I was bored with the typical Easter Egg coloring methods....BORED!  

Is that a terrible admission? 

 Teaching preschoolers is my passion.  I have been at "my passion" for over 10 years and when holidays roll around and the "typical" crafts to go along with it, I am less than enthused (insert sigh...)  If you are the parent of more than one little one, I am certain you can share my sentiment.

I originally ran across this idea when looking into some letter "V" activities on several other blog sites.

Here and Here

When I ran across Dinosaur Eggs I KNEW I would have a major hit on my hands!  These kiddos LOVE everything messy, everything fizzy, everything creative!

Set up was easy, clean up was a breeze, but the place did smell like Easter for a few days because when you have 10 children coloring eggs it takes a TON of vinegar!

Fizzy fun that resulted in questions, observations, color mixing, and LOTS of colorful eggs.  Perfect for pre-k!! 

I wish you well and I hope you get to play today!

-L

This pic was my favorite of the week and shows off our "G" is for ground learning unit perfectly!  This week we talked about the ground.  It's a natural choice for the children.  They have watched the grass grow and fade, the rain fall and be soaked up, and now the snow fall and melt.  We have planted seeds and watched them grow.  We have harvested our SINGLE surviving vegetable plant...our oddly shaped cucumber that tasted a bit like the ground it came from!  We have made mud and watched as the drought browned and scorched the flowers and plants.  All of these events have brought lots of questions and now...the GROUND is cold, frozen and hard.  So when we came upon the letter "G," once again, and we were discussing different things that started with the letter "G," we determined that the ground would be a fun topic of study.  In this picture we have made a worm farm.  We talked about the purpose of the worms in the ground.   We learned that worms are decomposers and we made up a sweet little worm song.  We read about worms and found out what they like to eat and how they move.  During this week my little girl came down with the flu as well, sooo...we didn't get to finish all our wormy activities, but not to worry, Spring is right around the corner!

The first part to any respectable worm farm is, of course, the dirt!  And who wouldn't want to bring a bit of the outside INSIDE for some scientific sensory exploration?!  We used what's called "organic soil."  I found this quite humorous since...really...what soil isn't?  BUT, I wanted the BEST for our worm friends and opted to purchase a bag of "organic" soil.  We poured about half the bag into our biggest plastic bin (with a lid that had pre-drilled holes for air).  For a while we just let the children experience the dirt.  The younger ones dug right in.  The older ones were curious and just wanted to move onto adding the WORMS!  Soooo....we did just that...

Since we were talking about the ground and earthworms, we kind of took a divergent path and got in depth about our wormy friends.  We learned that eartworms are decomposers, that they help turn dead plants into dirt and help the ground to grow new living things. 

We also learned that earthworms only have a sense of feeling.  That they move through the ground finding their way around with just how things FEEL to them.  We praticed only using our sense of feel.  In this lesson we closed our eyes to see if we could tell what was wet and what was dry. 
We discussed that we have "senses" and that we were NOT using our sense of sight, or smell, or hearing, but rather, our sense of FEEL.  Each child took a turn, eyes closed, stating which cloth was dry or wet.  We further observed that we could find our way across the table to the wet cloth just by feeling our way...just like a worm. 

Our wormy friends were a BIG hit.  We measured their length with "non" conforming standards of measurement.  We used paper, blocks, crackers (we didn't eat them!((the worms or crackers!!!)).  We decided that the worms were different sizes around and different lengths.  We looked at them through our magnifying glasses and we could see their rings.  We also made up an earthworm song...

(To the tune, I'm a Little Teapot)

I'm a little earthworm soft and slow,
through the earth I like to go.
I'm a decomposer so you know,
I'll eat the plants from down below!

First...click the title above to see the CUTEST little girls around sing this sweet little song about seeds growing in the ground!

Ok...so we also did (and are still doing) ALOT of study about the ground.  This includes seeds.  How are the grown, what do they need, how fast will they sprout, can we water them again...why not???? 

