Preschool ~ Fall Fun

We continued to enjoy the fall season around here and engaged in several fall-inspired activities. However, the weather has been a bit crazy around here, with temperatures in the 80s-90s!

Fine Motor/Sensory/Writing Activities...

We really love the wooden pieces of our Handwriting Without Tears program, and not just to form letters! Smiley loves using the pieces as ramps for his cars, as bridges, or ladders for his fire truck :)

We did also use them to build a gigantic E, F, and L though ;)

The kids enjoyed playing with a fall-themed sensory box that included oatmeal, textile leaves, pumpkin erasers and small apple prints. I also gave them a few Halloween-themed buckets that I got from the Target dollar section a few weeks ago...

We sorted fall leaves by color. This was really an activity for the tot, but Smiley liked to participate for a little while...

Making patterns...

Later that week, I let the kids play with corn kernels. They LOVED it! All they needed were a few buckets, spoons and their trucks...

The kids had such a great time finger painting our ocean mural a couple of months ago that I thought it would be great to make a fall mural. Smiley started by practicing writing the letters L, F and E, before just mixing all the colors together ;) Unfortunately, I was too slow to capture his letters on camera... (I think this might have been the letter L)

Additional crafts included bats and pumpkins :) I love fall!

Everything else...

Reading continues to go really well. Smiley loves to read his little readers (hooked on phonics- K). He also played ABC Reading Eggs on the computer once or twice this week. It's great practice to reinforce sounding out and practicing his sight words.

Math just continues to be an everyday occurrence around here. Smiley is often counting something, adding, or subtracting. The singapore math textbook I purchased isn't really working for us right now. The concepts are too easy, and he isn't interested in writing numerals yet. So, for now we're just continuing with our everyday hands-on math :) Eventually, I would like to either purchase Montessori Math materials or Right Start materials. We'll see... 

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Preschool ~ Ocean

My family has been visiting us from Switzerland for the past 3 weeks, so our weeks have been all about quality family time and fun :) Here are some of the things we have been up to. Due to the beach locations of our trips, we started our ocean theme hands-on.

I prepared an ocean sensory box for the kids, which they loved... It included plastic fish and shells (table decoration) that I got from Target. Lots of fuzzy pom poms to represent the water. Lots of real sea shells. And ocean-themed finger puppets...

Smiley loved to put the littlest pom poms into sea shells and to get them back out with tweezers...

He also loved filling up his schoolbus (pretending it was gas) and driving it around the living room (there were lots of emergencies involved to, hence the fire truck!).

Any play involving the schoolbus was probably his favorite and occurred repeatedly :)

We then spent a few days down in San Diego, and of course, had to go to Sea World! What a great addition to our ocean theme!! One of our favorite parts was to be able to touch different sea animals!!

Last week was spent in a house in Maui, Hawaii!! A generous gift from my parents. We had the most wonderful time!

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Our house was right at the beach. It was the perfect set-up with two young kids (and 5 adults).

Due to the time difference, the kids woke up very early and we were able to play in the waves while watching the sun go up :)

One morning, we took a submarine trip to more closely see al the sea life, including sea turtles and an octopus!

On another day, we went to look at a sugar mill and learned the process from sugar cane to raw sugar. The kids even got a little sample ;)

Of course, the majority of the time was just spent having fun at the beach, such as building sand castles with my mom.