We "Heart" Preschool!

Our Valentine's themed week was wonderfully rewarding! Caroline was especially excited for preschool and Gwen enjoyed it as extra fun when she got home too. I love it when the kids ASK to play with educational materials! At the end of the week we sadly had to cancel our Book Club Valentine's party because Caroline was contagiously sick with a nasty cold (some love should NOT be shared!). But we squeezed in all the learning activities during the week before she got apathetic and wanted to lay on the couch all day with someone rubbing her back. So here is what went down:

Capital/lowercase letter match. Just as simple as it sounds. I used a heart punch and card stock for durability and wrote the letters on myself. There are printables out there, but the ink saturation just seemed a waste. This was the easy alternative. 

Caroline is still challenged by lowercase letters, so I began with the easiest approach: I named the lowercase letter as I handed it to her and asked her to find the mommy. Next step up was to put 2-3 lowercase letters for her to choose from and then ask her to identify the "f" before pairing it with the "mommy". When she had that down, we transitioned to the hardest way: putting a large number of lower case letters out there and asking her to find their matches. We don't stay too long on challenging ones like this because Caroline still gets frustrated. So usually this is the 'crowning' activity before we move on. 

Another ABC/phonics activity we did was to put the heart over the letter that makes the phonics sound I was doing. Basic. I made this ABC sheet generic so that I can re-use it for all kinds of themes. You can use any kind of 'marker' to cover the completed letters, which makes it perfect for year-round use!

Caroline was singing "Red Heart Pink Heart" (a song we sing at her music class) throughout the lesson. Adorable. 

We did rainbow writing 'L is for Love' and 'H is for Heart' during the week. Caroline is getting pretty adept at this. I just have to remind her repeatedly to begin her letters at the top, otherwise she wants to start at the bottom of each.

This was our second time to do patterns. I originally introduced patterns in October, but she was NOT ready for the concept and it was a terrible failure. No big deal, I set patterns aside until last week when she tried out duplo patterns (during construction week. Sorry I'm all out of order on blogging) and she was getting the hang of it. So I brought them out again this week and she NAILED it! Just goes to show: if your kids don't like an activity, don't bang your head against a wall. Give it a rest and come back to it later! What fun it was this time around!

Gwen loved it too and spent a lot of time after school doing patterns. Candy heart patterns available for printing free from PreKinders. You'll notice I have a HUGE bag of conversation hearts. I needed a ton for a group game for our V-tines party that we didn't end up having. So now I've got a stash. :) I see science experiments in our future. :) Oh, and one last side note. Gwen laughed and told me she found one that said 'Pugs and Kittens' and I thought she was mis-reading 'hugs and kisses'... but nope. It said "Pugs and Kittens". How funny. 

One to one correspondence activity with a beautiful do-a-dot heart. Supposed to be red, but I am almost out of ink, so this was how it printed. Available for free printing from Gift of Curiosity. Of course Caroline ate the candy afterwards. :)

Caroline got a set of wooden shape blocks for Christmas and ADORES them. I knew she would love this activity. I found it for free printing at Playdough to Plato, but as I've already mentioned, my ink is low. Yellow always seems to be the first to go. So I had to color quite a bit of this AFTER it printed so that orange and green looked right in addition to the obvious yellow. While I was working away with my markers, Caroline kept asking when it would be ready. I told her 'after laminating.' Well, when we DIDN'T pull this out for our first day of Pre-K, she was offended. So I got it out anyway (even though we were officially finished for the day) and she played for about another hour. Yeah. An awesome activity!

One of our math activities was counting. Just plain ole counting. She would draw a heart, each with a number from 1-15 on it. She had to count that many M&M's into the muffin cup. Then she could eat one, dump it out, and pick another heart. 

In retrospect, I should have saved out the 11-15 hearts until the end. Her first 3 draws were from the teens and it was a frustrating way to start out. She would have done better with a 'warm up', I think. She kept getting sloppy and dropping multiple candies in while calling out numbers rapid fire. When she did this I made her start over. I want her to practice the one to one correspondence of counting so that she recognizes numbers aren't just a 'sequence' that we chant along like lyrics to a song. They represent actual objects, especially when counting. 

