Preschool- Pirates Week 1

Hello!  Do you have a little pirate in your house, too?  Little Guy received some Jake and the Neverland Pirates toys for Christmas, and has been loving playing pirates, watching pirates, and learning about pirates ever since.  In trying to keep preschool in line with Little Guy's interests, we did a pirate theme!  Little Guy is 42 months old.

I found a lot of great printables with pirates.  This first one came from 123 Homeschool4Me.  This activity was a great listening exercise for Little Guy, as he had to follow the directions to place the objects in the correct spot.  It also reinforced positional words, like over and under.

This number count and clip also came from 123 Homeschool4Me.  It was great counting practice to 10 for Little Guy.  He needed some support to count past 7, but he is getting better and better at his one-to-one correspondence.

I found some great beginning sound sheets at The Relaxed Homeschool and Homeschool Creations.  Little Guy really enjoyed these sheets and listening to the sounds at the start of the words.  He also really enjoyed using a pencil to circle or cross out the pictures!

This was a fun counting and number recognition activity from Homeschool Creations.  Little Guy pulled a number from a small bowl and then had to put that many parrots flying over the pirate!  As you can see, he was quite proud of himself!

This next activity was a real world activity- sorting silverware.  Grandma A had found this silverware tray at a garage sale this summer, so it was the perfect item to use for this activity.  Little Guy sorted the silverware a couple of times, including separating tablespoons/teaspoons and small forks/big forks.

The next part of the activity was completely him!  He wanted to count all the pieces of silverware.  He laid them out on the floor and counted them!  It was so neat to see him take ownership over this activity and turn it into something he wanted to figure out.

We needed to do some alphabet practice, so I put the magnetic alphabet into our sensory bin, currently filled with peas and beans.  I also put in a dozen gold doubloons- I had to stick with the pirate theme a little!  As Little Guy found the letters, he would name them and then stick them to the cookie sheet that had the alphabet written on it.  I think this was his favorite activity of the week, as he came back to it several times!

We had some gold doubloons, so we also needed a treasure chest to put them in.  I saw this pin on Pinterest and had to try making our own treasure chest!  I only had egg cartons with a dozen spots in it, so we used that and painted it brown.  I added yellow stripes later.   This was the perfect treasure chest to use as he pulled the doubloons out of the sensory bin, especially since it had the correct number of spots!

We'll have more pirate activities next week!  For additional ideas, check out my Pinterest board!

Follow Stacy's board Jake the pirate activities on Pinterest.

What have you been up to in preschool recently?

Busy Bag Exchange

Have you hosted or participated in a busy bag exchange before?  I never had, but wanted to try it out!  I am part of a pretty active mom's group, and we do most of our communications on Facebook.  So I posted, asking if anyone was interested in doing a a swap, hoping maybe 8-10 moms would be interested.  To my surprise, 17 moms indicated interest!

To keep it organized, I created a Google doc with all the participants names and what activity they were bringing.  I also wrote a few guidelines.  Some of the ideas for guidelines came from Second Story Window.  Here are the guidelines for our swap:

• Please put your items in a ziplock bag and label the outside with the name of your activity.
• Please include a set of directions in your bag.  Even if it seems really self explanatory, please write a sentence or two description on how it can be used.
• Please keep the cost of each bag around $1 or under.
• You do NOT need to laminate any papers included.  If possible, print any papers on cardstock so they will last.
• Put together the quality kind of bag you would want to receive in return. This is really important to remember! Of course we want to be cheap but we also want the activity to hold up to toddler use.
• If you cannot attend our swap night, please give your bags to me or another participant before the swap night.  We will include your bags in the swap and get your new activities to you!

How did it turn out?  It was a huge success!  All the moms were excited to participate.  16 moms sat around my living room on a Saturday morning, enjoying some time catching up and exchanging a variety of activities!

I was so pleased with the variety of activities and the quality of the bags!  Here are the bags that were swapped!

Animal counter sorting using tweezers

Button lacing and number practice from See Vanessa Craft

Clothespin color matching from Rookie Mom

Make a felt pizza

Copying shapes and patterns with yarn on felt from Momtastic

Wiffle ball lacing and weaving from See Vanessa Craft

Fish and frog sorting and patterning

Pom pom push

Lacing cards

Velcro craft sticks to make shapes and letters

Button snake from Motherhood on a Dime

Counting with googley eyes

Clothespin number wheel from Money Saving Mom

Shape memory from Delighting in Today

Felt roads

Crazy straw weaving from Powerful Mothering

Make a felt sandwich

Caterpillar counting from Powerful Mothering

If you have been thinking about hosting or participating in a busy bag swap, I highly recommend it!

