Tag Archives: Preschool

Preschool Playdate: Earth Day

Theme: Earth Day
Inspiration: International Celebration of Earth Day on April 22

STORY TIME
This book was gifted to our children – what a perfect share for Earth Day! From the I Am Foundation website:
“I Am The Earth: Positive Affirmations for Loving Our Planet is dedicated to our children and future generations, to enable them to become great stewards of this planet. This book builds an awareness of valuing, appreciating, and taking care of our beautiful world. For every I Am The Earth book you order from The I AM Foundation for donation, we plant a tree via The Arbor Day Foundation. ”

Available at http://www.iamfoundation.org/home.html

LITERACY CENTER
I found today’s activities on THIS blog – the mama offered several ideas for Earth Day in her free printable pack.

Level 1: for the younger set I printed out tracing pages – they love writing with the dry erase markers!!

Level 2: I printed out the Letter Sound Matching. I wrote in the words in one set, and left the other as it was with the pictures on the left and the letters on the right.

MATH CENTER
Today’s activity was also printed from THIS same blog as the literacy activities. Since the matching numbers would have taken up a whole page for just five numbers, I used our left-over cardboard from our Arts+Crafts activity to make the matching numbers.

Level 1: Match the number cards

Level 2: Write in the correct numbers

DISCOVERY TABLE
This was a sensory/math activity. I used leftover green and blue eggs from Easter and split peas to go along with the blue/green earth day theme. This gross motor skills activity was inspired by THIS image.

In addition to the egg match for the numbers, I also pulled out our bumblebee clothespins that we made during our A.A. Milne playdate to have the kiddos talk about the importance of bees to the ecosystem, and have them pick up the flowers with the clothespins to work on fine motor skills.

The second sensory activity today was planting a bean seed. The kiddos got to pack the dirt, plant their seed, cover it, and then water the seed. We can’t wait to hear how their seeds sprouted this week!!

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
This was a two-part craft!! As the children arrived, we had them paint their blue earth. Once we broke for centers, we mixed the shaving cream+glue+food coloring concoction we learned to make for our Black History Month playdate and this time, we turned the cream green so that the kiddos could make green land on top of the blue water and create their own planet Earth.

We finish our Preschool Playdate with a sharing time: each child that wants to share gets to say what (s)he enjoyed the most about the morning. We close with a good-bye song where children are welcome to give hugs. It helps to set a formal end to the time together so that parents have a clear reason to insist that it’s time to go if they have somewhere to be afterwards.

I hope you and your sweet peas had a fun time celebrating Earth Day! Join us next Thursday when we share our Space Exploration playdate!

Preschool Playdate: Have A Laugh Day

Play date: April 14, 2016
Inspiration: “International Moment of Laughter Day” Read about it HERE

This theme took a little creativity – once I latched onto the idea that clowns make most of us laugh, planning got a little easier.

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: What kinds of things make us laugh? Why is laughing good for us? What is the difference between laughing with someone, and laughing at someone?
— Storytime: The Day the Crayons Quit, Drew Daywalt (author) + Oliver Jeffers (illustrator)
~~— Unsquiggle activity~~
~~— Poem/Song before we break for Centers~~

No time for our unsquiggle or poem since the Sweet Peas sat enthralled and listened to the whole story!!!

As a preparation for this day, we invited each of the children to prepare a joke to share with their friends. Here are some of the ones the children shared:

From Zootopia:
What do you call a three-humped camel? Pregnant.

From Home:
Knock know. Who’s ~~there?~~ Mooo. Moo ~~who?~~ Mooo. The interrupting cow.
(The teller interrupts the listener during ~~these~~ words)

One of Charger’s inventions:
What did the bat take on his trip? His bat-pack.

One of Puma’s inventions:
Why doesn’t the lollipop have any friends? Because he’s a sucker.

STORY TIME
My sister, who is an eighth grade English teacher in NYC, painstakingly selects each of us a new book every Christmas. This book and it’s sequel, The Day the Crayons Came home, are not loved just by Otter, for whom they were intended, but the whole family! If you haven’t read them yet, please check them out.

I chose this book because it is a Laugh Out Loud funny book – the parents were laughing right along with the children when I read it. Funny voices may or may not make it even funnier.

LITERACY CENTER
I had two printables for the sweet peas to enjoy at this station. One was a pre-writing activity to have them practice making different kinds of lines and move their hands across the page. We set this out with some dry-erase markers and it’s always a big hit.