A simpler math activity was to create the number of tarts that the heart specifies. This was fun because playdough is always fun. The cute Queen of Hearts play dough mat was a free printable from PreKinders. The link takes you to ALL their Valentine's mats, but the one I used was the 'Toddler' mat because it has an unspecified number of tarts. I liked the open-endedness of this one. I paired it with my home made number hearts. 

Caroline loves sticking toothpicks into her play dough and asked if her tarts could have candles. Which then morphed into suckers? I'm not sure. But she pretended to lick them. So. There you go.

Gwen spent almost 2 hours playing with this and making cute mini tarts! She said they had blackberry sauce, marshmellow creme, and glowing candles. I'd say this play dough mat was a hit!

For our gross motor, we adapted BINGO into Heart-O. Got the idea from Mommy and Me Book Club, which is one of my favorite sources for our book club ideas. 

HEART-O 

(tune of Bingo)

"There is a shape and it means love. Heart is it's name-o. 

H-E-A-R-T, H-E-A-R-T, H-E-A-R-T, and heart is it's name-o."

blow kisses instead of clapping when you take the hearts away. Very cute!

Our favorite books were:

The Day it Rained Hearts (thank you Mama! You chose a great one to send us!)

Love, Splat

Plant a Kiss

Fancy Nancy Heart to Heart

Guess How Much I Love You

All the Things I Love about You

We also read:

I Spy Little Hearts

Happy Valentine's Day, Mouse!

The Biggest Valentine Ever

Pete the Cat Valentine's Day is Cool

There were a few others that didn't get to us in time (that happens when everyone is requesting the same books from the library. Guess I have a few more to add to my own collection wishlist!). But if you can snag a copy, I've heard wonderful things about:

Brugal. Love Monster

Boynton. Consider Love

Sperring. The Shape of My Heart

Sheehan. Love is You and Me

Patricelli. Hugsy Kissy

Isop. How Do you Hug a Porcupine?

Happy Valentine's Day! Hope you had a LOVE-ly time with your friends and family!

Making V-tines and Goodies for Grands, etc

Eric's sister is serving a full time mission right now. She has a special relationship with both our girls (being young and fun has that effect upon kids!)

and when I told them we were going to make her a special treat for a care package, both girls EAGERLY volunteered their hands. It just so happens that this was a pajama day (to celebrate 100 days of school), so that is why they are both not dressed in regular clothing. :)

 Gwen was in charge of dipping the pretzels into the chocolate and she took her job VERY seriously, perseverating over each one (was that enough chocolate? Should she dip it in farther? Did she shake that one off too much or not enough?) before triumphantly placing it on the waxed paper where Caroline could reach it.

Caroline tired of waiting for Gwen sometimes, so I gave her a pile of pretzels to mess with (I actually over-melted the first batch of chocolate. No good for dipping and therefore no good for giving away, but perfect for spreading on our own family's pretzels. That was Caroline's other job.)

Caroline's first task was adding sprinkles to Gwen's dipped chocolates. My FAVORITE are those sprinkle-crazy ones... have some pretzel with your sprinkles, right? :)

They got to sample a few and gave their approval. 

We also made "hugs" using their handprints and yarn measured to their armspans. That was fun!

Babies, Whales, Penguins, and Projects

When you don't feel well or your kids are sick and you aren't sleeping well, something always has to give. For me, blogging goes out the window first. Followed closely by exercise (embarrassing to admit that, but I'm being honest--- who has the energy to exercise when you feel like you're barely hanging on to the day?). Well, I'm happy to report that all of us are mending from our colds and that the bug didn't bite us too hard. It has been much worse. Counting my blessings here. But either way, I've got catch up to do from the past 2 weeks. Accordingly, this is going to be a "recap" post. Individual posts just aren't happenin. You understand, right? and you're not judging me for it, I hope. ;)

 Mr. Emmett turned 5 months! He is our smiley, chill baby-- who hardly spends a minute on the floor without wanting to roll over onto his tummy. He hasn't figured out how to roll back onto his back, so we end up having to rescue him eventually, but he really LIKES being on his belly, so he doesn't complain much. He has successfully scooted his bum under the couch a few times and can rotate around in a circle on his tummy... putting lots of little things within his eager grasp!

