentration using the dinosaur alphabet cards I made when Rylan was a wee one.


• Damian completed many of the activities provided by Confessions of a Homeschooler’s “D is for dinosaur” week.

~using counters to make the numbers and a pointer to count them all~ ~lacing~ ~matching numbers with amounts~ ~size ordering, completing patterns, sorting big and little Ds~

• The boys painted the dinosaurs from this Melissa and Doug paint your own dinosaur set.


• The boys decorated these dinosaur cut-outs.


• They also colored in do-it-yourself dinosaur stickers and then used them for other art work projects.


• We made perler bead dinosaurs.


• We did this cute craft using the letter D for form a dino, which I found on Homeschool Creations.


• Damian completed this Melissa and Doug dinosaur puzzle.


• We made playdoh Ds using the playdoh letter mats I made from Homeschool Creations.


• We sang this song: I'm a Mean Old Dinosaur (Tune: I'm a little Tea Pot)
  

  I'm a mean old Dinosaur (Make a mean face, the kids make the cutest mean faces) Big and Tall (Gesture hands big and tall ) Here is my tail, here is my claw. (Gesture hands behind your back for tail and make claw hands) When I get all hungry (rub your tummy) I just growl (have the kids exaggerate the grrroooowwwlll) Look out kids I'm on the prowl. (Here I tickle each one of the tummy and they all giggle)



• I recited this rhyme for Damian and had him do the finger math along with me: Five enormous dinosaurs Letting out a roar-- One went away, and Then there were four. Four enormous dinosaurs Crashing down a tree-- One went away, and Then there were three. Three enormous dinosaurs Eating tiger stew-- One went away, and Then there were two. Two enormous dinosaurs Trying to run-- One ran away, and then there was one. One enormous dinosaur, Afraid to be a hero-- He went away, and Then there was zero.

As you can see it was a fun filled dino week (and a bit)!

This has been added to: Preschool Corner & 5K too and Show&Tell.

Preschool fun: review of our letter C week

• We started the week reading our Baha’i Alphabet Book in which the letter C was for courtesy, so we spent our virtue time for the week learning about courtesy. For ideas on teaching courtesy, see this post.
  
• We made the letter C using our new Haba peg board which Grandma gave to Damian recently (both boys love this peg board).

• We went through the C items in our alphabet box. We practiced the phonetic sound of the letter C using the song from Leap Frog’s Letter Factory DVD.
  
• We completed many of the “C is for caterpillar” activities from the Letter of Week curriculum by Confession of a Homeschooler.
  
• I printed 2 copies of the Do-A-Dot sheet from the “C is for Caterpillar” post and made up this activity to add some pincer grip exercise: I put a glue dot into each of the dots on the sheet, provided Damian with chopsticks and container of pompoms, then asked him to tweeze the pompoms and stick them onto each glue dot.
  
• We practiced writing Cs in rice. Damian loves this activity, so when he is finished I just leave him with the tray of rice and he draws and plays for while.
  
• Damian sorted these little pompoms by color.
• He watched the scholastic DVD version of “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom”.
  
• We did the “C for caterpillar” exercise from Yoga for Kids, Vol. 2: ABCs.
  
• We wrote Cs on magic scratch paper. I bought our pack of scratch paper from a local store, but I found this on amazon too.
  
• I gave Damian this matching upper and lower case letters sheet from Confessions of a Homeschooler to complete (it is laminated, so that we can re-use it).
  
• We read Farfallina and Marcel going with the caterpillar theme.
  
• We completed the week with our ceremonial reading of “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” and added our Cs to the palm tree.
  

This has been added to Preschool Corner & 5K too.

Making name bracelets and necklaces for cousins and friends

This year for Ayyam-i-ha the boys made handmade name necklaces and bracelets for their cousins and friends. Although mom (that would be me) forgot to take pictures of their completed jewelry before I wrapped them. I did take pictures of the ones they made with their own names the next day.

We used alphabet beads and a pack of wooden and shell beads (I guess we still have the Hawaiian beaches in our hearts, we tend to do things with beachy themes…). It was a fun exercise in fine motor skills (beading on string), pattern/sequencing, and in spelling with the alphabet letters. Rylan did the spelling of the names (spelling practice) and called out the letters he needed to Damian, so that he could find them in the bowl of letter beads (letter recognition).

I had not made any conscious goal for this activity to be anything more than a fun craft, however, observing how it evolved into a joyful learning experience, made me stop and think about how naturally and seamlessly learning has become woven into the daily rhythm of our family life. Learning is a natural, enjoyable, and continuous part of my boy’s life, there is no underlying feeling that learning occurs only during “school”. I have never been anything but a homeschooling mom, so I don’t know if this is unique to the homeschooling experience, but it is something I am truly grateful for.

Preschool fun: a review of our letter “B” week

• We started the week by reading the section on letter B in the Baha’i Alphabet Book.
  
• Then we took all the items out of our alphabet box under ‘b”, practiced sounding out the words with an emphasis on the bah sound.
• We used many of the activities listed under Letter B for butterfly on Confessions of a Homeschooler. I am focusing more on the hands-on activities right now.
• We made Bb’s out of playdoh.
• We used letter “b” from the sandpaper letters I made for my boys.
  
• Damian traced over chalk Bb’s that I had written using a small wet sponge.

• We made butterfly finger puppets (cut out of cardboard, make finger holes, and decorate).

• We read stories about Baha’u’llah and the Bab and made pictures of the Shrine of the Bab.

• We ended the week with the ceremonial reading of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and I lifted Damian up so he could stick his big B and little b onto our letter tree.