The other activity was a word family sorting activity. Both of the activities are from THIS free circus printable pack via homeschoolcreations.com.

Level 1: Parent reads the words out loud and has child identify the matching rhymes.

Level 2: Child reads the words and sorts the rhyming words into the correct group.

MATH CENTER
I had two activities for this center as well. The first one is a counting activity for the parent/child to enjoy together. The other activity was a puzzle the children could complete by ordering the numbers across the top of the image. I intended to add in the number words before I laminated…and I forgot. Oops.

Print your own worksheet HERE from first-school.ws

Puzzle is from THIS free circus printable pack via homeschoolcreations.com

DISCOVERY TABLE
Years of dance classes have yielded one clown costume plus several others that were close enough. The sweet peas got to play dress-up and be silly!

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Playtime exploration
Today’s craft activity was an opportunity for the sweet peas to get a little gross and fine motor skills practice as they explored their creativity. I printed THESE play dough playmats from the Picklebums blog, and set up four stations complete with a playmat, modeling clay, and some crafting staples: beads, feathers, wiggle eyes…and here is what happened:

The Make+Take activity was a clown coloring page this week – print your own HERE from first-school.ws

Join us next Thursday when we share all the activities we do today in celebration of Earth Day. Find some good ideas HERE since Earth Day is tomorrow 🙂

Preschool Playdate: Butterflies

Playdate: March 31, 2016
Theme inspired by Learn About Butterflies Day

STORY TIME
Here is a sweet story that follows a caterpillar through the spring and metamorphosis. It’s a pop-up book with a puffy caterpillar that weaves through the center of the pages…and then a pretty pop-up butterfly on the last page.

by Susan Hood, Claudine Gévry

LITERACY CENTER
I found some images of butterfly gardens on the internet, and then printed up THIS butterfly life cycle. I printed up a list of position and direction words as a reference list for the parents.

My favorite way to use this is to take turns with your sweet pea. You ask them to place one of the figures around the picture, and then have them tell you where to put the figure. It helps teach them the concept of how things relate to one another…read more about that HERE. I find it an important idea for them to be able to learn things such as reading and math…it’s important to understand how letters and numbers relate to each other according to their position to each other.

MATH CENTER
I created this center using playing cards from a Hungry Caterpillar Game.

Level 1: Match the number on the card to the number on the reference picture.

Level 2: Start teaching your sweet pea about the days of the week.

DISCOVERY TABLE
This incorporated two ideas – the line of symmetry and color blending. The sweet peas put dabs of red and yellow paint on one side of the paper, then folded it in half to transfer the paint. Where the colors blended, they got to see that red+yellow=orange. I love 2-for-1 activities 🙂 This one might count as 3-for-1 since it could also be a craft!!

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
This was the “official” craft activity. We used water-soluble markers to draw on coffee filters. Then i let the sweet peas drop water on the filter by using water trapped in a straw by air pressure (mini-science lesson built in!). Once they dried, we attached them to the popsicile stick prepared the night before. The pipe cleaner is glued on with hot glue; it serves as the body when you twist it at the top, and then turn the ends into the antenna.

This activity works best with fresh markers that are full of ink. Ours were a little dry and not enough color transferred to the coffee filter – the butterflies were more colorful when I brought out new markers.

Next week: check out the activities we enjoyed on April 7th in honor of World Health Day.

Preschool Playdate: Flowers

Playdate: March 24, 2016
Theme: Spring Flowers

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: passed around seeds and plants for children to observe
— Storytime: Book from Enchanted Learning.com
— Unsquiggle activity: growing plants

Unsquiggle: after the children got to see the seed, roots growing, first leaves, and flowers, we invite them to act out the growth cycle. They ball themselves up into little seeds, start shooting roots, then stem, leaves and flowers. A parent or another child can be the sun shining and the water falling from the sky or a watering can. Whoever is the water can visit each child individually and water them to grow. (Idea from Mailbox Superbook)

STORY TIME
We used a book we made when Puma was a preschooler. It shows all the stages of growing from seed to plant, and you can print your own copy HERE at Enchanted Learning.com.

We passed around these samples for the children to look at and get to experience the live version of what they were seeing on the page.

LITERACY CENTER
This was a fun activity to put together. I was trying to incorporate uppercase and lowercase letters, and then it occurred to me that each letter could also be a color of the rainbow. I decided to add a little Spanish into the color identification games.

