Preschool Fun

 Since I will no longer have any in preschool come this fall and I still have some random preschool stuff left, I wanted to take advantage of having my niece over for the morning to use some of it up. I also thought it would be a great way to keep everyone in one place and out of the play closet and Grammy's house.

 The girls started off the morning by making blue collages.

 Then went hunting for red, blue, and yellow pom poms.

 Followed by a game off toss.

 The two younger girls were having so much fun with the pom poms that they were not interested in decorating tea pots.

It has been a peaceful morning with the 5 girls and everyone has stayed in the kitchen! Why is this so important....because Zoe is potty training and we want to keep her close to the potty and off the carpet.

Ocean Blue

PF made a request yesterday, while I was considering what theme to use for our Friday centers, she wanted on ocean theme. I didn't realize just how much ocean themed activities I had. We worked together last night to create 14 centers for our ocean blue theme. I wanted a mix of educational levels so that preschool to middle school were covered and everybody would have a good time.

We started the morning with blue oatmeal in blue bowls. I just added blue sugar sprinkles to the top of their oatmeal.

 After breakfast, the girls had their praise and worship time. Last years VBS was the High Seas so I had a DVD handy to go with our theme.

 Center 1: Cutting, pasting and coloring.

 Center 2: Memory

 Center 3: Sorting by color or animal

 Center 4: Tracing

 Center 5: Blue discovery bucket. The possibilities are endless.

 Center 6: Playdough and spelling ocean.

 Center 7: Play animals. Pretend play, sorting, size order. I also had information sheets on some of the animals to read.

 Center 8: Find it. Find objects and reading/vocabulary.

 Center 9: Geoboards

 Center 10: Ocean Life floor puzzle

 Center 11: Ocean Themed Connectogons.

 Center 12: Lace the whale.

 Center 13: Wrap-ups

Center 14: Collection of ocean themed worksheets.

Big Sisters help to teach Preschool

Juggling four girls at different levels of education can present challenges at times so when they offer to help each other out, I am more than thrilled. Butterfly has been a huge help this week with Dragonfly. Butterfly has been rather quick with her work this week giving her plenty of time to do extra work with Dragonfly. I think this helps them both. She loves reading to Dragonfly but they have also played Starfall, put together puzzles, worked on file folders, and made pictures with geometric shapes.

 PF has taken Dragonfly under her wing during chore time and has been teaching Dragonfly how to wash windows, water plants, feed pets, sweep, mop and many other things. Ladybug has wanted Dragonfly to help her too so they have been sorting clothes together.

Space Trays

We are studying Astronomy right now so I wanted to make our preschool trays this week space themed.

 Put the planets in order. I taped planets to bottle caps and then put the order number under the cap so they can self check. Added Pluto in because our book teaches both ways. I still want it to be a planet because that is the way I learned.

 Button the rays on the sun.

 Space puzzle

 Picture matching

 Lace the moon

 Space Dot (we use a stamp instead of Do-a-Dots)

Space Sensory Discovery Box. The game today will be to save the earth from the destructive blue balls by capturing them (with tweezers) and putting them in the blue holding container.

Day 7: 15minute timer

Today, I tried something different to see if it would help the girls stay focused with their work. I set a 15 minute timer. Maybe I should start by explaining that my girls have a checklist for each day (I will post this another day). The checklist is broken down into 15 areas that need to be completed each school day. Several of the areas need to be done with me, some need to just be checked by me and some are completely independent. I was finding that the girls were lingering in some of the more fun areas of work and then not quite getting through with the more important areas. With the timer, there was a set time at each area and this would allow us to finish our morning rotation in a timely manner. Most areas can be finished in one 15 minute time slot. I found today that Ladybug really needed 20 minutes to do all of her spelling but only needed 10 minutes to do her flashcards. So I just combined both activities together so she would stay on schedule. PF's work is more time consuming but she was also getting upset that she wasn't able to do each center. The timer allowed her to get to each center and during quiet time she finishes the work she wasn't able to complete. What I loved today was that PF got her math done in 15 minutes. She was starting to drag this subject out. Overall the timer worked well today. We finished our morning rotation by 11:30 which allowed for a nice late morning break before lunch. I am going to continue the timer next week before I make a final decision on whether it works the best for us or not.

 Dragonfly more and more each day wants to be treated like the big girls. When the big girls were writing in their journals she wanted to as well. She knows how to spell her name and she can sound out the first letter of each word. So her writing journal tends to be a lot of letters. She also likes for me to spell words for her and will write each letter as I say them. We are still working on her holding her pencil properly but this is lower on my priority list right now.

 I have a box with just items for Dragonfly. This week, I have peek-a-blocks and small books.

 In My Father's World today, we discussed globes and maps. To demonstrate what map makers have to do to flatten the earth for a wall map, we used an orange. First we cut four sections in the skin, then drew a few key points, and then peeled the orange.

We laid it flat and it was easy for the girls to see the gaps that are naturally created. They thought it was like a puzzle and tried to figure out the best way to squish it together to make a map.

Celebrating Green

Today I based Dragonfly's lessons around the color green. She started with a green collage.
She still needs help cutting so I made lines for her to follow.
The finished product.
Blowing the green whistle.
I put together a bunch of green items for Dragonfly to sort.
Sorting with our special green tongs.
Green eyedropper fun.
I also gave dragonfly some spoons. I love that she realized right away that the eye dropper filled the caps much quicker.
Then she tried pouring from the caps into the bottle.
That led to stacking the caps.
Playing with minty green play dough.