Ocean Unit (printables for preschoolers)

2 Teaching Mommies shared this wonderful ocean unit for preschoolers with lots of printable activities.  I'll be printing some of these out for ED as we wrap up our ocean unit this next week !

Green Eggs and Ham Preschool Activity

I made this a while ago, but never got around to introducing it to ED.  It was a big hit the yesterday.  Then DD came over and wanted to play.  I had a number of extra eggs and ham without a letter on the reverse side, so they took turns trying to find the letter for their plate. If they got a blank egg or ham it was the other person's turn.

I don't remember where I saw this idea, but it obviously goes with the book Green Eggs and Ham. I don't remember why I chose the letter R--we were probably doing rainbows at that time (as I recall).

You might be interested in this post Preschool at Home: Learning Letters 

Other books-and-activities we did when the kids were little:

• Chameleon Craft (Animal Habitat Unit) based on Eric Carle's book

• Seahorse Art–Based on Eric Carle’s book

• Theme Time: Eric Carle Books
• The Mitten – Free Animal Printable Activities

• 15 Children’s Books Your 4-7 Year Old Shouldn’t Miss!

• 20+ Board Books Recommendations

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page. Don’t forget to sign up for our Homeschool Den Newsletter! ~Liesl


Don't miss our other preschool posts. This page has links to dozens of our Preschool Activities!!
You will find all of these posts over at our new location (homeschoolden.com)

Don't miss our HUGE List of Things to Do with Your Toddler or Preschooler with 100+ Activities (It's a free printable)

Here are a few of our more popular posts:

Preschool at Home: Activities You Can Do with Your 2-4 Year Olds (Fine Motor Skills)

Preschool Math Activities for ages 2 1/2 to 3 1/2

Preschool at Home: Science for 2-5 Year Olds (and Up!)

Your kids might also enjoy the activities in our Dinosaur Packet.

See you again soon over at our new location homeschoolden.com or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! ~Liesl

St Patrick's Day Units -- Free Downloads, Printables, etc.

There are such wonderful resources out there for those of you planning to do some St. Patrick's Day activities with your kids. Here are some of the free St. Patrick's Day units and printables I've come across this past week:

Irish-themed letters (lower and upper case), numbers (0-20) and phonics cards; Powerpoint Explanation about St. Patrick and how he brought Christianity to Ireland

Musings of Me -- St. Patrick's Day Pack (120 pages of activities!)  and also here is her St. Patrick's Day Teacher's Pack

Our World Wide Classroom: St. Patrick's Day Printables


What the Teacher Wants: St. Patrick's Day Mini Unit

Prekinders: St. Patrick's Day Unit ideas -- for example, a Leprechaun Math Grid Game


St. Patrick's Day Unit: from Oopsey Daisy -- with song, finger play ideas, shamrock letters, a maze and more

Beautiful Rainbow, Letter R printables (pictured above and right) from Confessions of a Homeschooler


St. Patrick's Day Arts and Crafts Ideas -- Kinderart



Family Fun -- crafts, games and activities

St. Patrick's Day Literacy Activities: such as a short U, long U sounds sort (pictured to the left) and a Silent "E" sorting activity with a Pot o' Gold both from Sarah's First Grade Snippets

Thank you to all of you who share such amazing resources with all of us!!

DD and I are using a rainbow grid board from p. 57 of the St.Patricks Pack from Musings of Me.  DD turns over an addition card, figures out the answer and places that many objects on her grid board. We kept a few "Hoo Loves Ya" cards (ED's holding it for me in the lower right) to add spice to the game. If someone turns over that card, he/she automatically wins the game!

We love these "Hoo Loves Ya" Addition Cards from Oceans of First Grade Fun. DD uses them almost daily! 

ED and I are playing a Leprechaun grid game from Prekinders.  We take turns rolling the die and place that many objects on our grid board.

We were excited to hear an Irish bagpipe band, watch Irish dancers and things like that gearing us up for the big day on Thursday! Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!  (My Great Grandparents were from Ireland.)

Free Clipart by Phillip Martin

PS -- I was looking for a blank shamrock template and found what I was looking for here (template is pictured at the left).

Also this evening I found some new file folder games that I hadn't seen before at File Folder Fun. I plan to play Shamrock Showdown with DD this week (a place value game).

Fall Fun (Indoor Activities-counting,letters, crafts, etc.)

We've been enjoying fall both inside and out! This post has actually gotten quite long, so I'll post more of our outdoor adventures in a bit.  Here are some of the fall-themed activities we've been up to inside. 

Here are some more activities I've had ready to pull out for ED when I'm working with the older kids. I just want to add that suddenly ED gets it!  She's easily counting up to 7 or 8 while pointing at each object and counted up to 16 (remembering number 4!!) for the first time yesterday.  It's amazing how quickly they jump when for so long she'd count "1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3" or "1,2,3,5,6,7..." never remembering number 4.

I used some leaves I got from a dollar store and wrote letters on them to place on top of the letter card sheet. Those were from that new website I found the other day communication4all.co.uk. ED seems to be enjoying the sandpaper letters at this point too. You can make them yourself, but I bought mine a couple of years ago.

Just a cereal box with slits to "mail" the letters!

It has been several months since we last did an eye-dropper activity.  I cut coffee filters in the shapes of leaves and let ED go at it. Then I had to start cutting up napkins because she wanted to continue on and on and on! She spent at least 30 minutes on this!