Level 1: Match the colors

Level 2: Match the letters in the same case (Uppercase to uppercase)

Level 3: Match the letters to the opposite case (Uppercase to lowercase)

MATH CENTER
This was a number correspondence game. The children would place the correct number of buttons in the corresponding basket. The game could be played with random placement, or with instructions like, “same color”, “same size”, or, “make a pattern”.

DISCOVERY TABLE
This is a felt activity where children could play with the arrangement of the flower parts and also identify the print words. A parent can ask a younger preschool to turn the letters the correct way. If the child is already sounding out, they could start to read the words.

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take

This is a print activity. You could use paint or ink – we opted for paint this time. I didn’t lay out any “sample” with this activity…simply put out the sponge shapes and plates of color and waited to see what would happen. As you can see, there were lots of ideas on how to make flowers.

Stop in next week to see all the fun we have exploring caterpillars and butterflies today.

Preschool Playdate: Ireland

Playdate: March 17, 2016
Theme: Luck o’the Irish

How perfect that this playdate was on St. Patrick’s Day!! It made for a lot of neat activities. We did not focus on the saint aspect so much since we honor that not everyone shares our belief system. We made it more about The Emerald Isle and all things green!!

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Discussion of theme
— Storytime: Great Irish Legends
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers) to welcome any latecomers to our playtime and sing one more time to the other children

STORY TIME
I found this book on Amazon. We chose the story about the king with the donkey’s ears. It was a great story that taught about tolerance and acceptance – very poignant during this turbulent political season.

LITERACY CENTER
I found this idea on the B-Inspired Mama blog. I adjusted it to focus on uppercase and lowercase vowels since there are too many children and too little time (and too few foam shamrocks from the Dollar Store!) to make them all their own individual game. We turned the shamrocks upside down in the containers for an element of surprise. I also set out fishing poles with blue and yellow strings since blue + yellow = green 🙂

Level 1: Name the letter and match the letter case to the corresponding game card.

Level 2:Name the letter and mix the case and the card so that they have to match uppercase to lowercase.

MATH CENTER
This was a printable from the B-Inspired Mama blog that I modified in order to add more print elements. I wrote in the word names for the numbers in both English and Spanish before laminating the puzzle.

Once the sweet peas put the puzzle together, you could also have them count the elements in the picture: how many children, shamrocks, rain drops, etc.

DISCOVERY TABLE
We had two activities for the children to explore…

Sensory Bin
We made green rice via the recipe on the Mama Miss blog. It is so easy to do – it literally takes five minutes to make. The only caveat is that you have to leave enough time for it to dry. When we remember, we will make it the night before we need to use it. If not, luckily our AZ sun is hot enough to dry it out in a couple of hours, or spread it out and dry it on cookie sheets under a ceiling fan…we have done all these to get rice ready for playdates!!

We added pom-poms, buttons, and foam for different textures for the children to find under the rice. Of course, scoopers and kitchen utensils completed this area.

Green Food Taste Test
This is an idea that I have seen across Pinterest as a way to engage picky eaters…sorry that I don’t have exactly one blog I can credit here. Our sweet peas and I brainstormed green foods and made a mad dash to the local Sprouts to get some green!

We prepared a tray for each child individually in the kitchen. The parents got a tally sheet so that they could write down the food and circle a happy face or a sad face after the child tasted the particular food. If my memory serves me, I think that the idea for the tally sheet was from B-Inspired Mama…we simply made our own instead of using her printable.

Spinach, green pepper, grape, green apple, lime, cucumber, celery, kiwi, pear, broccoli

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
These Wee Little Men are from the Sweet and Lovely Crafts blog – you can find the instructions HERE. As a preschool teacher, I tend to save toilet paper rolls – it was nice to finally put some of them to use!

Check in next week when I share the activities we enjoyed for our Green Thumb playdate from yesterday.

Preschool Playdate: Hungry Caterpillar

Theme: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Play date: February 4, 2016

— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: intro to 5 signs the sweet peas could use during storytime
— Storytime: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
— Unsquiggle activity: butterfly life cycle

STORY TIME
One of our students knows ASL and she and her daughter were kind enough to lead story time. Before we started, they taught the group 5 signs that we used throughout the story. We’ll check in to see if they remember what they learned when we start this week’s story time.

Our “unsquiggle” activity today had the children act out the life cycle of the butterfly. I used three different instruments to represent different segments:

Knocked on a rhythm stick: caterpillar breaking out of it’s egg
Scraped the rhythm stick: caterpillar crawling around looking for food and making it’s pupa
Silence: caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis to transform and change shapes.
Tambourine: Butterfly breaking out of the pupa and flying out in the garden

To add to the activity, we asked the parents to bring a pillowcase and a scarf. The Sweet Peas climbed into their pillowcases (scarf tucked in at the bottom) and were very still inside their “pupa”. As they came out, they used their scarves as their wings, and then fluttered around the room.

