Preschool: Exploring Alligators

Hi! I'm Leslie- a homeschooling momma to almost 5 year old girl (seriously can't believe I just typed that) and 17 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.

This week we started our newest unit from Mother Goose Time: Bubbles, Boats, and Floats.

As we journeyed "Down the River" this week, we studied rivers, beavers, boats, and....Alligators! 

My girl knew a lot about alligators (we go to the local zoo pretty regularly), but she mainly talked about their sharp teeth.  Perfect day to talk about the letter V since it looks like a sharp tooth upside down.  Using our loose letter parts, she built her uppercase and lowercase letter V.  We then used our letter pointer to locate the letter V, and lo and behold it's right there on a book of the month supplied by MGT!  By the way, I really enjoyed this book!

She then worked on her letter V book and turned those V's into alligators with snapping jaws!

We practiced making /v/ sound and really enunciated it in both her and her little brother's name.

Math Time = Game Time

Our game was called "Losing Teeth."  Did you know alligators have 80 teeth at a time but will have over 2,000 in their lifetime! Yeah, me either. #teacherguide

So how do you play this game?

All you need is playdough and golf tees.

MGT sent us 18 golf tees (love that I don't have to go to Walmart and search for this) and Avaleigh practiced one-to-one correspondence and counting as she placed 17 tees into her alligator's jaw.

She then picked them out one by one and placed them on her Counting Card to make sure she was right.  I love how she pointed each one up to look like teeth!

She then used a pair of tongs to put each one back into the basket (I couldn't get a good pic of that.)

Fine motor skills at work!

She was way into her playdough at this point, but wanted to go outside. 

MGT's Steam Station suggested we make "Alligator Skin" by doing crayon rubbings of different textures.  However, instead of crayons, we used playdough and had so much fun exploring and making impressions of textures outside!  We talked about what an alligator's skin might feel like (rough and bumpy), and Avaleigh would observe our yard and test what certain textures did to her playdough.  She explored our brick wall, trees, logs, shutters, wheels... so many more things!

"What can I test next, momma?"  "I don't know.  What do you think might be rough and bumpy?"

This was by far the favorite lesson of our alligator day.

Our playdough is still outside in its container.  She has gotten it out several times since doing this experiment to test more things!  I love to see her love learning.

So go try it out friends!  

Happy Learning!

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!