Later she added the leaves to this tree I cut out.

I had things out for the girls to make turkeys.  This is what DD came up with!

Here's our (growing) front porch display--finally got the Halloween stuff put away!

I brought out pipe cleaners, fall themed stickers and some styrofoam balls and let them at it. They all came up with such different ideas. EDs were suns, DD made a fall ball and a fall creature and LD made rockets.

 

 

We did a lot of fall activities a few weeks ago too so if you want to see more of our crafts and stuff, click on the FALL THEME on the sidebar to the left.

Snowflake Math (2 1/2 yr old's activity)

Since we had our first frost last week, I guess it's okay to bring in some snowflake-themed math, right?  Actually, I just stopped by a hobby store and saw the pretty snowflake ornaments. Since ED is STILL doing the spider counting, I thought it was about time to change it up for her as she ALWAYS comes running when I tell DD or LD that it's math time.

ED is learning to count out 4 objects (not just saying the numbers and pointing to as many objects as she can!) It's a big step for her (she's 2yrs9mo).

Below there are three different basic counting activities:

We had leftover numbers from putting up mailbox numbers.  Bright and shiny for this activity!  ED simply has to place the sparkly snowflake ornament on the small snowflake that is glued on the paper.

For this activity I made lots of black strips with numbers and crayon-drawn snowflakes.  ED really enjoyed using the snowflake stamp to punch out the snowflakes from the strip.  I told her she could also glue snowflakes onto the strip, but she wasn't interested.

For the last activity I glued very small homemade snowflakes onto Popsicle sticks.  I covered a cereal box with aluminium foil and contact paper and stuck on numbers (again from our mailbox set).  Then I used a knife to put slits next to the number.  ED LOVES LOVES LOVES this activity! She did it over and over.  After a while I held up 4 (and 2 and 3, etc) snowflake sticks and asked her how many there were. She was correct each time!

This had huge appeal for ED and I suspect I'll do the same type activity for matching  letters sometime soon!

Snippets of our Week (for our 2 1/2 yr old)

I've had a hard time getting to the computer this week (more about that in another posting). I have about four posts I've been working on--Snippets of ED's week, LD's week and my week, not to mention posting pictures of DD's completed butterfly lapbook. But now these are rather looonnnggg because it's taken so long to get these posted. So, in reality these are snippets of the past two weeks or so!

First I'd like to share these really cute physical activity cards we've added into our day!

I added these to ED's workbox about two weeks ago and we just love them!  They are balance, dance and gymnastics movement cards and when ED is at loose ends (because I'm focusing too much attention on the other two) these cards are a wonderful break!  We have a stack of about fifty cards and do a half-dozen of the movements suggested. They include things like star jumps, making yourself wide, thin, pointy, jumping around, moving in a zig-zag and more.  At some point I hope to add in some yoga pose cards that I downloaded for free as well, but haven't had a chance to print them out. Click here to go to the free downloads of the physical education cards from sparklebox. There are three sets that I printed out there.

ED in her balance pose!

These past couple of weeks I've brought out some of the girls' toys for ED to play with in our schoolroom.  Along with the play food, I made a little oven out of a box using aluminium foil and black circles covered with contact paper (on the top) and white paper glued straight on the box for the front area.  ED and DD loved this! (We don't have a play kitchen.)

ED has taken great pride in "doing her math."  She's been doing these spider sheets every day for about 10 days now. I cut the sheets apart after taking these pictures, but as you can see she's just tonging the correct number of spiders onto each page (I have to help her identify the number and to count them out).

ED and DD have really enjoyed bingo markers lately.  They do pages and pages at a time. These pages came from Making Learning Fun.

These do-a-dot letters are from http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/

ED and DD loved, loved the spider web activity (with glue and glitter).  They did about twenty!

"I want to do nastics again!"  ED goes once a week for a gymnastics class and wakes up each day hopeful that today is the day! The other kids go to this same gym, but in the evenings when it's considerably more crowded!

I made this felt board last year out paint canvases.  Here are the links showing how I made it:
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-felt-board.html
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/making-felt-board.html
http://thehomeschoolden.blogspot.com/2009/09/felt-board-play.html

My sister sent us these paint cards years ago.  We pulled them out for ED to sort through. 

It had been a while since I set out pin pushing.  I just make designs on construction paper and let the girls go at it. They usually go through about 10-15 each!  This time they are using a push pin, though I often have them use a meat skewer wrapped with a couple of rubber bands.

 I showed the picture above of the food/kitchen play I set out one week. This week I set out the farm animals and have been doing farm-themed things with ED.

I forget where I got this cute shadow matching activity. I lost one of the pages, but that makes it more challenging as there are a couple left over animals.

This sheet is from kidssoup. It's simple one-to-one correspondence where ED had to give each crow a popcorn seed.

Here ED is matching the farm animals with the (free) farm animal cards I printed out. They also have some wild animal cards as well.

Farm Animal Sounds:  This game called Old MacDonald Had a Farm is a great gave for memory and animal sound recognition.  Under each of the hay stacks is an animal baby that needs to find its mama.  On the player's turn she/he chooses a mama animal, pushes it down on the red stand and listens to the sound it makes. Then she/he chooses a hay stack and tries to see if the baby animal is hidden under the hay stack (see the picture below).

We haven't played this yet, but I found cute farm animal bingo sets here:
 http://www.animaljr.com/farm-animal-bingo-printable-bingo-cards/