This unsquiggle activity was a combination of an activity suggested in The Mailbox
Superbook, and one from THIS blog that offered Hungry Caterpillar lesson ideas.

LITERACY CENTER
Sound Box: We used the letter “C” this week. It’s a tough letter since it doesn’t always have the soft sound. In the future, we will use the letter “K” next to it reinforce the sound we are looking for. Most of the things on the tray had the hard “c” sound, the others were placed on there to be the “no” items.

Our “C” items: Can, Card, Cat, Car, Clip,Clothespin, Comb, Cow, Crown

MATH CENTER
Level 1: Taking inspiration from all the food mentioned in the story, we had the children roll the dice and then “feed” the caterpillar with the number of items that matched the number they rolled.

Level 2: Have the children sort the food into groups. We did fruits, vegetables, breads, desserts, and dairy.

DISCOVERY TABLE
This week we had an activity that provided an opportunity to work on motor skills.
Gross motor skills: hole punching
Fine motor skills: stringing the leaves they punched on a string.

Once the sweet peas were done with their leaves, they could glue them on the “tree’.

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
This was a craft idea I picked up at a story time at the mall. Other ways to celebrate this story are to make thumbprint caterpillars with red and green ink. We also printed out an activity sheet from The Mailbox Superbook for the Sweet Peas to add to the story. The page asks them to draw other food the caterpillar tried to eat into the caterpillar’s tummy.

Preschool Playdate: Australian Animals

Australian Animals
Play date: January 28, 2016

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: used our MAPS book by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski, plus some postcards I had picked up when I visited Australia in 1998.
— Storytime
— Unsquiggle activity
— Poem/Song before we break for Centers: Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree

Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/319966748497620409/

STORY TIME
I could not find the kind of book I wanted for today, so I “wrote” one and presented it to the children on PowerPoint. Inspired by the MAPS drawing of Australia, I tried to imagine what we would see if traveled around the edge of the country. In order to make the book more vocabulary rich, I also incorporated different words synonymous with walking and swimming.

Here it is on YouTube :

LITERACY CENTER
With two “K” animals in the Australian Animal Toob, I naturally gravitated towards the “K” sound for today. We picked up items from around the house and put them on the tray. The Sweet Peas had to find the other items that started with the “k” sound, and put them in our “K Sound Box”. I leave it flexible, so that whether they are spelled with a K or sound like a K, they can go in the sound box. Some of the older Sweet Peas knew the difference between the “c” words and the “k” words, so they were encouraged to play however their Sweet Pea led.

MATH CENTER
For this we pulled out some older toys of Puma’s from her toddler years, plus some of the animals from The Australian Animal Toob. The numbered cards are also from Puma’s preschool days. They were a great tie-in for the Great Barrier Reef! All three levels of play allow for parents to also work on the concept of even and odd numbers

Level 1: Count the animals

Level 2: Match the amount of animals to the number on the card

Level 3: Place the cards is oder

DISCOVERY TABLE
Some animals, some sand…the Sweet Peas really enjoyed today’s center. I picked some red sand as well as some tan sand to use in the center. I had showed the children pictures of the red rock in Central Australia, so this was a fun way to incorporate it into the morning.

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
Inspired by the images on a scarf I bought in Australia, I thought that stipple art would be a good project for the Sweet Peas. It’s actually framed and hanging in the hallway near our art area, so Puma walked the Sweet Peas over to it to show and inspire them before they worked on the art project. We also used the four basic colors most often used in Aboriginal art: brown, yellow, white and red.

We finish our Preschool Playdate with a sharing time: each child that wants to share gets to say what (s)he enjoyed the most about the morning. This morning, the discovery table and the art project got the most mentions.

We close with a good-bye song where children are welcome to give hugs. It helps to set a formal end to the time together so that parents have a clear reason to insist that it’s time to go if they have somewhere to be afterwards.

Come back next week as we peek into our “Very Hungry Caterpillar” play date that we are doing today!

Preschool Playdate: A.A. Milne

Play date: January 21, 2016
Theme inspired by A.A. Milne’s birthday (January 18, 1882)

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: talked about the characters in the series
— Storytime: Tigger’s breakfast
— Unsquiggle activity: “take the ants out of your pants”
— Poem/Song before we break for Centers

Thank goodness for all our dollar store flash cards! I had purchased these when Puma was a preschooler because she adored Winnie-the-Pooh. They came in handy today, after a good dusting off!

