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!

Cookie Day Fun for Preschoolers

I don't know about you, but when I think of Christmas, one of the first things that comes to mind is cookies!  That smell of chocolate chip cookies fresh outta the oven... 

or the shapes of all the sugar cookies... or the rainbow colors of all the sprinkles... 

cookies are definitely a holiday tradition around here.

As we were studying the Indoor Sights and Sounds this week with Mother Goose Time, we had a day completely devoted to COOKIES!

Check out what we did and make your own COOKIE Day at home over the holidays! 

Storytime/Reading:  If You Give A Mouse A Cookie

Math: Working on pattern making and shape recognition creating Cookie Shapes with our manipulatives from Mother Goose Time 

(have your kiddo make "cookies" out of cut up shapes,blocks or any pattern blocks you have at home)

Creative Arts: Creating Cookies with Puffy Paint Icing!

Mix equal parts glue and shaving cream and put into a sandwich bag to make your puffy paint icing.

Create cookie shapes and cut out.  We traced a few cookie cutters we had and also cut out plain circle shapes for cookies.

Add your icing aka puffy paint mixture (it really looks like royal icing) and REAL sprinkles! 

I love that MGT sent us rainbow sprinkles!

Keep decorating your cookies until you have a paper plate full to play and share with others.

You can't have a COOKIE Day without making REAL cookies, so that is just what we did!

We received a beautiful gift from my pastor and his wife which included Sugar cookies in a jar... so we made them!  I have never made homemade sugar cookies in my life.  I learned a few things.

1. sugar cookies puff out and spread the thicker they are.

2. the dough is not meant to be super sweet- that is what the icing is for

3. it's a messy process... rolling out dough, but cutting the shapes lets my inner Tetris queen come out.

4.  Sometimes toy giraffes like to watch you make sugar cookies... see pic below. #creepers 

5.  Cookies are meant to be shared and these are perfect for sharing once the icing sets.

 What are those shapes you might be asking?

Gingerbread man, candy cane, stocking (upside down) and a snowman (he really puffed out).

There was also a bell shape that turned out to be more circular than bell shaped after the cooking process. But my girl didn't care, and she did a fabulous job cutting the butter into the dough and mixing up the wet ingredients. Her cookies turned out really tasty too and look at that sprinkle coverage on that gingerbread man!  Never can have too many sprinkles.

Those are going to the mailman. He's been working some serious hours these last few weeks.

We hope you too will have a cookie day at home and share it on our Facebook page!

So what cookies are you baking this holiday season and who are you sharing them with?

3 Shape Activities for Preschoolers

We have had lots of fun with shapes this month.

 This month Mother Goose Time sent us Tangram Shapes as our monthly manipulative along with tons of activities and games.  Many of these activities revolved around Friends and Feelings- our theme for this month.

You can easily do these activities at home by cutting out simple shapes from card stock or construction paper.

Here were our top 3 Activities with our shapes this month:

Feeling Faces

Using some chalk, my girl drew an oval on her table.  After spinning the spinner, she then recreated that face with the shapes. With older kids you can ask, "What is that face feeling?  How do you know?"  She could tell me each emotion the face was showing when I asked.

Feeling Shapes Sort

We had 4 shape cards with faces on them.  Each face had a specific emotion- the triangle smiled, the rectangle frowned, the parallelogram was mad, while the circle looked surprised.  I piled her shapes in front of her and she began sorting them.

After sorting the shapes, she then started creating designs with them.  I was really impressed as I watched her create.  I could see her making patterns and really thinking about what she wanted to do.  I snapped a pic of her designs down below. 

Pattern Making: What's Next?

This month we have been focused on an AB pattern, and our pattern making game came with 4 strips with premade patterns on them.

Our strips had an AB pattern (green), ABB (blue). and ABC (red). and a create your own (purple).

There is so much reasoning and understanding that goes on when creating patterns and especially making your own.  Avaleigh has just recently become interested and is really understanding patterns, so we try to squeeze in pattern making whenever we can.

I hope you enjoyed seeing some ways to help your learner have fun while learning about their shapes.  If you would like to see more learning ideas, be sure to like our Facebook page. 

 I will try to do a GIVEAWAY on there soon <3.  

What are some of your favorite shape activities to do with your kiddos?