 No teeth yet, but he is exploring everything with his mouth and will gum anything that gets close to him. He loves to explore textures with his fingers too--- embroidered/beaded embellishments on shirts and jackets are a clear favorite! Oh, and I think we've decided his eyes are going to be brownish with perhaps a hint of green. Still hard to say, but they are definitely not blue like his sisters. 

 We had a Family Home Evening lesson on Repentance using Jonah and the Whale. We had a wonderful felt set to play with (a combo of Keeping Life Creative's version with some storm clouds I designed, sailors and people of Ninevah from the LDS Friend, and then I shrunk KLC's version of Jonah so that he could fit on the ship with the sailors. I also added a hinge mouth to the whale because I thought that idea was cute), but the felt set in all its awesomeness is not pictured here because I forgot to go back and take a picture. 

 The girls got to practice putting pictures of themselves inside the whale (I got the idea for that at Blue Skies Ahead, but opted not to make a milk jug whale. We used a 2-D image instead) and then demonstrating what they would need to do to come out. We emphasized that though it is sad, lonely, and dark in the whale, the Lord does NOT want us to stay in there. He provided a way to come out: repentance. 

 The picture of the whale and the sticks with our pics on it were on display all week as a reminder. I can't count the number of times I had to either put a child's stick into the whale (kind of like 'you're in the dog house' only 'you're in the whale') or just ask "do you want to go in the whale? What do you think you should do right now?", but each time we helped the girls remember that they have a Savior who made repentance possible so that they could happily come out of the whale again. 

Preschool this week was all about penguins!

Caroline had a morning where she really wanted EVERYONE to come join her for preschool... so we indulged, though it made the table a little crowded. :)

We did lots of activities with these little abc guys all week. For this activity, I scattered about 7 cards around the room and called out a letter for her to find and retrieve. Lots of fun! Another game we played was matching the uppercase magnetic letter to the correct lowercase penguin. These penguins were free for printing at Gift of Curiosity. But it was really hard to choose our penguin activities because 3Dinosaurs, RoyalBaloo, and a myriad of others also have some wonderful free printables. Man, if my ink was unlimited... :)

This arctic animals tracing page is from the 3 Dinosaurs Zoo pack free printable.

We did a dice rolling game. Count out the penguins... and then eat them of course! :) Started out with one die, then added two dice so that she had to add the two together for increased difficulty. She loved this activity! (Eating the learning materials always makes the activity a hit, don't you think?) One thing I thought was observant of her was the way she started to arrange her penguins in the same configuration as pictured on the die (I didn't take a photo of her doing this, but it was neat to see her copying the composition and making connections from one 'space' to another similarly proportioned 'space'. The artist in me was pretty stoked to see her doing that because that is key to observational drawing!)

Our Penguin book club was a hit with the kiddos! We read A Penguin Story and Penguin and Pinecone. Both are adorable books! Then the kids got to practice being daddy penguins with eggs on their feet, throwing 'fish' (i.e. balls, bean bags, etc) into a box with a hungry penguin inside and singing "I'm a Little Penguin":

(tune of I'm a Little Teapot)

I'm a little penguin

black and white.

I waddle to the left

and I waddle to the right. 

I cannot fly but I can swim. 

So I waddle to the water and jump right in!

We did fun actions for the song and the kids wanted to do it over and over again!

 We made these penguin pals for our craft. I got out the heart punch for the feet and let the kids do it themselves and I think that might have been their favorite part! Originally the design was simple, but when one child wanted to add an orange scarf (because the penguin in Penguin and Pinecone wears an orange scarf) and another immediately asked about his friend pinecone, I knew we were adapting the project! who can stifle such creativity? A little ribbon, some brown acorn caps and buttons, and wuahlah! Penguins with personalized touches! 