Today’s craft and discovery table were inspired by the Sugar Aunts blog. The take-home mask craft was printed from the Surburban Mom blog.

STORY TIME
We got these little books for Puma’s first birthday party so that guests could share a little story time with their Sweet Peas. I selected a story that recounts Tigger’s search for the perfect breakfast. I emphasized that he tasted everything until he found the food that tasted just right to him. We also had our stuffed animal friends help us tell the story!

LITERACY CENTER
We had two options here – both games created out of the cards.

Activity 1: Word Match
It could be played as a memory game, or very simply as a “show and find the match” for the younger children. If they were playing the “show-match” version, I encouraged the parents to emphasize the first letter/sound as their child searched for the matching card.

The second activity was for word correlation. It was a self checking game – if they matched the words correctly, they would form a picture on the reverse side that incorporated the two words that they had matched. This is a great game to reinforce the “go-together” concept, and also to do visual recognition once the items were shown on an illustration.

MATH CENTER
We had two card games for this center as well…

Activity one: Shape or Color Match
This could be played as a “show and find” or a memory game. We added the same shapes in orange if the Sweet Peas wanted to play memory. Otherwise, we stuck to the primary colors to reinforce the colors as well as the shapes for the younger Sweet Peas.

Activity 2: Number Match
The Sweet Peas matched the number to the card with the corresponding number of pots. To further emphasize 1-to-1 correlation, they could pin the “honey bee” clothespins to the card to match the number of pots.

DISCOVERY TABLE
Another use for the “honey bee” clothespins! There are several ways to play:
Level 1: fine motor skills only – celebrate picking up a flower with the clothespin!
Level 2: Pick up flowers of a certain color
Level 3: Name a number to pick up of a certain color. This could be done progressively: take out 1 pink, 2 yellow, 3 blue, etc.,
Level 3a: Name a size of flower to take out…you could also request a certain amount here, too.

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
We made a couple of adjustments to the craft as suggested by Sugar Aunts. We have lots of younger siblings that come to play date, so wiggly eyes were definitely out, and, there was absolutely no way we were going to plug in a hot glue gun for the wings…so we put out markers for the Sweet Peas to draw faces on their “bees”, and we used tacky glue for the wax paper wings. They ones we made as samples and for the centers all held up pretty well; here’s wishing that they survived once the Sweet Peas took them home!

Join us next week when we share all the fun we had today for our Australia theme!

Preschool Playdate: Dragons

Playdate: January 14, 2016
Inspiration: Appreciate A Dragon Day

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— ~~Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)~~ Skipped this week since we got a late start…everybody had to get back in the habit of getting out of the house on Thursdays 🙂
— Discussion of theme: Other animals with scales
— Storytime: Puff the Magic Dragon
— Unsquiggle activity: not necessary since they squiggled through storytime!!
— ~~Poem/Song before we break for Centers~~

STORY TIME

I read selections from this book to the Sweet Peas. Everyone was so excited to see friends they hadn’t seen since December (the Peas+Pods – lol) that it was hard to get everyone settled. Instead of reading the whole book, which is an illustrated version of the song (repetition of chorus every other page!), I read the pages that told the story of Puff’s friendship with Jackie Piper, Jack growing up, and Puff making a new friend. I used the finger puppets to add interest to the storytelling.

I also shared the book pictured below with the moms in attendance as a suggestion for bedtime reading. “My Father’s Dragon” by Ruth Stiles Gannet is the delightful story of an ingenious little boy, an old cat, and the quest to find a dragon. The little boy follows the cat’s instructions to rescue a dragon, that then carries the boy off to new adventures. Jungle animals are introduced in each chapter, and the boy applies creative problem solving to get him one step closer to rescuing the dragon, chapter by chapter. There is a hilarious rescue scene at the end. All of our children have enjoyed this book.

LITERACY CENTER
My favorite part of this center was finding a dragon font HERE. It’s a free download…since we are a preschool group I kept it simple. I am guessing we will find many more applications for this font going forward!

Activity 1: Unscramble
I had both upper-case and lower-case magnets available for the Sweet Peas. They had to organize the letters to spell out, “dragon”. Since the print-out is tucked into a page protector, they could also use a dry-erase marker to trace the upper-case letters on the page.

