Preschool: Free Valentine's Day Word Matching Game

ED has been working a lot on letter sounds and simple -at and -an words. I made this Valentine's themed word matching activity for her to work on over the next couple of weeks. She has to attach the clothes peg to the matching word on the wheel. It took some cutting pasting to put it together, but if you'd like to make your own you can download the pages I made here at our new location--Valentine's Day Word Match

On Tuesday, I'll be sharing another Valentine freebie (math) that I made for my 8 year old. Update: This post has links to many of our Valentine's Day Freebies including addition and subtraction pages, multiplication, skip counting and more!! You'll find that post over at our new location, homeschoolden.com

Other Valentine's Day themed activities:

Heart dot-to-dot (1 to 30 found here) (1 to 16 found here). There's also a Valentine candy counting maze at 2 Teaching Mommies.

Math Grid: We'll play lots of grid games where you roll the die and cover that many spaces until someone's board is completely filled. The one we're using is no longer available but you can find a cute Valentine bear grid game over at PreKinders. (Note: they don't have this exact printable available there anymore)

Counting Cards: I have some activities that are no longer available, but there's a similar count and clip activity at 2 Teaching Mommies called Cupid Clip Cards. Nicole at Tired Needs Sleep has very cute heart counting cards. You can find a Valentine's number match up at Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Jill over at Enchanted Homeschooling Mom has a very cute set of 1-12 number cards with Valentine owls.

Storage: Here's how I stored some of the loose bits in ED's workbox. I just stapled two heart together and glued another small heart to the front. Simple, but it helps contain the mess!

Other Letter V and Valentine Ideas: This letter hunt is by Erica over at Confessions of a Homeschooler. She has lots of other great ideas in this post. I really love the dry erase activity center that ED got for Christmas because you can slip other sheets (like Erica's printable) inside as well as the ones it came with. (I see it is currently $14.78 at Amazon.)

Valentine Crafts: There's lots of good craft ideas at Activity Village and at the Crafty Crow.   DD made the penguin and tissue paper heart card to the left for an elderly family friend who is quite ill.

Our Move: On another note, next week, the week of Valentine's Day, our blog will be joining the Parent's team over at Parents.com/blog. (NOTE: I worked under the Parents umbrella for 3 years. Now our blog is at homeschoolden.com) I'll have a link from this address to get you there.  I hope you'll check in on us there!  We've done some great science experiments and will be sharing more about our geography and history activities in the next couple of weeks.

We have lots of free Valentine's Day printables and resources at our new location here:

Check out our Valentine's Day posts (and free printables) by clicking on the button above!

Preschool Activities

While the other kids are working on their things, ED has lots of preschool activities in her workboxes. Here are a few things she's done this past week or so:

We played memory using -at words.

We are going through "My -at book." ED says the initial sound and then I help her smash the sounds together. This is definitely an activity we do together as she is not reading yet.  You can find the "-at book"  here.

ED did a sort with the living and non-living cards I download from Homemade Montessori.

Snowman Two Letter Sight Word Mat by Shelley at Childcare Land.

Cupcake Counting from File Folder Fun

Rainbow Activity: Mixing primary colors

ED and her big sister are always doing crafts of one sort or another. Today she wanted to make a spider's web while a few days ago she insisted we make a mouse!

 We've also been doing lots of geography and science activities for preschool, but I'll save those for another post.

Game: A to Z, Jr.

The girls got a new game for Christmas called A to Z, Jr by Discovery Toys.  What a great game!

The game itself is the perfect age for DD and LD (ages 6 and 8). It's similar to the game Scattergories. Each person rolls the die and picks up a card. Then he/she has to name as many objects as they can for the category they rolled. Categories might include:

• snack foods
• purple things
• stuff you see in a parade
• boring things
• stuff that fits in your pocket

The person covers the beginning sound of each object she/he listed.  To win the kids have to get five in a row while I have to cover my entire board.

We've been also using it for ED's preschool work.  One day we turned over some Memory cards that we have.  We took turns drawing a card and covering the first letter sound of the card we turned over.

Another day she went through some of the alphabet words we have (a cut and paste alphabet printout book I had on hand). I don't have the exact link, but here is something similar that you could print out on cardstock.

Preschool Math: numbers greater than 10

ED is ready to tackle the teen numbers. She often skips some of the numbers after 13. I am using a homemade version of the Montessori seguin board (download the packet I made here).  It's a board with lots of 10s in a row. The child then places a digit over the zero to make 11, 12, 13, etc.
1) First ED counted the number of animals.
2) Then she pulled out the same number of beads. I made a big deal about the group of 10 beads being called her special 'golden beads.' She promptly fell in love with them!
3) Next she chose the proper digit and placed it in the ones column to make it "one ten and one" (for 11), "one ten and two" (for 12) and so forth.

