H is for Heart

This week being Valentines week, I decided to teach H is for Heart.  There are tons of craft ideas out there for hearts and valentines so it was actually a task to narrow down the ones I wanted to do. 

We started with a heart sticker H

Then we did this Heart memory matching game.  The girls had to match upper and lowercase numbers.  Faith LOVED it and Rebekah did really well but got bored after making about 2 or 3 matches.

I got a heart punch from Michael's and used it to make this pattern activity for Faith and a sorting activity for Rebekah (along with the heart mold from Dollar General).

I also used the heart punch to do this paint shake.  A little paint in the container, fill it with the paper hearts and then shake, shake, shake.  After the paint was sufficiently mixed I had the girls glue them on a separate sheet of paper in the shape of H h.  I found these and some of the other activities on NTFFC.

I filled some medicine droppers with paint and had them dot one half of a folded heart.  The concept was a great one but the medicine droppers were pretty hard for them to use.  They liked the symmetry of pressing the heart together to make the same design on another page though so it was a good craft. 

 

We ended the week with Musical Hearts.  I wrote some actions on these foam hearts and placed them in a circle.  I played the Sabre Dance while the girls ran around the circle.  When the music stopped they had to do the action written on the heart nearest them.  We did this about 3 times a day all weekend long and it was a great energy release!

 

Manna from Heaven

We read Exodus 16 for Bible story this week and made Manna from Heaven using this recipe and template :

10 Plagues

Update to my last attempt at this Bible story.

We sang The Plague Song and did one plague each day for 2 weeks.  I used visuals from 1+1+1=1 and I think the combination of the song, the pictures, and the crafts helped the girls remember each plague.  I was really amazed at how much they retained.

Plague #1, red food coloring into water using small medicine droppers:

#2, paper plate Frogs painted green using the girls' handprints as the legs

 #3, Lice (the singular is louse which I learned this week).  We used a brown paper bag and pipe cleaners to make these lice.

 

#6, Boils and sores to make you sick.  I used medical tape to put red playdough boils on the girls' skin.  We also made red milk for dinner.  

#7, Hail.  I was also planning on letting them throw ice outside but it was way too cold!

#8, Locusts.  We watched a BBC video on locusts and then made locusts legs.  Later that night I poured cereal on the floor for a sensory exercise on locusts.

 

#9, Darkness.  The girls did a simple light/dark paper craft and then I turned off all the lights and covered their heads with towels and we walked around in the dark for a while :)

S is for Snowman

Rebekah really loves snowmen so I decided to start our Letter of the Week back up with S.

We started with Snowmen at Night (also the title of a book for the week):

We focused on circles this week for our shape.  Here is Rebekah doing a sorting exercise with them and Faith is cutting circles out.

This mini-marshmallow snowman was by far their favorite :)

Pre-School Schedule

The current Pre-School schedule at the Theising Academy for Young Ladies (Faith 3 1/2, Rebekah 2):

Pledge/Calendar/Letter intro - 10 min
Bible story and craft (craft done 2-3 days/week) - 15 min
Music and worship - 10 min
Station Activities* - 10-15 min
Letter craft - 15 min
Reading - 10 min

Friday nights/Saturday morning are also family night and/or a sensory activity centered around the letter or Bible story we are doing that week

*Station Activities:
Faith
Monday - Letters (letter hunt, write the letter worksheet)
Tuesday - Alphabet (reiew, beginning sounds, missing letters)
Wednesday - Numbers (clothespin match, mazes, review, missing numbers, collage)
Thursday - Kumon Letter / Number and Handwriting
Friday - Reading (sight words, first words, see, spell, write, word search)

Rebekah
Monday - Letters (letter hunt, write the letter worksheet)
Tuesday - Alphabet (magnets, cookie cutters & playdo)
Wednesday - Numbers (review, collage, puzzles)
Thursday - Coloring
Friday - Matching and Sorting activities

Letter of the Week - F (Football)

We did F this week and since we are smack in the middle of fall, we decided that Football was a great F word!  We made this football craft and the girls really enjoyed it!

 

 

Our next craft was a football field.  Each girl got a green piece of construction paper and I put 9 glue lines on it for them to place white strips of paper.  We counted each line as we went.  Then they got to put their own end zone colors on there.  I also had some number stamps for them to play with.  They enjoyed just stamping and we didn't worry too much about yard line identification :)  We have a VT football field mouse pad which I used as a model.  The girls really did like this craft as well.  In the future I think we'll try and take them to a football game for a family night!

Our books for this week were T is for Touchdown which we all really enjoyed and of course Baby Hokie Bird's First Football Game which provided ample opportunities to learn Old Hokie!

