Roll a Painting

How can you incorporate kicking and painting?

By painting with a ball of course!

Mother Goose Time comes up with some memorable and amazing ways kids can create art- especially in their Invitations to Create which I love!

They sent us a rubber ball (blue) and I added a yellow one for my 1 year old son because all things go in his mouth. MGT also included this amazing inspiration photo and the white cardstock.  

All I needed to supply was the paint and the box. 

Avaleigh and Everett collaborated on their first masterpiece!

I could not be more pleased!

Here are the deets:

Observe the Inspiration photo and ask your kiddo what they notice.

"That's a lot of colors momma! Can I roll my ball in paint like they did?"

Yes.  Yes you can.

Get a container (box lid/ tray/ pan) and tape down a white piece of cardstock.

Roll the tape and fasten down on the backside.  This will allow the entire surface to be painted and you do not have to worry about the picture falling out.

Pick 3 colors of paint. This lesson can turn into a great one on color mixing, so be careful about what colors you choose.  We went with the primary colors which make all colors. 

Dip the ball in paint and start moving your container.

Ewwww and Ahhhhh at the beauty as it unfolds....

Don't panic when the ball bounces out of the tray because your preschooler is so excited and paint trails in a line across your tile floor.  You used tempra.  That stuff washes out with water.

Oh wait... you used acrylic.... yikes!  It'll come off your tile but not your clothes.

Because this was a collaboration, my girl would roll her small rubber ball and then take it out, dip Everett's large yellow plastic ball in paint, and then she placed in on the paper. Then I held his hands as we shook the box. That's why there aren't too many process pictures.  It's hard to take pics with a one year old who can't wait his turn in your lap....lol! 

I love how the large ball left different track lines than the smaller ball- adds variety.

My girl was so excited about this artwork that she brought it as her Show and Tell item to our Classical Conversations co-op the next day!

She shared how she made this masterpiece with her brother and I'm wondering if her classmates are painting their own kick inspired artwork at home.... 

All thanks to Mother Goose Time. 

Kids in the Kitchen Activities

I love having my little sous chef in the kitchen!

Mother Goose Time had some great "In the Kitchen" Activities this week 

from our Health and Fitness Unit.

Here are some of our faves.

(LOTS and lots of pictures... but that's not really anything new to you regular readers ;)   )

Cleaning and Safety:

"Wash your hands and say your prayers because Jesus and germs are everywhere!"

Avaleigh constructed all sorts of germs using our shape manipulatives from MGT.  Not only did she review the names of her shapes, she created some germs of her own.

Everett loved sitting nearby and drew his FIRST picture!!  It's getting framed, yall.

Measure and Pour:

Shape recipes was a super hit!

First we pretended the shapes were certain foods.  The orange pieces were carrots, the hexagons were her mini pancakes (she eats those daily), the green triangles were green beans, and so on.

We then reenacted the stories on the cards.  She did really great with this activity, although she was quite the perfectionist when stacking her shapes on top of her hexagon.... it almost led to a meltdown, but she got it together and kept working at it.  That smile says it all...

Chop and Stir: 

Avaleigh stirred primary colors together to create secondary colors.

She has her color mixing memorized, but it's always magical when you see the colors transform.  MGT suggested we stir colors together in our Invitation to Create.  Just add shaving cream, a touch of paint, some glitter and a spoon and you too can make soup fitting for every Grandparent.  

Just listen to Avaleigh explain hers in the video below... so cute! 

MGT sent us these cute cutting boards and numbered bowls along with a wooden knife.

After rolling out the play dough, Avaleigh lined up her dough on the cutting board, cut the log with her knife, counted the pieces, and then placed them into the corresponding bowl.

Hers what happened thought (to the tune of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie):

If you give a preschooler a cutting board with a picture of a banana, she's going to ask for a real banana. When you give her the banana, she's going to want a plate to put her slices on.  When she sits down with her plate of bananas, your lesson will be over because now... it's snack time. 

Bake and Cook:

After discussing what we bake in our oven (lasagna- her fave, brownies, cookies, potatoes), we set out making an oven from a diaper box.  This was our STEAM acvitity suggested by MGT and I am so glad we did it! She helped glue the foil on, and I mad a handle from 2 unifix cubes and an extra popsicle stick.  Presto Chango!

We then made pizza for our play oven and then danced the Pizza Dough Boogie, Banana Boogie and all the other Dance and Beat songs on YouTube, cuz yall...it's rained FORRRR EVVVVER!!! 

Her moves are a little stiff and totally remind me of Elaine on Seinfeld! Ha!