If you're interested in the printout packet I made of the seguin materials you can download them here. You can also buy a proper wooden seguin board (such as this or  this teens and tens board), but I never used them enough with my older two to warrant the price.

Preschool Life

I feel like I haven't written a long post about ED's preschool work in forever. That's because she's been such an integral part of all our latest activities. She did all the owl crafts in our forest unit, did the dissection of the owl pellet. She takes notes and writes out her letters when the kids are taking notes on their science activities. She gets her own lapbook pages and carefully cuts things out.  (I'll be posting about our astronomy unit over the next couple of weeks.) She's right in there doing all our experiments and INSISTS (I say with a smile!) on being a part of everything!  She is right there snuggling with Mom to read during independent reading time. We tend to go over letters and letter sounds while snuggling (not as a separate activity at the moment) because we're spending a lot of time "SMASHING" sounds together (with a dramatic clap... "kuh..."--"Aaaa...ttttt"" "CAT!") All that makes for very dry posts I suppose!

So here is ED diligently writing out the answers on this science page. I tell her the letter (sometimes remind her what it looks like) and she writes them down!

Some of the time ED just finds her own things to do.  At this moment I was playing  Bump-Division with LD.  ED took the erasers and carefully separated them all into different categories!

ED also has her own black notebook. She LOVES coloring pages and I keep that topped up (as much as I can!) with new pages. So, when the others grab their spelling, science or math notebooks, ED also runs over to check out what's new in her 3-ring binder! I love the bright colors she uses. Below is a collage of some of her latest creations.  In fact, just this morning she was coloring the two new "pokemon" coloring pages in the bottom  left of the picture!

Theme Time: Dinosaurs

Two weeks ago, I read The Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark to ED.  This inspired a short themed unit on dinosaurs. Here are a few of the things we did, plus other dinosaur books and dinosaur puzzles that I don't have pictured below.

Last week we were lucky enough to top our theme-time unit off with a visit to the Gray Fossil Site in east Tennessee on our trek to visit Auntie C, Uncle T and the cousins for Thanksgiving at their farm.

Upper - Lower Case Letter Matching from Making Learning Fun.

Time for a scavenger hunt!! I hid dinosaur themed letters all throughout the basement.  ED found the letters and had to find the matching partner (pictured below). I often go to communication4all, Early Learning tab or sparklebox for letters with a certain theme.

The other kids came running and demanded their own scavenger hunts! DD had to find cards and find the card pairs that added up to 12.  LD had division problems and their answers to find and pair up. (Below)

 

General dinosaur play, of course!!

Triceratops Leaf Counting -- from Making Learning Fun

Sight Word Letter Tile Cards from Making Learning Fun. The tiles are from our spelling program -- All About Spelling. We love, love, love that curriculum for DD (6) and LD (8).

Dinosaur Counting Cards from 2 Teaching Mommies.

Dinosaur Egg Counting Cards from Making Learning Fun.

LD pulled out some of his fossils and did some reading.  He found this amazing brachiopod fossil in Grams and Gramps' neighborhood in Missouri.

On our way to Nashville, we happened upon this museum at Gray's Fossil Site. It is about a half-hour off of I-81 (along I-26).  When they were building I-26 construction workers noticed some fossils. It turned out to be a fossil bed rich with fossils from about 4 1/2 to 5 million years ago. It is an active fossil site and has a wonderful interactive museum.

They have lots of displays  like this saber toothed tiger.

They had so many interactive activities and please-touch areas. Here the kids are trying to figure out what types of bones these are.

Uncover the fossils (with paint brushes and your hands).

Bone-puzzles

The kids spent lots of time at this activity, hunting through a tray of pebbles looking for shark teeth specimen.

The kids were impressed by this triceratops.

You might be interested in our 60 page Dinosaur Packet with activities for 3-7 year olds.

Forest Animal Sort Cards

ED's next habitat study is on the forest. I made a set of cards for the kids to sort through. We'll be sorting them by
   vertebrates-invertebrates
   and also into the five animal kingdoms:
  ( fish), amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

Since we live in the woods I used a lot of the photos I've taken in the past year or so and supplemented them with some from wikimedia commons.

Oh and by the way, I didn't include any fish in this sort--I did include a photo of crayfish that LD found in the creek that runs through the woods behind our house. They are crustaceans (related to the lobster) and would obviously be sorted into the invertebrate group.

If you would like a copy of the Forest Animal Sort Cards that I made, just click here.

P.S. I realized when I sorted these with the kids today that I didn't have the three frog and toad pictures I had intended to include. I added those in this afternoon and there is now a new file link above.