Letter of the Week - P

I know, I know, F comes after E... Faith told me this several times this week but I decided to break out of my conformity shell and not work strictly in alphabetical order.  It is fall and the pumpkins are growing bigger and bigger; going to the pumpkin patch with our LIFE Group over the weekend seemed like a great family fun event to anchor our P is for Pumpkin weeks!  I am attempting to do pumpkin for both weeks of P... we'll see how pumpkin'd out we get!
The first craft we did was a messy one: cutting open a pumpkin to get out all the seeds which we saved for a subsequent craft.  I then roasted and pureed the remaining pumpkin flesh and used it in a pumpkin cake during the week. 

We washed and dried the seeds for our next craft, a pumpkin seed pumpkin. I didn't tape the seeds down like the directions say (because I didn't re-read them!) so we just started out trying to paint the seeds.

That did not work out so well.  We then moved to the painting with you hands method and that was much more fun and exciting and it got the job done!

We let them dry all day and then after dinner I pulled them off the cardboard and the girls glued them inside their pumpkins.  They turned out really cute and it really was a fun craft!

 

Our family fun day was a trip to the pumpkin patch.  It was awesome weather and a great time for the whole family.

We did take two short pumpkin breaks during the weeks to do color days.  First we did pink.  Faith is currently in love with a series of books called Pinkalicious by Victoria Kann and everything is better in pink so the pink day was super fun for her!  We started with our standard pink collage...

Then I had the girls mix white and red paint to make pink and paint on their collage.  Faith remembered that white and black made gray from our E is for Elephant week!  She really enjoyed painting with her own pink paint.



 It was back to pumpkins again to decorate our pumpkins from the patch.  We painted them with glue and then sprinkled glitter on them.  Next time I will use the glitter shakers rather than individual packets.  The girls loved it!

 For our purple day we mixed red and blue to make purple paint and dipped the ends of some old wine corks into it in order to make "grapes."  Incidentally we found Purplicious by Victoria Kann this week at the library!

We followed that up with mixing blue and red food coloring into a jar of milk to make purple milk.  The girls drank it with dinner and loved every second of it!

Our final pumpkin craft was a variation of this one, without the face.  The girls really had fun with this one, I am sad I forgot to get a picture of the end result :(

 

Our pumpkin books during these two weeks were Its Pumpkin Time and Patty's Pumpkin Patch, the later being the girls' favorite of the two. 

 

Letter of the Week - E

I decided to do E for 2 weeks.  The first week we focused on Elephants.  Our first craft was an adaptation of several letter ideas that I found.  Frank has such a creative streak, sometimes I think he should be the pre-school teacher :)

We made the top of the E into the trunk, so it was longer and curved outward. The girls painted them gray, added the eye and ear, and then we danced them around to our Elephant Song. We also made a paper plate elephant ....

 

 

One of my favorite elephant crafts was the handprint elephant.  I had the girls cut the grass out first and then we mixed the paint and did our book time while it was drying and then glued on the ear and eye.



 

I honestly was not that overly excited about either of our books for elephants.  Our library didn't have most of the ones I was looking for so I guess I was lucky to find the ones I did :)  We read Babar's Counting Book and Elephants: A Book for Children.  The latter book was certainly informative and had great pictures but more words per page than really works for a 2 and 3 year old!  My plan was to go to the zoo and look at the elephants for family day but Frank ran in a triathlon Saturday morning and we decided it was way better to support him!

 

Now, onto eggs!

Our first egg craft was this lower case e in an egg.  Faith loves cutting so I had her cut the crack of the egg and then we put the craft together.

 

Next we made some Egg Carton Es

 

Rebekah and I hard boiled some eggs and then we had some egg races with Daddy one night in the evening.  Outside games are always a hit and this one was really fun for everybody (except Lady who was barred from eating the eggs!)

 

I have been saving my egg shells for the last 2 weeks in order to do this sensory craft.  I had them crack the shells with their hands and then we glued them to an egg.  The weather turned cold the night we did this activity, hence the knitted hats and shorts :)  The girls liked this activity certainly but it wasn't the same level of enthusiasm as some of the other sensory crafts we've done.  Perhaps if they were more into destruction it would have gone over with more exuberance but I'll take their mild manner void of the need to brake things :)

 

 One of the activities I had the girls do while they were watching each other at gymnastics this week was some egg letter matching.  Faith did really well with this but I think next time I will also use 2 egg cartons and put the letter at the bottom of each space so she has a specific place to put the now completed egg.

The last awesome egg activity we did was this naked egg experiment.  The girls were certainly intrigued by this and it will be a very cool thing to do when they are a little older as well.

Our egg books this week were Big Egg and First the Egg which both girls had memorized by the end of the week they loved it so much!