Funny: while I was concentrating on tying that scarf on Caroline's little brown pinecone pal, I didn't notice that she had used the WHOLE pile of brown buttons and glued them to her penguin! Guess she wanted him to be stylin (or popular)!

C was pretty sure he wanted his penguins to swim in his milk. :)

On the home front, Gwen has been going perler bead crazy lately! She got a set for Christmas and was eager to try it out... again and again! She has been generous to share with Caroline (who made the above square) and eager to create both small and large designs. 

Pictured here: a purple snowflake, rainbow heart (the perfect landing pad for Toothless), and a very large penguin (that took her several hours to do!)

My friend Rachel posted recently about her projects and asked readers to comment on what they were working on... and I thought. Hmmmm. I should probably finish those stockings that I started in November thinking vainly that I could finish them by beginning of December (with preschool, Thanksgiving, and a 2 month old? What was I thinking?)... Inspired to create by her beautiful creations, I decided that I would love to work on them some more rather than snuggle down and read after the kids went to bed (the ambition to do a project came closely on the heels of feeling improved health! Amazing how that works!). I designed these critters myself (way back in October) after seeing these adorable stockings but wanting to go for an all animal motif (no Santa or snowmen here) for our family stockings. These are 3 of the 6 animals I've created (we also have a moose, raccoon, and bunny. with plans for a skunk when the times comes!). Now that they are ironed onto velvet material, I'm ready to add faces, embellishments and cute stitching to the felt/fabric. Stay tuned for more pics of the project progress!

Out of curiosity, what drops out of your life when your days are feeling weary? and what are you eager to add back in?

Snowy Book Club: The Snowy Day, No Two Alike and Snowmen at Night

Our Mommy and Me Book Club is small (mostly because I wanted to include all the kids in Caroline's class at church and if we invited the class above or below her age, then, well, it would be huge.) Our numbers are usually 3 or 4 kids and their moms each week with the occasional 5-6 kid day and younger siblings thrown in too. I like it when there are 4-5 kids. More friends just make all the activities I plan more fun, I think! I loved having 2 newbies this week since Cl and Ce had never been before. They fit right into our play!

We started off with No Two Alike and the kids loved it! We talked about what makes US unique and special while still finding commonalities we share with others. An adorable book and the kiddos loved taking turns finding animals on the page. 

From that bird/snow book, it was a natural transition to felt/finger play: 

2 Little Blackbirds

Two Little Blackbirds sitting on a hill (hold 2 fingers in front of you, one from each hand)

One named Jack, one named Jill (lift one pointer finger and then the other)

Fly away Jack (hand behind back)

Fly away Jill (other hand behind back)

come back Jack (hand comes back to front)

come back Jill (other hand comes back)

Two little blackbirds sitting on a hill. 

One named Jack, one named Jill.

 We did 3 verses (hill= jack and jill, cloud = quiet and loud, snow = fast and slow). It can be chanted or even sung.

The kids really got into this and loved doing the hand motions along with the poem. When I'm doing the felt I never take pictures, so this pic is afterwards during free play when the kids wanted to do the felt story themselves. 

Our next book was The Snowy Day. Some of the kids had read this book before and were quick to tell me how it ends (with the snowball melting in his pocket) before we even got to that point in the story. 

We sang "Snowflake, Snowflake, Little Snowflake" from Super Simple Songs (the video is adorable and you must go watch it with your kids if you haven't yet) and used our foam snowflakes to 

dance with while we sang. After they were sort of familiar with the song, each child got to choose where they wanted the snowflake to fall. We actually did this AGAIN when Gwen got home from Kinder. She wanted the snowflake to fall on her nose. :) (ps. Mommy, this photo is for you-- bc you said you wanted to see what she looks like with tooth #7 lost)

Of course, we had to have a snowstorm at the end with snowflakes falling everywhere!