Children LOVE dirt, this is such and EASY topic to hold their attention with.  ANYTHING they can water and water and water is going to get LOTS of TLC (maybe a bit much).

However, despite all the GREAT love our preschoolers have shown these beans they are GROWING.  We closely examined the roots coming out of the beans.  We noticed that the roots were indeed going "DOWN" into the soil and, as of the post...we didn't yet have any stems.  We will continue to nurture our plants and update our progress.

The holiday season is here and the children are excited for all things turkeys, trees and toys!!!  The past couple of weeks we paused on the letter "B" as it made a perfect topic for this time of year to discuss "Blessings."  During our lessons regarding Thanksgiving we learned that the holiday of Thanksgiving is a time to gather together with friends, family and other people at church, school, shelters and hospitals to give thanks to God for everything we have and to remember to say "Thank You!" to others that help us too.  We discussed that a "blessing" is something good that we have, or love.  We named, each day, many "blessings" to help the children understand that a "blessing" can be a toy, a home, a person, a pet, food, feeling healthy and strong and LOTS of other things. 

As we would go around the table each day naming "blessings" and we came up with some pretty cute ones!!  One of my favorite blessings was learning that one of our little ones is going to be a big sister soon :))!!  Congrats to you and your sweet family!!! 

During Thanksgiving week we focused on the history of Thanksgiving as we made this book.  This was quite a project as we have a very young group, but it turned out SO CUTE!!! 
The story inside is one sentence on each page and what we learned about Thanksgiving.  Page One is pictured to the left.  Page Two says, "The Pilgrims sailed on a boat to discover a new land."  We discussed that a pilgrim was a person that wanted to be able to say prayers to God in his own way and left his home to find a land where he could do that.  Page Three says, "The boat was called the Mayflower."  We learned that they sailed an a large boat and that it was the Mayflower.
Page Four says, "They sailed to Plymouth Rock."  We learned that they finally spotted dry land after months and months of seeing nothing but ocean and water. Page Five says, "They made friends they called Indians."  We discussed that the people already living on the land knew how to grow food and hunt for food and that the Pilgrims were hungry and sick and that the Indians helped them to eat and be healthy in the new land.  The final page says, "The Indians helped them plant lots of vegetables and they shared with each other on a day we call Thanksgiving."  We learned that the Pilgrims and the Indians decided to have a great big meal together to say "Thank you God and Thank you friends," and that we do this each year too to remember that everything good we have comes from God.

This last little activity was a letter "Z" matching game.  We cut out a zig zag, zebra, upper and lowercase letter "Z's" and glued one set onto paper. 

We then cut out another set and spent time with each child discussing each item and helping them determine what matched. 

We also practiced writing our letters, shaping them with paint, glue, sticks, playdough and spaghetti!

So many times I only post a few of our week's highlights.  Each day we do SO much more than what I am able to post in a weekly update. 

We sing our Days of the Week, Months of the Year, Welcome Song, Nursery Rhymes, S.T.A.R. songs, etc.  We read MANY books.  Our class favorites are Brown Bear, Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom; Llama, Llama Red Pajama; The New Potty, Me Too!, and our seasonal favorites or themed books that I list. 

We count crackers, rocks, sticks, each other, blocks, train tracks, crayons and really anything we can each day. We practice counting backward from 10, then 20.  We count forward 1-3, 1-5, 1-10, 1-20 and up to 100.  We play listening games and following directions games like Follow The Leader, Simon Says, Red Light Green Light and Tag. 

We discuss sizes and comparisons, colors and shapes in the clothing we wear and the toys we play with.  We take every opportunity to converse with each little one and discuss what they see and what they are doing.  We NOTICE the positive and ignore the not!

