Homeschool preschool: fairy tale theme

In January, I started doing additional structured activities at home with Ellie. These follow my ideal way of learning for her: it's child-led, theme-based, and play-centered. See more about our first month here.

Each month, she chooses a theme. I find or create activities for her in that theme, around broad educational categories. Many of those overlap, but I try to identify a primary learning objective for each one and hit a number of categories each week. Each day we (usually) do one or two activities, depending on our schedule.

MONTH 2 THEME: FAIRY TALES 

Literacy

• Write (brainstorm, write, revise) and illustrate our own fairy tale

• Mixed up fairy tales: Ellie picked four fairy tales. For each one, we made a small card (2" x 2" or so) with the protagonist, antagonist, setting, conflict, and resolution. Then we turned each set face down and drew one card from each story element. She LOVED this. We revisited it multiple times throughout the month. She really began to understand how to describe story structure, and it helped in writing our own story as well. 

• Perspective retelling: We used the Melissa and Doug Three Little Pigs set to retell the story. Then, we each picked a character and told it from his or her perspective (she chose pig 3, the girl, and told it as the big sister. HILARIOUS).

• Write a letter to a Disney princess. Apparently, if you mail any Disney character a letter, they'll send back an autographed photo. We haven't gotten ours yet, but it's only been a couple weeks. Send them to: Walt Disney World Communications P.O. Box 10040 Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830-0040

Math 

• Cinderella bar chart: Using our Cinderella stories from around the world (below), we graphed how many included common Cinderella elements Ellie brainstormed (stepsisters, glass slipper, a prince, a ball...).

• Jack and the Beanstalk more or less game: We rolled two die, got two different colors of beans, added them together, and determined more and less. 
• Word problems: I wrote a couple simple, single-digit addition word problems, then had her illustrate and solve (if the princess has three gowns and four necklaces, how many things does she have total?)
• Making 10: I printed out a sheet with sets of 10 blank princesses. She picked how many she wanted to color blue, and I colored the rest red. Then we wrote our equations to equal 10.

Science 

• Potion brewing: Ellie and Sam did this together for an hour. An hour, ya'll. I gave them about 10 bowls filled with random stuff I found in our pantry and fridge. I think I had baking soda, vinegar (dyed green), apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, milk (dyed red), cornstarch, flour, coconut flakes, sprinkles, salt. They each had three "potion jars" to work with, pipettes, and measuring spoons. This was a hit. Notice Ellie wearing her witch wig...

• Free Anna: I froze Ellie's little Anna doll in a block of ice, then gave them salt, warm water, regular water, and spoons, and challenged them to free her. They worked together on this while I made dinner. I would have given them the sink if Sam could have reached it -- our floor was SOAKING wet when they were done (and I had two towels down!).

Engineering

• Building block castles
• Three Pigs experiment: We built houses out of paper strips (straw), popsicle sticks (sticks) and blocks (bricks). We hid a pig inside and teamed up to be the Big Bad Wolf! I had her predict which one would last the longest, but it was a great challenge building things that could be considered a "house" with the first two materials.

Art: We did sparkly princess painting. I know, I know. I'm not into crafts though. And she picked "Artists" for the next months, so I knew we'd be doing tons of art...

Music: We listened to "Peter and the Wolf"

Sensory: Fairy foam during bath, with their fairy house and fairy toys

Fine motor: Lego challenge. Ryan and I made Belle's rose, Merida's arrow, and Rapunzel's tiara out of Legos, then gave her the same pieces to figure out how to build a match. She's big into Legos and we were confident she could find the pieces if they were all mixed together, but if you're just starting, I'd keep each set separate. She also had labels to assign to each piece when it was done.

Geography

• Around the world with Cinderella: We read Cinderella stories from around the world. We used the books for a math activity too (see above). After reading about two dozen books, I landed on the following as ones that were age-appropriate for a four-year-old, represented a variety of cultures, and were recognizable fairly easily as a Cinderella story: Princess Furball, Adelita, Cendrillon, The Gift of the Crocodile, Jouanah, and The Golden Sandal.

• Reading about real-life princesses 
• We drew a very simple map to go with the story we wrote

History: This one annoyed me. I thought I would get out some biographies of historical princesses, but they were all either WAY too text-heavy for my active preschooler, or were so out of touch with the reality of the princess's life (I'm looking at you, Pocahontas) that I gave up. If anyone has read any good biographies for preschoolers, let me know.

Cooking/kitchen: I loved this one! We paired it with a geography and literary activity. We made three special meals, each representing the country where one of the three pillars of western fairy tale literature was from. As we ate, we listened to an audio story from Story Nory.

1. Sauerbraten from Germany, for the Brothers Grimm (Rapunzel, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog Prince, etc.).
2. Smørrebrød, an open-faced sandwich from Denmark, for Hans Christian Anderson (The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Princess and the Pea, The Little Match Girl, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, etc.)
3. Cassoulet (holy smokes, this is rich and delicious) from France, for Charles Perrault (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast)

She asks for this sandwich about once a week now. I did NOT predict that.