Caroline tried to rescue the fallen flakes and put them back with their 'families'. :)

I was planning to read Snowmen at Night last, but actually ended up omitting it because the attention of the kids was waning (new kids and younger siblings, ya know. Gotta be flexible!). I opted to include Once There Was a Snowman song I'd planned to follow the book because I thought the kids would love it. And they did! I think we sang it 4 or 5 times! It was a great way to end the circle time.

They are melting... it happens a lot faster in song than in real life! :)

We made name snowmen for our craft (I guided their hands to write their names on each circle, then they glued them on and added snowman features and snow)

 I like that Caroline's snowman has feet... She is so funny!

  We finished off the book club with homemade frozen yogurt. The kids that got here early helped me make it and it was ready right about the time we were finished with everything. Perfect ending!

I loved the creativity displayed during free play--- Cl insisted that his train was driving through a snow storm. He wanted me to take a picture of his handy work. :)

We had a great time! I can hardly wait for our next book club on Penguins! :)

Snow: Chillin at Preschool

Appropriately, the weather provided us with snow this week to accompany our snow-themed preschool! 

We did some Upper and Lower case letter matching with this cute snowman I made. The letters attach with velcro. I observed that Caroline gravitated towards the easy ones (Ss Ww Oo Cc) and completely avoided the harder ones. Notice her little tongue there? She was thinking hard! I realized half way through that she really didn't KNOW all that many of her lower case letters or was mixing them up. At that point, rather than ask her to find and create her own matches, I put on the lower case, identified its name for her, had her repeat it back to me, then asked her to find the big one that goes with it. This version of the activity was much better received! I'm sure we can come back to it again for the harder version when she is ready. ;)

We have been working on her writing. Honestly, I don't expect anywhere near perfection here, I just want her to practice holding the utensil and get her hands used to making motions to create letters. Caroline really enjoys it when I guide her hand with mine, which we do often, but when I am holding Emmett during school, that doesn't work so well. :)

Sometimes the simplest math is the most fun! Caroline is really good at sorting. She likes to do it too and will begin sorting objects unprompted throughout the day. Tiny things in parades, toys on the shelf... and in this case, snowflakes. This was just a bag of cheap foam snowflakes that came in three different colors and two sizes. I first directed her to sort the sizes. Then we counted each pile and she had to declare which one had most and which had least. Then we repeated the activity sorting the colors into three piles. She loved this and was devastated later in the week when she had to share these foam snowflakes with friends at our Mommy and me book club!

I threw in a little science with pics of real snowflakes in large and micro pics for matching. I planned to use these with a magnifying glass to increase the 'scientist' authenticity, but last minute I couldn't find the mag. glass and didn't feel like venturing into the frigid garage to see if it is stored away in the summer box (since we used it all summer to look at bugs). I found the idea here, but opted to make my own with color to aide in the matching process (and because the artist in me is fascinated by the rainbow of colors in a single flake's crystals!). If anyone wants a copy for printing, I'm happy to send it. Just leave your email in the comments. ;)

For some reason, Caroline REALLY wanted me to take a picture of her socks... silly girl! :)

We read Snow (Rylant) (I love the poetic quality of the text and the warmth of the illustrations), Snow (Shulevitz) (we counted snowflakes on each page until there were too many), Owl Moon (which was a little too much text for Caroline, but she enjoyed the gorgeous illustrations), Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost--- DO look for the illustrated version by Susan Jeffers! What a great introduction to classical poetry!), Sneezy the Snowman (Caroline LOVED my silly melting voice and used it herself when she retold the story to me :), and Snowmen at Night (Gwen also loved this one-- they were both drawn to the pickle-nosed snowman in particular, which I found interesting). I didn't do Snowflake Bentley with Caroline because I didn't think she had the attention span for it, but for slightly older children it is a great snowflake science book that pairs beautifully with the large and teeny snowflake matching activity!

and of course, what could be more appropriate for gross motor than outside playing in the snow? We have done that a lot this week.

We continued the snow theme for book club, but I'll save those books and activities for another post. Hope you all are enjoying chillin with your loved ones!