Preschool Rodeo Learning Activities

Down here in Texas, it is Rodeo season. 

The Houston Live Stock Show and Rodeo starts at the end of February and goes through mid March.

We actually have a rodeo in our community coming up the last weekend of March and I cant wait!

In my opinion, the best part of the rodeo is "Mutton Bustin'" where preschoolers and early elementary kids ride on a sheep!  It's pretty amazing.

So why am I telling yall about the rodeo?

Well our new unit of Mother Goose Time, Desert Discovery, started

 and the first week is all about the rodeo!

Cowboy boots, cowboy hats, lassos, horses, and experiencing a rodeo are all our first week's lessons, and it was a ton of fun.

Let me share what our Horse Day looked like and the fun my preschooler and I shared together.

After completing our circle time calendar, I showed my girl the Horse Topic Poster and asked her, "What do you know about horses?"

She actually knows quite a bit (thanks to Spirit on Netflix)

Her response went on and on, "They have 4 legs, a mane, eat hay and grass.  They need water and can jump really high.  You can ride them.  You need a saddle but sometimes you don't."

We then talked about the letter N, its' sound, and built the letter with our loose letter parts.  I then challenged Avaleigh to use her letter N pointer and go around the room finding the letter N. 

She had so much fun finding the Ns around the room. 

When she was done, she colored her Nn Letter Book page.

My girl loves to color, and she especially loves markers. She has been working really hard lately on staying in the lines and even creating patterns in her coloring.  

Avaleigh was really into our N activities and wasn't really wanting to stop, so I took out the 

My Little Journal from day 5 and opened it up to the front to see what MGT planned for the N page.

I have to tell yall, this N page activity is PERFECT to lead into the Counting Horses math activity, which is what we did following the N page.

Instead of small sticks and twigs, we used Wikki Stix.  Love those things! They stick to paper by pressing them down, and you can peel them off and cut them if needed.  They bend easily, and instead of using them to make an arena, Avaleigh used them to build the letter N on her page... after she drew herself of course.

Then came our favorite Horse activity for the day: Counting Horses.

Using our Connecting Cubes (supplied as our monthly manipulative this month) as horses and blocks that have been in my family for 3 generations as fence, we built a corral to hold our horses.  It started with me telling Avaleigh a number (7).  She then counted out that many horses (cubes). let them fall from her hands, and however they laid, we built a block fence around the horses.

Then I told her I was going to hide 14 (our monthly number) horses (yellow blocks) in the living room while she built a large fenced in corral.  Once I returned, she had to go and find all the lost horses and put them in the corral.  She loved searching for the lost horses, and we used our number card for more one-to-one correspondence practice.

We even did the "Challenge" activity of hiding 20 cubes (horses) to find and count.  

We did this activity at least for 30 minutes, and probably could have gone longer, but I knew my son's nap was almost over.  Baby's Naptime = Preschooler's Learning Time. 

20 horses have been found and are safe in their fence.

We ended our horse day playing Horseshoe Toss.

This game not only worked on coordination but also identifying Uppercase and Lowercase N. 

MGT sent us the star punchouts and the horseshoes too!  So much fun!

Yall, she was really good at horseshoes!

I am so grateful MGT thinks of so many details to make learning fun!

School time is something we both love to do together and I know a huge part of that is because of the work and effort MGT does in creating these activities and games.

I hope you have fun learning with your littles! 

And if you can, get to a rodeo!