To see more busy bag ideas, check out my Pinterest board.

Follow Stacy's board Busy bags for a busy boy on Pinterest.

Preschool- Pumpkins Week 2

More pumpkins in January!  This was our second week of our pumpkin unit.  Be sure to check out week one, too!

For this activity, I wrote out the word pumpkin really big on piece of construction paper.  First, Little Guy had to identify all the letters.  Then, using tweezers, Little Guy had to move the candy pumpkins to the letters, covering the letters up.  This activity took a bit of time, but he really enjoyed doing it, and especially enjoyed getting to eat one pumpkin when he was done!

Another fine motor activity he did was spooning.  I place some orange glass beads in a bowl and he had to use his spoon to transfer them to the pumpkin tray.

An art project we made was a pumpkin pocket. This idea came from Fantastic Fun and Learning.   Little Guy painted one and a half paper plates orange.  Then he laced them together to make a little pocket.  We added a green pipe cleaner to the top as the stem.  I'm sorry I don't have a picture of his completed pocket.

Our next activity was counting and number recognition.  I had some foam pumpkins, on which I wrote one number, from one to six.  Little Guy had to put that many little pumpkin erasers on the foam pumpkin.

Another counting activity we did involved a die.  Little Guy would roll the die, count the dots to see what number he rolled, then put that many pumpkin erasers into the mini ice cube tray.  This was fun, as we could take turns rolling or Little Guy could play all by himself.

Since Little Guy enjoyed this activity so much from last week, we had to bring it out again this week!  We had a fun time singing "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate" and taking the pumpkins off and on!

This next activity was a great patterning activity.  Using the orange and green wooden beads that I painted for last week, Little Guy had to put them on a pipe cleaner.  But instead of simply stringing them, he made an AB pattern.  I helped him to get started with the pattern, but by the end he was putting them on in the correct order by himself.  He was very proud of himself when we has done!

Our last activity was a ring toss from Inner Child Fun.  We picked out some pumpkins that had some tall, straight stems specifically so we could do this.  I took some rings off of canning jars and Little Guy had to toss the rings onto the pumpkin stems.  This actually was a lot harder than I thought it would be!  Little Guy did manage to get a few rings on, but the ring tossing action is much different than the throwing action we usually use, so we gave up after a little while.

So that wraps up our Pumpkin theme!

Check out my Pinterest board for more ideas!

Follow Stacy's board Pumpkins and Halloween on Pinterest.

Preschool- Pumpkins Week 1

Pumpkins in January?  Yes, that's right! Well, kind of.  This was for the pumpkin unit we did way back in October, but I never shared with you!  So, here it is now!  Little Guy is 39 months old.

Little Guy loves puzzles.  This was a 24 piece puzzle, so he had a little trouble working on it.  I helped to guide him by helping him to see the different vegetables in the pictures.

This was the first time we used count and clip cards.  It is great for one to one correspondence and number recognition.  Theses are from the Gift of Curiosity.

This may have been the favorite activity of the unit.  Using a hammer and some pin nails, Little Guy hammered some buttons onto a foam pumpkin.  This was great fine motor practice and took a lot of concentration on Little Guy's part.  I found these foam pumpkins last year at the dollar store.

What pumpkin unit would be complete without some Halloween printables?  We used do-a-dot printable, some cutting practice, and a pumpkin/ jack-o-lantern sort.  The cutting practice and sorting is from the pumpkin pack at 1+1+1=1.

We've been continuing to practice our knife skills by cutting grapes.  Little Guy really enjoys "preparing" his own snack.

We continue to practice spooning.  Little Guy had to spoon pumpkins (orange and green wooden beads) from one bowl to another. He's getting pretty good at this!

I made this clothespin pumpkin activity to go with the song "5 Little Pumpkins sitting on a gate." This idea came from Still Playing School.  In addition to moving the pumpkins and singing the song, I also found a short animated version of the song on YouTube that Little Guy enjoyed watching and acting out.  This was probably his other favorite activity of the week.

Need more pumpkin ideas?  Don't worry, more are coming soon!

In the meantime, visit my Pinterest board.

Follow Stacy's board Pumpkins and Halloween on Pinterest.