Paul Bunyan Fun for Preschoolers

This past week we studied the Tall Tales of Paul Bunyan with our
Mother Goose Time Fables and Folktales Unit.

MGT did not disappoint in the activity department either. 
\Here's just a few of the activities we did this week....

Literary Activities:

Each day we had a story in our bag complete with colored cardstock puppets to cut out and play with.  My girl's favorite was Bessie the Cow and Babe the Ox.  She's had all sorts of imaginary adventures with those picture puppets.

My girl also received a new I Can Read Book: Babe and Bessie along with 3 sight words: "likes", "the" and "is". During our Morning Calendar Time, we go over her sight words that I made into magnets and place on our magnetic dray erase board. You can read how I did that here.

Math Activities:

Did you know that Paul Bunyan was a towering lumberjack?

One activity had us using a measurement tree and leaves to record how tall things were.  We measured Sweet Pea, her cart, brother, baby doll, and Farmer Eddie (from Little People, haha!)

On the day that we learned about Paul's cooking companions, we played with our tangrams and sorted the shapes- pretending they were pancakes and placing them on a paper plate that had that shape on it.  She really loved this, and we did this activity over and over and over...because #preschoolers. 

Creative Arts Activities:

Besides the drama of playing with puppets and acting out our Paul Bunyan stories, 

we had quite a few fine art activities.

On our Paul Bunyan baby day, my girl drew this lovely self portrait of when she was just 3 weeks old, complete with a pink bow and blue eyes.  It is totally okay to LOL at this picture!  Not only did I laugh and laugh at this picture, but I framed it and will treasure it FOREVER! 

Those mountains at the very bottom of her drawing are toes yall! hahahaha!

The day we learned about Bessie and Babe, we did an Invitation to Create that also incorporated science as we discovered what happens when blue and yellow paint mix.

And of course, it ended up being a finger painting because ... #preschoolers.

However, she did realize that using the handle end of her paintbrush created some fun lines in her painting as well.  I also framed this and hung it in her playroom.

Our week ended with us watching the animated classic of Paul Bunyan.

You know... the Disney version?

I am so thankful for YouTube!  I mean where on earth would I be able to find that without the internet and YouTube?  

Well, I hope this post inspired you to have fun with your preschoolers and check us out next week as I give you a tour of our recently updated schoolroom! 

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Detectives Need Magnifying Glasses

Nature Detective.

Our newest preschool theme, and I am smitten.

Our newest Mother Goose Time box had this awesome magnifying glass,

 and it has made being a detective so much fun!

My girl took the magnifying glass outside as soon as we took it out of the package.

She went all around the driveway inspecting things.

She found this bee sleeping on our zinnia! He didn't move at all for quite some time.  Using our magnifying glass, she could really see his stripes and fuzzy body! It was so interesting!

Earlier in the day, we had traveled to our local zoo.

It is the perfect size for younger kids, especially preschoolers.  The zoo has tons of peacocks roaming freely, and one male peacock had started molting, leaving his feathers all over the zoo.  

We grabbed this one before we left. 

 

My detective used her magnifying glass to find all sorts of things in our thematic poster.

I would ask counting questions like, "How many things are flying?" or 

"Can you tell me how many trees there are?"

Using her magnifying glass, she counted the request using one-to-one correspondence- pointing as she counted aloud. 

Later in the week, we used our magnifying glasses to do a nature hunt!

MGT sent us this great Nature Collection book, and so I created a list for her and we hunted the yard for our listed items.  Please excuse the blurry picture below, but it's the only one I have of this great book!

 

After collecting and inspecting her items, my girl then glued them in her booklet, and I will write about that post a little later.  I really want to show you all her work, and it would make this post way too long ;)

I love this magnifying glass.  In fact, each month I am always impressed with the quality of the manipulatives that MGT sends us.  I am planning on sharing with yall how I have used them to make my girl some quiet time boxes, so please keep your eyes peeled for a post on that.

I always get so tickled that something so small like a magnifying glass can truly change how a child feels about their learning.  When I think back to teaching in my science classrooms, my students' most favorite days were our lab days, or when I went above and beyond to truly create a learning experience (such as moving our chairs to make us feel like we were on a bus tour in Mexico).  Those days were also my favorite too.

And now I get to share those moments with my girl 

because a simple magnifying glass transforms her into a detective.