Valentines For Tots

The Valentines Day art project the toddlers and Izzy did spanned over a few days to make.

First they painted pink on stiff white paper.  All the while we talked about the color pink, and painting, brush, and how paint is for paper - not for eating.

Then the next day we added red footprints to form a heart-ish shape.  There were lots of giggly tots and wiggly toes during that process!

The next day I helped them paint a heart around their footprints, hand-over-hand.  We talked about the color Red and the Heart shape, and how we paint nice and smooth!

Valentines Day Eve I hung them up on the door to welcome their parents (and us) in the morning!  They can give them to their Mom or Dad tomorrow after daycare!

Recap

Snapshots of what we've been up to lately:

Sticker math

Practicing printing with shaving cream

Color mixing project

Trip to the dentist

Playing with trees

SP joined Girl Scouts

and got her math badge!

Went to the Renaissance Festival (that'll get it's own post)

And dressing up brothers.

Easter Preparations and My Little Troublemaker

I've got enough Easter pictures for two posts, so this first one is dedicated to the preparation part.

Last Thursday I planned an Easter egg hunt for the daycare kids.  Our neighborhood does a huge one every Good Friday morning but one of my daycare kids (besides the babies) lives outside our neighborhood and I knew she'd love hunting for and collecting eggs, so we had one in our backyard!!

First I set out fun springtime foam stickers, plastic cups with two holes punched in the tops, one on each side, sparkly chenille sticks, and Easter grass.  By the way, I hate plastic Easter grass. Go paper, it's way less messy!

 And I set them to work making little baskets to put their goodies in!

 Since Sweet Pea was home from school that day for spring break I asked her if she wanted to hide the eggs, or find them.  She chose to hide them.  Once they were all hidden, and cup/baskets were made, they were off!

 This was Little Man's first egg hunt that he could participate in.  Last year he was still just a crawler.

 I gave the toddlers a little head start, and when they each had a few eggs I reminded the bigger kids what their egg limit was and let them loose.

After the big neighborhood hunt on Friday morning Spencer, the kids, and I decorated our Easter eggs! 

 Little Man wasn't too impressed with the process, he really just wanted to play with the bowls of dye.  Not gonna fly with this Momma!  So he took off to play while the rest of us did the eggs and played with Easter egg-shaped playdough.

 
Oh did I say play? 

Hey... where's the little guy?  I don't hear him anywhere?

.
.
.
His door is closed.
.
.
.

 Busted!!

Birds and the Letter B

Last week the theme was "Birds" and the letter B.  As you can see by the little snippet I'm showing you, we had a lot planned! 

Once again, we started the week off with the letter, number, and some other non-bird related activities.  One thing I had to do was find out where the kids were with their cutting ability.  I knew the 4 year old was able to cut on a curved line just fine, but I wasn't sure about Babydoll.  Turns out she can cut a straight line, a zig-zag, and a curved line without too much difficulty. 

Then on Tuesday we started talking about Birds.  We started with Bird vocabulary and body parts.  Did lots of make-believe which helped anchor those words into their memory (and it's fun!!),

We used a real bird feather to paint blue jays.  Perfect integration of the Birds theme, and the letter B.  We sang songs about birds, bird fingerplays, number puzzles, read books like The Little Red Hen, and Are You My Mother.  We made artwork with birdseed, used almost all our senses to examine and discuss about a real bird nest (the one sense we didn't use? taste!).  For lunch on Friday the kids helped me make egg salad sandwiches.  Throughout the week we kept going back to the letter B, word wall, B sound, and the letter A.

We also made a simple bird feeder out of an orange juice container.

Do you think the birds like LOTS of PULP birdseed?  Sure hope so!

Ants and the Letter A

I am really behind on blogging about preschool!  I've been stock piling pictures on my camera because I wasn't sure where my usb cord was, and I wasn't about to post about preschool without pictures.

Two weeks ago the theme was the letter A and Ants.  The first day of the week we just worked on the letter A, number 1, short A sound, and some other super cool stuff.  Then on Tuesday we got going with Ants.

We learned some ant vocabulary, ant body parts, the toddlers worked on learning their body parts. So far Little man has nose and feet down, is getting the hang of mouth, and my toddler daycare girl nose all her basics and was working on cheeks and lips.

This was the Letter A word wall.  I am not expecting my 3 and 4 year old to learn to read these words.  The point was for them to recognize the letter A in words, to understand that letters make up words, and that words have meaning (the pictures next to them, which they helped me match up).  Then the words stay up all week, we keep coming back to them, and they have the opportunity to possibly remember them by sight.

We made ants out of egg cartons, which helped them to remember how many legs ants have, and to compare that to us and other animals.  Look out kids, there's a giant brown ant about to eat your snack!  This day the kids also used their "mandibles" to pick up and eat their goldfish snack.  I wish I had a picture of that, it was pretty funny:o)

We made fingerprint ant pictures, painted a letter A, and made ants out of playdough. Read books like, The Ant Bully, and The Magic School Bus Gets Ants in its Pants.  We sang songs and learned fingerplays about ants.  One favorite activity was for Dramatic Play/Large Muscle.  We made our "colony" under the table, then went into the living room/playroom to find "food" which was a bucket of large legos.  We then carried our "food" with our "mandibles" all the way back to the colony.  We made ants on a log, and explored ants outside with magnifying glasses. 

We did a lot more that was unrelated to Ants as well.  The toddlers are starting to learn to count, and the preschoolers are fine-tuning their one-to-one correspondence during math, and getting the hang of those upper-teen numbers that are always tricky.