What's great is that Ellie has started inventing her own activities for themes. She came up with a game that involved vague rules about matching princess letters and names. She made an Olaf out of sticks "for fairy tale theme," and made up a way to make a dragon with an old egg carton, then had Daddy make one too :-)

Homeschool preschool: horse theme

In January, I started doing additional structured activities at home with Ellie. These follow my ideal way of learning for her: it's child-led, theme-based, and play-centered.

Each month, she chooses a theme. I find or create activities for her in that theme, around broad educational categories. Many of those overlap, but I try to identify a primary learning objective for each one and hit a number of categories each week. Each day we (usually) do one or two activities, depending on our schedule.

We're on month three, and it's working because I'm planning and prepping EVERYTHING the month before. I've tried planning without prepping beforehand, and then I end up quitting after a few days because I get behind.

Here are links and photos of month 1, week 4!

MONTHLY THEME: ANIMALS

WEEK 4: HORSES

Literacy: Uppercase/lowercase horse-barn match

Math: 
Horse race game

Measure things around the house in hands

Science: Horse anatomy

Music: Rhythm cards

Fine motor: Clothespin horse color matching (she discovered these could stand up!)

Geography: Dress up a horse (File 1 and File 2. So. Much. Cutting. So worth it.)

History: Horse gait flipbook with early photography

Cooking/kitchen: Carrot-apple-cinnamon oatmeal (Ellie peeled the carrots and measured the oatmeal; Sam dumped in the ingredients)

Homeschool preschool: dog theme

In January, I started doing additional structured activities at home with Ellie. These follow my ideal way of learning for her: it's child-led, theme-based, and play-centered.

Each month, she chooses a theme. I find or create activities for her in that theme, around broad educational categories. Many of those overlap, but I try to identify a primary learning objective for each one and hit a number of categories each week. Each day we (usually) do one or two activities, depending on our schedule.

We're on month three, and it's working because I'm planning and prepping EVERYTHING the month before. I've tried planning without prepping beforehand, and then I end up quitting after a few days because I get behind.

Here are links and photos of month 1, week 3!

MONTHLY THEME: ANIMALS

WEEK 3: DOGS

Literacy
Alphabet construction to spell dog breeds (using prompt cards)

First letter sound sort (I put pieces of paper on the ground with initial sounds for "bowl," "leash," "food," "treat," and "collar." She had to place those items on the right letter).

Math: Patterning with dog food and treats (we discussed AB, ABC, and ABB patterns, and she experimented with creating her own)

Science: Dog hair under the microscope

Engineering: Design a machine to feed the dogs (I was quite impressed. It was a simple drawing but a great concept!)

Art: Paint with dog treats

Music: I made the worst-ever (don't judge!) color-coded sheet music, then put post-it note flags with the corresponding color on our piano keys. We learned how to play B-I-N-G-O (or E-I-Ban-Gee-Oh as she calls it) on the piano.

Geography: Placing breeds on their country of origin on our big world map

Cooking/kitchen: Homemade dog treats

Homeschool preschool: seahorse theme

In January, I started doing additional structured activities at home with Ellie. These follow my ideal way of learning for her: it's child-led, theme-based, and play-centered.

Each month, she chooses a theme. I find or create activities for her in that theme, around broad educational categories. Many of those overlap, but I try to identify a primary learning objective for each one and hit a number of categories each week. Each day we (usually) do one or two activities, depending on our schedule.

We're on month three, and it's working because I'm planning and prepping EVERYTHING the month before. I've tried planning without prepping beforehand, and then I end up quitting after a few days because I get behind.

Here are links and photos of month 1, week 2!

MONTHLY THEME: ANIMALS

WEEK 2: SEAHORSES

Literacy: "Mr. Seahorse" by Eric Carle

Math: Seahorse size sequencing

Science: Seahorse anatomy 

Technology: watching how seahorses move

Art: Bead and button seahorse

Sensory: kinetic sand (aka, moon sand) play

Fine motor: seahorse transfer (I set up a 6-section chip-n-dip serving tray from the Dollar Tree with water and mini seahorses. Ellie would roll a die and use a spoon to move that many seahorses. The goal was to get them all in the middle together.)

Geography: Clay landforms and bodies of water (we made a peninsula and an island). We did this for about two hours! She loved playing in the clay, talking about what we were making, and then using our mini seahorses to hide in the ocean! 

Cooking/kitchen: Seahorse-shaped sandwiches, and I gave the kids fruits and veggies to make an underwater habitat. Ellie loved making seaweed and coral!

Homeschool preschool: bear theme

In January, I started doing additional structured activities at home with Ellie. These follow my ideal way of learning for her: it's child-led, theme-based, and play-centered.

Each month, she chooses a theme. I find or create activities for her in that theme, around broad educational categories. Many of those overlap, but I try to identify a primary learning objective for each one and hit a number of categories each week. Each day we (usually) do one or two activities, depending on our schedule.

We're on month three, and it's working because I'm planning and prepping EVERYTHING the month before. I've tried planning without prepping beforehand, and then I end up quitting after a few days because I get behind.

