Friday, September 30, 2011

Preschool ~ Apples


Tot School


We continued our APPLE theme this week and did several apple inspired preschool activities.

MATH...

We laid out our number cards (from the Target dollar section a couple of years ago) from 0-25 and then counted out the according number of "apples" (cranberries from the target fall decorating section). Smiley is a hands-on learner, so he really enjoyed this activity.


We then added in his Lightning Mc'Queen car, who had to find the number that mommy yelled out. BIG HIT! I think Smiley really benefitted from seeing the numbers 11-20 laid out in order below 1-10. Before, he struggled with the order of 13-19, but seeing them below 1-10, really seemed to help him :)



We then built car tracks from one number to another and he enjoyed driving his car along the road...


Writing/Fine Motor/Sensory...

Smiley is not very interested in writing with a pen just yet, which is fine with me. He is still very young and lacks some of the fine motor control. But, he really likes writing letters in shaving cream :) We worked on the letters L and F. 

Again, a car was involved ;)



He washed his cars for about 20 minutes :)


The kids were really into building with blocks this week and worked on making towers several times this week.





On another day, we wrote our letters (again L and F) in some leftover yogurt. I am glad we did this on a clean tray, since my kids decided to lick the yogurt off their fingers (strange, how yogurt is so much more appealing this way...;))



Smiley used tweezers to transfer beans...

And then transferred the beans with a spoon to a baby bottle...

On another day, he transferred water with a little spoon...


READING...

Smiley has been doing a great job with his reading. He is SO into it and so proud after each little reader he reads. We're about half-way through the Hooked on Phonics Kindergarten program. I try to only do one new reader per week and lots of review to make sure he is really solid rather than rushing through it...

Coloring his new sight words "this, says, of"...





Decorating his sight words with cheerios, beans and lentils...



Fall Activity...
The kids helped me put together some fall decorations...


I try to integrate Smiley into cooking/baking a few times each week. Here he is cutting apples for a yummy carrot/apple soup :)

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Ocean Mural

We worked on an ocean mural to go along with our ocean theme a couple of weeks ago. I somehow forgot to post about this earlier, but here it is :)



 We read Eric Carle's Mister Sea horse and painted a sea horse with water color, similar to how the artist painted his sea horse.
 We made eels from all natural, self-hardening clay. The kids absolutely loved this!







We glued colorful aquarium stones, sea shells and sea snails on the bottom of our ocean. We made sea anemones from tissue squares and also added them to our board. 




We cut out sea stars from construction paper, colored them with crayons and then glued some sand on them.



We made a fish swarm with potato stamps. We cut a potato in half and used a fish shaped cookie cutter to make a fish stamp (we only had a whale, but we just pretended it is a fish, lol). Smiley LOVED cutting the potato.




 We cut bigger fish from construction paper and painted them. We then added tissue paper scales... (Lovebug preferred painting her hands instead)...



And here is the finished product...







 Linking to: Red Ted Art, ABC and 123, Pinterest Tuesday