On an unrelated note, we pulled out some dress-up stuff, and Babydoll showed us some awesome ninja moves! :o)

Next up... the letter B and Birds.

Preschool at My House!

We officially started preschool during daycare last week!  While I enjoy taking a break in planning a curriculum during the summer, I'm always excited to get back into it in the fall.  New supplies, new ideas, and a fresh new school year!

Last year I taught using the Fireflies curriculum from Funshine Express.  In past years I have used Mother Goose Time, Carols Affordable Curriculum, and made my own based on the many early childhood books and websites I have in my arsenal.  Funshine Express and Mother Goose Time are both really great curriculum, but Funshine express is just a bit less expensive - and since I don't charge my daycare parents for preschool... every dollar counts!

My goal is to save a couple years worth of curriculum guides, supplies, and materials so I will be able to stop ordering them but keep on teaching them on a two or three year rotating schedule.  Every month I make copies of the worksheets and parent hand-outs, save all of the supplies and teaching guides, and one day I'll only have to plan the corresponding crafts, and make the typical adjustments based on developmental levels of the children (this is the part that takes the most time anyway)... the rest will be done.  I'll probably be able to do that after this school year!

This is our weather chart.  Every day someone gets to be the weather-watcher and it is their job to report what the weather is that day (or at least at that particular moment).  They then get to choose the correct weather picture and stick it on the chart for that day.

This is our calendar.  Everyday someone else gets to be the Calendar Helper.  We all say the days-of-the-week song, and today's date, and the calendar helper puts the date picture on the calendar.  It is also a pattern, so they get to practice recognizing patterns and predicting the next item every day as well!  The calendar and weather chart are from last years supplies, we'll be getting a new set later this month with October's order!

This week we start focusing on the alphabet with the letter A, but last week we were concentrating on rhyming.  We've been reading lots of poems, books that rhyme, playing concentration with flashcards that have rhyming pictures, rhyming word worksheets, and naming off words that rhyme throughout the day.  The whole point is to help them train their ears to pay attention to the sounds in words, to build phonemic awareness, which is vital in learning how to read. One of the poems we read is pictured above, and they almost have the whole thing memorized now because they like it so much.  To extend the activity we found and circled the words that rhymed with different colored crayons.  For example, we circled the words "go" and "so" with a blue crayon, and "bite" and "right" with a green crayon.  Then we made a craft which gave us the chance to practice tracing numbers 1-5, counting, color recognition, and gluing skills.

This week we are starting the letter A and Ants theme, I'm hoping to tell you about it next Monday!

"I Love To Read" Month

   It's I Love To Read month in February!  Everyday I'm going to try to highlight a book that my kids and/or daycare kids love this month!  I'll also do my best, as I'm still figuring out this advertising stuff, to link to the book on Amazon in case you want to read more reviews or possibly buy it.


The first book, which we read today, is called Are You My Mother? and it's by P.D. Eastman.  This book is a "Beginner Book" or easy reader.  Sweet Pea, who's in first grade, is reading it pretty well on her own.  It's about a baby bird that hatches from his shell while his mother is off looking for food to feed him.  The baby bird can't fly yet, but he can walk, and he begins his search for his mother.  The only problem is that he has no idea what she looks like.  He asks all sorts of animals and "creatures" if they are his mother, but she can't be found.  Are you getting worried for the poor baby bird?  Don't fret, they find eachother in the end, but that baby bird went on quite an adventure to get there!

After we read the book, I had the kids tell me a character they liked from the story, and they then walked to the table as if they were that animal.  Babydoll chose the Hen, one of my daycare kids chose to be the Cat, and another daycare kid was a hen as well.  Once at the table we talked about the story and I had them draw pictures of their favorite characters.

  


Babydoll first drew the Momma Bird, but started scribbling it out because she felt it wasn't her best work. I don't care what their art/projects/crafts look like, but I do care that they give it their all, do their best work. I insisted that her momma bird was excellent and that even Mommy can't draw a bird to look exactly like the bird in the book. She was just in a bad mood, still tired from the weekend, and was frustrated easily. While I was talking with the other kids about their pictures she decided to keep going.

This is her drawing of the Hen in the story.  Hm, this is feeling a little repetitive with the whole picture-titles-on-the-pictures thing and all.  Oh well, I'm going to keep explaining away :o)  She was very proud of her hen!

This picture belongs to one of my daycare kids.  He drew, yep you guessed it, the baby bird.  This was completely on his own!  Didn't he do a fantastic job?  If you look closely you'll even see the toes on the bird's feet.  By the way, that leg on the far left isn't supposed to be there.  He wanted to erase it but, alas, it's marker.  So we decided we would pretend it's not there.   (kind of like I sometimes pretend the laundrey isn't there, the dishes aren't there, the mountains of junk stashed in the basement aren't there.)  I digress, and apologize for doing so.  Point is, he did great.

This little masterpiece is actually on my kitchen table.  One of the littler members of my troop got bored drawing animals on paper pretty quickly and decided that while "Abby is talking to that other kid about the extra leg, I'll see what red crayon looks like on the table!"  Haha, no worries, it comes off eventually.  This is the precise reason I do not have fancy expensive furniture.... kids are rough on them.  The fact that her picture is on the table aside, look at those crayon strokes, look at the complimentary lines!  Look at the creative use of kitchen furniture!  Maybe I'll sell my table some day for millions when she becomes a world famous artist! 

That's it for today!  If you feel so inclined, take a peek at the book on Amazon.  Time to get going, I have to get tuesday's book picked out.  Happy Reading!