 

We then got into the kitchen and made lasagna!  She put all her learning into action and helped me make 5 8x8  pans of lasagna (Pioneer Woman's recipe- it really is the BEST)

Last but certainly not least,

Set and Serve:

Our highlight was learning how to set the table and then play Restaurant, aka Serving Friends lesson. I taught her the correct way to set the table and she made name cards for the 4 of us.

Writing the name card for our places was such great practice on writing all sorts of letters.   

MGT sent a food sheet (we cut out the food) and menu for our Serving Friends lesson.  After cutting our food from the food sheet, we placed it in the play kitchen of the playroom which is adjacent to our dining room. We then took turns playing customer (one of us sitting at the dining table) and waitress (one of us going back and forth from the play kitchen to the dining room).   

She calls this game Restaurant and wants to play it everyday.  I love how she used a tray to carry the food- totally her idea!

So many pictures... so many videos....so much fun... and so many memories.

Have fun with your littles in the Kitchen this week!

Happy Cooking!

Preschool Fitness Makes Me Wanna Jump, Jump!

Yall. I am so outta shape.

This month we are studying Health and Fitness with our 

preschool curriculum from Mother Goose Time.

We had JUMP day on Wednesday.

Thursday morning my legs were so sore.

It took me a while to figure out why.... smh...

My calf muscles hurt from all the jumping I did with my preschoolers the day before.

Yall.  MGT wasn't lying about their Fitness Week.

This week we had the opportunity to add one of Avaleigh's best buds, Joseph,  to our homeschool for the day.  I wasn't sure how he was going to react to us doing "school," but he ended up taking his Frog Hat (activity described below) to his real preschool on Thursday, so I guess he loved it!  

Because I knew his rambunctious personality, I decided to skip a few lessons and do JUMP day to suit both his and Avaleigh's needs.  They had so much fun!  

Here are our highlights:

Our day began with a question:

"Do you know any animals that can jump?"

The kids spouted out answers left and right: 

rabbits, kangaroos, grasshoppers, frogs, and even dolphins (thank you Octonauts).

We then did our Community Challenge Activity.  This is where I think I worked out the most...

After catching my breath and all of us sitting down, we revisited the animals that jump.

I told them that they were going to make Frog Headbands to wear today so that they could jump like frogs.  They were pretty stoked!

The directions had us using paint and plastic bags, which would have given us a really cool textured effect, but I decided to whip out our dot blotters.  I did not know how Joseph would handle paint, and my 1 year old was napping, so I went with a less risky paint application. I still think they turned out great!  MGT sent us the frog cut out, band, eyes, and tongue!  Avaleigh worked hard getting the tongue to wrap around her finger so it could be curly.

Are they not adorable?! 

Look at this little animation of them jumping with their frog headbands!

I laugh every time I watch it....lol... 

We took a quick break from jumping to read our suggested story of the day:

Good for Me and You (Little Critter book) by Mercer Mayer.

We also read From Head to Toe by Eric Carle and acted out the movements in the book.

They are arching their backs like a cat pictured below.

After our stories it was time to jump again.  You can tell why I was hurting on Thursday, can't you?

This time we were jumping for letters.  Before we did the activity, I decided for them to practice building our monthly letters, Q, A, and G with our loose letter parts from MGT.

It took Joseph a little while to get used to it, but once he did, he was cranking out those letters.  I loved watching Avaleigh work alongside him.  She helped him here and there, but she was so happy to have someone working alongside her.  

"Does your mom teach you school too, Joseph?" she asked.

"No, I go to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays," he replied.

Love their little conversations.

Back to the Jumping for Letters Activity...

We didn't really jump up so much as jump to.

Those prepositional words make all the difference, huh?

I made them each little lily pads from green card stock that I taped to the floor.  After rolling the letter, they hopped to that letter on the wall.  Here's a minute video of our game in action

(Avaleigh didn't jump at the end of this video due to needing to go to the potty).

After this game, Everett woke up from his nap.

We took the jumping outside as I taught them how to play hopscotch.

The neighbor kid across the street joined in on the fun and helped the Joseph and Avaleigh create a hopping board game made from chalk.  The game is a long path of squares that twist and turn all over the driveway.  The person must roll a die and then hop that number of squares.  Some squares tell you to switch places, some have "lava" in them so you have to leap over the lava spots, and some even have carrots drawn in them because rabbits hop and like carrots. #brilliant 

None of the game was my idea, just all 3 kids.  I love seeing their imaginations work.

All I had to supply was the chalk and foam die. 

(thanks MGT for all those foam dice!)  

We were still hopping on that chalk board game tonight.

I might hurt tomorrow.  I'll keep you posted! 

Happy Jumping!

**By the way, does my title to this post remind you of anything???** hahaha! 

Food Group Activities with Preschoolers

What a week we have had!

