W is for Wolf: Retelling of The Three Little Pigs

Hi! I'm Leslie- a homeschooling momma to an almost 5 year old girl and 18 month old boy.  The 2 are as different as night and day.  I share our adventures here to both inspire learning at home and chronicle our lives, because honestly, I never started the baby books and my kids will just have to look back on their childhood through this blog... ha! #keepinitreal

We have been having so much fun with our A to Zoo theme this month from Mother Goose Time!

The last 2 weeks have been non stop busy as our church has prepared for VBS, but being able to pull a bag of our little bus box out, and make some memories with my kids while they learn, is so wonderful!

On this specific day, we went over Wolves and X-Ray Fish.

My girl started her day by making the letters X and W from loose letter parts.

You could use sticks, buttons, blocks, paper strips, or whatever you have to practice making letters without even picking up a writing instrument. 

I have had this amazing book called Wild Animals ABC: An Alphabet Book  

by Gary Fleming for years waiting for my children to reach this age.

The book has rhyme and illustrations that are beautiful.  The W and X days happened to match our animals of the day! Perfect!

My preschooler is recently obsessed with the story of The Three Little Pigs.

We have read multiple versions of it.   Her personal favorite is James Marshall's retelling.

However, everytime we turn on Netflix, she asks to watch the old Walt Disney version.  

When she saw the puppets for our Make and Play craft from MGT, she quickly cut them out, and created her own 3 Little Pig scene.  She then told me her version, incorporating elements from both the Walt Disney version (the wolf dressing like a sheep), and the classic tale.   I didn't even have a chance to read the version MGT sent us! Ha!

I am so glad MGT sent us these materials!

I might have never caught her retelling this and I love all the details she shared in her story.

Our month of A to Zoo Animals is coming to a close, but next month is the box I have been waiting for for THREE YEARS....

the Art Studio!

Can't wait to share with yall all the awesomeness that is in that box! 

Butterfly Metamorphosis Activities for Preschoolers

Our butterfly adventures ended this week.  We released our butterflies at the end of our last day.  It was the perfect way to end our week on Metamorphosis and our unit on Bees and Butterflies.
I shared the other week some egg-celent ideas (pun intended cuz I'm cheesy like that) from
Mother Goose Time as we studied the Egg in our Metamorphosis week.
 But here are our faves from the rest of the week of Metamorphosis.

Caterpillar 

Using our attribute blocks, my girl would roll a shape and we built the longest caterpillar we could naming each shape as we added to the body.  Her favorite activity though was building the caterpillar from the cornstarch noodles (amazing! check them out if you haven't).  MGT sent us a straw to make legs out of, but it would not stab into the noodles easily.  So I cut up some pipe cleaners and those worked great.  

We then took turns hiding the caterpillar and the other pretended to be a bird as we attempted to find the caterpillar.  It led to some great talks about predator and prey.

Chrysalis
On our Chrysalis day, we discussed the letter "X".  It was a great letter for that day, since we could make an X with our arms and hold ourselves pretending to be a chrysalis.
We made a pattern of the life cycle (I added the egg to our pattern cards below) of a butterfly, and my 4 year old drew it out.  I was so proud of her drawing!

Butterfly
It's so hard to teach her with my 16 month old who wants to be into ALLLLL of the things.   Lately I have been trying really hard to see what MGT has planned and how I can incorporate him into her lesson.  Our butterfly letter game was the perfect opportunity.  My son could throw the cube with our letter cards in it, and my daughter could use the butterflies and attach them to the flowers.  Doing this outside even made it more fun for both of them!  I try to take our learning outside as often as I can.
They both had a BLAST doing this activity.

Our butterfly day ended with us releasing our newest pets.
One amazing thing that happened was when we brought the carrier outside all the butterflies started to spread and open their wings.  They never looked like this indoors.  It is amazing how God designed them to know what to do.  Some flew off quickly, others had to be coaxed, and one even crawled onto my girl's finger to be released.  Definitely a cool experience for her and me.

What a great month of learning!  I loved how we could go outside and see all the bees and the butterflies around us.  In May, we will be studying Bubbles, Boats and Floats, and I will try to share a daily adventure on my FB page, so if you haven't followed me there, check it out :)


Happy Learning!

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?

Preschool Culture Study: Jewelry

Africa is an amazingly beautiful continent.  It is so rich in the beauty of its' people, their culture, and the animals and scenery of the land.

It's not every month that you get to go on Safari, but that is just what my preschooler and I are doing through our preschool curriculum from Mother Goose Time.

Last week I shared how to prepare to go on a safari, and this week we ventured into the African Grasslands to get a closer look at the African Culture.

On this particular day, we looked at how native people dress- specifically focusing on jewelry and the beadwork African tribes make and wear.  It is exquisite and the perfect way to teach patterns.

Being inspired by the beautiful beadwork in our photo, my preschooler decided she would make a bracelet. Using a pipe cleaner and pony beads (both provided by MGT) my daughter practiced her math skills.  She created her own pattern, counted the beads in her pattern, then transformed her line of beads into a bracelet.
(Twist a loop at the end of the pipe cleaner, make your pattern, then put the end of pipe cleaner through the loop and twist to close)

Our jewelry session did not end there.

Next, she made and African necklace during our Make and Play activity.

Using paints, a paper plate cut to become a necklace, and qtips, you too can create your own African inspired jewelry.

How can you incorporate beads into reading?

MGT does not disappoint- make word "bead" bracelets!

We read through our I Can Read book, looking for and underlining "-it" words.  

I showed her the "-it" band and told her it said "it" and we would use it to make words.

I then asked my girl, "Avaleigh, can you spell the word "fit"?"

  It was so cute hearing her make the first letter sounds to decide which bead would be placed on her arm.

  It didn't take her long to spell all the "-it" words provided from the paper bead rings,
so I decided to challenge her.
"Avaleigh, what letter would you need to make the word "mit"?"
" Mmmmmm mit.  Mmmmm.... M!"
"That's great!  What about "kit"?"
"Kkkk like kitten.   K!" (I was so surprised that she didn't pick "c"!)
"Wow! Great job sounding that out.  What do you think you would need for the word "quit"?"
"Qqqqq like queen.  Q!"
Even though she didn't say the "u,"
(and I didn't expect her to- if she did I would have dropped to the floor in shock)
I was so impressed that she recognized the "q" sound!

Who knew you could incorporate so much into a day of making jewelry!
Now onto learning about African homes, food, music and migration!

Happy Learning my friends!


Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest for more great ideas!