Activity Two: Trace or Outline
I used puffy sticker letters for a sensory experience. The Sweet Peas could start by tracing the uppercase letters with their finger tips. I added the beans to the table so that they could work on their fine-motor skills, so helpful to help them hold a pencil or other writing/drawing instruments.

MATH CENTER
Can you tell I was puffy-sticker inspired today?? The cards were printed with dragons that alternated designs between the odd and even numbers. I also added green dots to each card so that they children can start seeing the odd/even concept. Finally, we added the puffy foam sticker numbers to the back of the cards so the kiddos could do more tracing. I also added the “dragon’s treasure” for the Sweet Peas to use as counters. Lots of ways to enjoy this Math Center today!

Activity 1: Identify the numbers

Activity 2: Order the number cards

Activity 3: Explore odd and even: point out the cards that show each set and ask the child to tell you what is different about the dots on the odd cards (always one dot left over) and the even cards (all dots are matched).

Activity 4: Trace the foam numbers

Activity 5: Use the “dragon treasure” to count out the amount to match the number on a card

DISCOVERY TABLE
Activity 1: Scale match
This built on the discussion of the theme. I printed out images of animals with scales. It let us talk about familiar animals (crocodile, snake, fish, chameleon) and introduce a couple of new ones (pangolin, tuatara). I printed a matching set of cards with the scales magnified. The Sweet Peas had to match the animal with it’s scales.

Activity 2:
Sensory Play: These are dragons we have collected through the years, plus Toob knights. These could be buried and found, sorted, counted, arranged into epic battles…lots of ways to play with these.

What always fascinates me about the sensory table is that Sweet Peas of all ages enjoy digging in and playing with the rice and whatever is buried in it that week. The toddler guests and my upper elementary helpers are equally entertained whenever we do a sensory activity like this!!

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
Taking inspiration from the Ed Emberley fingerprint books, here are some of the dragons the Sweet Peas and their imaginative Mama Pods created:

I also laid out this Melissa & Doug dragon vs. knight puzzle for the children to enjoy as they waited their turn or they were finished with all the activities:

Join us again next week when we share the activities we use to celebrate the birthday of A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

Preschool Playdate: Winter

Theme: Winter
Playdate: December 3, 2015

— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: I had a bucket full of winter clothes that we pulled out for the children to explore, and we talked about the characteristics of the winter season.
— Storytime: Secrets of Winter
— Poem/Song before we break for Centers: Snowman song

Today’s songs and center ideas were from The Mailbox Superbook

STORY TIME
You can see my review for today’s book HERE. All the kiddos enjoyed this creative look through the forest during wintertime.

If you would like to order your own copy of this fantastic book, you can order one HERE. Orders placed by December 10, 2015 will arrive for holiday gifting at the end of the month.

LITERACY CENTER
This was a print center today. It also offered a fun opportunity for the children to explore negative space. We put out different circle shapes for the children to create a snowy winter scene complete with a snowman. Along with the white chalk for the snow, I also put out wax crayons that show up well on the dark paper.

Level 1: Free expression with the chalk

Level 2: Parents hold the circle and the child traces

Level 3: The child holds the shape and traces the figure onto the paper

MATH CENTER
This is a favorite from when our children were learning numbers. This printable is also from The Mailbox Superbook. We added the numbers for more reinforcement of the written number and 1-to-1 correspondence.

DISCOVERY CENTER
We have accumulated various winter outerwear through the years. We put all of it out for the children to try on. The first part of the center was a gross motor skill: shoveling the “snow” (cotton balls) into the bucket while they were dressed in the winter clothing.

After all the children finished the centers, we had an indoor snowball fight. I had bought the larger snowballs from Hallmark a couple of years ago, and we added all the cotton balls to the center of the floor. The kids were split into two groups and they had fun tossing the “snow” back and forth.

ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
We kept this one simple since our group has so many different ages. We used the doily, glue, and silver glitter. The original idea called for gluing different craft items onto a doily, spraying the whole creation with glue, and then covering the whole craft with glitter.

Today’s favorite activity was definitely the indoor snowball fight!!

Sweet Pea Families

Life beyond the Birth-Day

Tag Archives: Preschool

Preschool Playdate: Earth Day

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Preschool Playdate: Have A Laugh Day

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Preschool Playdate: Butterflies

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Preschool Playdate: Flowers

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Preschool Playdate: Ireland

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Preschool Playdate: Hungry Caterpillar

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Preschool Playdate: Australian Animals

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Preschool Playdate: A.A. Milne

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Preschool Playdate: Dragons

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Preschool Playdate: Winter

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