We started our new unit, Health and Fitness, from Mother Goose Time and have had a great time studying the 5 main food groups this week: Grains, Fruit, Vegetables, Protein, and Dairy.

Here are some of our favorite activities we did this week.

Grains Day

MGT sent us new monthly manipulatives: shapes.

We hid them in grains (rainbow rice) and dug out the pieces and matched them on a poster.

See how we made rainbow rice here (almost a year later and it still gets used ALL the time).

We made paper play sandwiches, packed them and other play food into a picnic basket, laid out a blanket, and had a play picnic indoors while the rain continued outside.

We even found an easy bread recipe that I had all the ingredients for in our pantry. So we made a loaf of French bread and then made french toast and breakfast for dinner.

Fruit Day

Fruits are parts of a plant that contain seeds such as apples, watermelons, and lemons.

Our color we are studying this month is purple, so we found some purple fruit in our play food stash....not much but some.

Avaleigh traced some of the play fruit and then added details to her front cover of her 

My Little Journal.  She then wrote the letter of what each fruit starts with.  Her "s" is backwards for strawberry, and she wrote a lowercase "g" for grapes.  I loved watching her sound out her words.

The heart is our shape of the month, and MGT sent us these cute fruit baskets and a bunch of foam punch out hearts.  Avaleigh decided to sort them by size, finding all the large hearts first.  We then counted how many were in each container (15 large and 30 small). 

After sorting and counting, she created a pattern with her large hearts.

Lots of math going on with these! 

 

Protein Day

Healthy Plate Game and our Catching Fish game were favorites from this day.

Avaleigh practiced setting a table using her play materials.  I kinda wish I just had gone to the dining room and had her set the table.  She did a great job.  Now I know another daily chore she can do... #momwin

We then played a healthy plate game.  MGT sent us an assortment of food pictures from all 5 food groups.  I cut them out, and then placed one from each group in front of Avaleigh.  She had to place them in the correct spot on her play plate.  

Lunch was perfectly timed following that game.

We went to the kitchen, made her lunch, and talked about what items were from what food group.

Green beans (with a little ranch)-vegetables

Pears- fruit

Cheese Quesadilla- dairy and grains

Turkey lunch meat- protein.

Definitely a healthy plate.

Most of the time, her plate is so much healthier than mine. 

After lunch we had so much fun playing Catching Fish!

All the supplies below came from Mother Goose Time.  I love how they make my homeschool life so much easier!  I hid a bunch of the cutout fish around the living room.  Afterwards Avaleigh drew a number card out of her bag, and then hooked that many fish onto her chenille stem hook.  

It was a lot of fun hunting for the fish.

You could easily challenge your child by having them add numbers of the the fish they caught.

I wanted to do that, but Everett woke up from his nap and ended our game... #momlife.

Maybe we will play again this weekend though. 

Dairy Day

You have to talk about cows when you talk about dairy!

Did you know they have 4 stomachs?!  I feel like I knew that at one point in my life but forgot... or I never knew it.  Let's just pretend I did and forgot.

MGT sent us materials to create our own dairy cow puppet, complete with tail, udders, heart, and 4 stomachs! So cute!

Sorry the lighting is a little dark...we were just about to get some snow when we made this!

Snow... in Texas... and yesterday we were in short sleeve shirts.

We then played a game focusing on prepositional words.

A preposition relates a noun or pronoun to another word.  

Basically think about a ball and a box.  All the places a ball can go in relation to the box are prepositional words.  

For example: The ball is NEXT TO the box.  The ball is UNDER the box.

The ball is ON the box.  The ball is IN the box.  The ball is ABOVE the box.  

So using a cow and our poster, I said prepositional words and my girl had to place her cow accordingly.

Put the cow UNDERNEATH the blue birds.

Put the cow ABOVE someone wearing a helmet.

Place the cow NEXT TO a girl.

STEAM Stations

Last but not least, we had a blast with our weekly suggested steam station...a Vegetable Stand.

I have had this scale for years and have never used it.  So glad I held onto it, because Avaleigh loved measuring the weight of things and comparing them.  Too bad the baby wanted in on the action.  The scale had to be put away but brought back out during nap time.

On Friday, I grabbed the bucket of all her play food, labeled colored construction paper with the 5 food groups, and watched my girl sort.  There were some challenging ones...like cereal or macaroni and cheese.  I just allowed her to place it where she thought it most belonged.

Job well done my girl!

We haven't really done our vegetable day yet.  We had our Homeschool Co-op Day Tuesday, and didn't get to our vegetable day, but stay tuned!

So which activity is your favorite and which one might you try with your little learners?