We laugh, love and cry ALL together as one GREAT BIG school family...and that's just the way it should be... :))

 

How precious are these girlies!!!  So this week we began our study on the letter "Y" and what a great time of year to be discussing yellow.  With all the leaves falling we have plenty of opportunity to lots of "materials" laying all around.  We started the week collecting, sorting, and matching all kinds of yellow, orange, red, green and brown leaves.  Pictured here we were ALL yellow!  We decided that they would display the best on black paper, grabbed the glue and began to CREATE!  Most of our little ones (ages 2 and 3) randomly placed the leaves on the paper.  Some created a pattern of big, small, big, small.  We talked ALL about how leaves change colors and WHY they change.  We learned a new song to the tune of London Bridges...

All the leaves are falling down,
falling down, falling down.
All the leaves are falling down,
In the Autumn.

Yellow leaves are falling down,
falling down, falling down.
Yellow leaves are falling down,
In the Autumn.

Orange leaves are falling down,
falling down, falling down.
Orange leaves are falling down,
In the Autumn.

Golden leaves...
Red leaves...
Brown leaves...
Crunchy leaves...

They really enjoyed this song and it was a fun one to sing outside while leaf color hunting too.  We hunted and collected all the different colors and mixed and matched.  We noticed that when the wind blew the leaves falling looked like golden rain showering down on us.  We got out all the rakes and made piles (little ones) and played in the leaves, throwing them up and watching them fall again.  We also observed that the leaves came from different trees and we matched the tree to it's leaves as we looked at the branches and treetops.  This is such a great time of year for all the children to be able to observe change and growth in the the seasons.  We had a really fun time with our "Yellow" theme...

Another letter "Y" word we studied was "Yak."  This simple word is fun to say and easy for the older children to build words with.  It's a great phonics word since you spell it JUST like it sounds.  Pictured here are a couple of our little fella's preparing their brown bags with yak faces, yellow yak yarn for the hair, yak tails and yak expressions.  When we make puppets around here its a messy process!  The yarn hair requires puddles and puddles of glue (that's the way they like it!) and the children are HAPPY to oblige!!! 

During this day's letter "Y" is for Yellow lesson we made "yellow yarn yo-yo's."  We cut toilet paper rolls in half and then we placed several slits in the upper and lower rim as pictured here.  We made the top and bottom with yellow posterboard circles we cut out and tied a yellow yarn to each roll.  The children flattened out the cut rims as we discussed what "flat" meant.  They then, again, used puddles of glue to secure both the upper and lower circles to their yo-yo tube as we talked about the shapes of the cylindar and the circles.  We then measured the yarn and tied a knot around the tube and helped each child roll the string around the tube.  They unrolled the yarn and we rolled it back again!

ANY week would be incomplete without utilizing our favorite learning tool...playdough!  I totally wish I could have a magical playdough fairy that made all this fun squishy stuff for us!!!  Hey playdough corp.  if you are out there, branch out and make playdough's that are sparkled, colorable, chunky, textured, scented, etc...WE LOVE the stuff!

We studied the letter "X" last week and made off white playdough for all the bones we were forming.  This week we bought a tube of yellow and mixed, mixed, mixed the white playdough with all the fingers at the table and watched in AMAZEMENT as it turned YELLOW!  We then began our word building session with it making every word we could think of that began with the letter "Y," including the letter.  We made "yellow," "yak," "yarn," yo-yo," "Y," and "y"...as you can see here, we also needed to spell the names of our special people in yellow :)). 

We also made yellow balls, snakes, butterflies, pumpkins and spiders.  We compared the sizes of the balls we made and counted the objects as we created. 

This was another of our favorite songs this week as we studies the letter "Y" and yellow.  We used this as a colors lesson as we would go around the room and find things of different colors as we would sing Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Yellow Sun...or Mr. Blue Sun...or Mr. Purple Sun...etc.  We also added our own little hand and body motions.  As you sing this with your preschooler you will notice them making a circle with their fingers as they sing, then peeking behind their hands, etc.  Please feel free to ask Ms. Rebecca or myself to demonstrate the song for you if you are missing anything!

Along with our yellow sun song we also made yellow "y's" that glittered with all the colors of the rainbow.