Here are links and photos of month 1, week 1!

MONTHLY THEME: ANIMALS

WEEK 1: BEARS

Literacy: Goldilocks sequencing cards

Math

How many bears in the den? 

Symmetry with counting bears: I made a line of symmetry with a bead necklace. I placed a bear, then she had to place one symmetrically. Then it was her turn to place a bear first. She began experimenting with facing different directions, stacking, etc.

Probability: I put 5 each of two colors of counting bears in a cup. We talked about probability, then she closed her eyes and pulled one out. We repeated over and over. This was good for subtraction practice too.

Science

Gummy bear science

Shortening and ice water experiment (mimics polar bear insulation)

Engineering: Moveable teddy (she did this 100% independently after I had the pieces cut out)

Art: "Old Bear" collage. We did a two-step art project. First, we did four large pages with two colors each, based on the colors in the artwork of "Old Bear" by Kevin Henkes. Then, we found pictures representing each season in nature magazines and made a seasonal collage for each one. Then, we read the book and walked our little model bear through each scene.

Music: I made a Spotify playlist of music from the 1900s, around when teddy bears were invented and became popular.

Sensory: Play-Doh teddy bear

Gross motor: Teddy bear toss: we collected all their teddy bears and tried different ways of tossing them into our laundry bin. 

Fine motor

Torn paper cave: Ellie hated making this because she was really bored. But she loved pretend play with it later!

Imaginets bear

Geography: Bear-habitat-map match game: I made cards to play a match game. We took turns turning over one card in each set. I wanted to focus on the geography part -- the habitat and map exploration -- more than the memory part, so when we turned them over, we left them face-up. If any of our cards completed a set, we could take them. Most sets wins, of course :-) We played this LOTS of times.

Cooking/kitchen: Bear-themed dinner of salmon, berries, mushrooms and a drizzle of honey

Princess puzzles

Subtitle for this post, "Dear Disney, please don't sue me."

Disclaimer for this post: I receive no monetary compensation in any way from these.

That should cover me, right?

Here's a newsflash that is not news to anyone. Ellie loves princesses.

Loves.

Princesses.

I could write a whole blog on how this is utterly baffling to me, as I am not exactly a girly-girl. But Disney's brilliant marketing minds are, well, brilliant, and long before Ellie had seen any movies, she loved those princesses.

So, in an effort to capitalize on that, I made some puzzles for her. My main goal with this, other than just being a fun activity, was letter recognition, especially matching upper- and lower-case letters. I found a jigsaw template online and made one puzzle per princess. Each has her picture, name, upper-case initial and lower-case initial. I printed them out on cardstock and spent maybe 10-15 minutes cutting them out.

Examining the pieces

I was pleasantly surprised by how effective this was. She naturally started sorting by letter, not color -- I know this because the doubles ended up together, like M for Mulan and Merida. We talked about looking at the names to match the upper case letter, which she did naturally with letters she's more familiar with (mostly related to our family -- E, S, M, B). I showed her lower-case for ones she didn't know and couldn't guess (s, c and m are easy to figure out because they're just miniature versions). She used the color-coding to determine which of the doubles matched with which puzzle.

A side benefit is that these puzzles don't "click" together like heavy cardboard or wooden ones, so she really has to use careful fine motor skills to get the pieces to line up.

Of course Elsa was her favorite because it has the same letter as Ellie, is in "aqua," and is FROM FROZEN OMG.

So proud of her work.

She's returned to these a number of times. It is a great thing for her to work on independently. 

Here's the file (free of course) if you want to print them out yourself.

Adhesive bandage name art

Am I allowed to just say Band-Aid? My journalism background says no...sigh. Well, these are Dollar Tree 40-for-a-buck multi-colored adhesive bandages!

Ellie is WAY into the boo-boo stage. Like, the stage where she puts a bandage on a boo-boo and then when it falls off, the boo-boo has mysteriously traveled to the other leg. The stage where bruises, scrapes, blisters and sometimes dirt are cause to request a bandage. I mostly blame my wonderful husband, who bought her princess Band-Aids as a fun surprise. There's no going back from that, kids.

She's also way into "E for Ellie!" Every car ride is now a hunt for the letter on signs, the sides of trucks, etc. She gets SO excited to find Es on street signs when we're on walks, or in her books, or really, anywhere. Just this afternoon she was having M&Ms as a treat at Nana's, and she turned one sideways and insisted it was an "E for Ellie!" At some point, I guess I'll have to break it to her that the name of the letter is not, in fact, E-for-Ellie.

I decided it would be fun for her to get to use bandages in a different way, and to get to play with some of the letters in her name.

I wrote her name (luckily, her name in capital letters is all straight lines) on paper, and then let her put the bandages over the lines to make the letters. I had to show her the first one, and then she caught right on and loved picking the colors and lining up the lines. Plus, it was GREAT fine motor practice -- opening the bandages, peeling off the backing and sticking them down. She spent a solid 20 minutes on this, and then promptly hung it on our fridge!

Winter tot school activities

Well, I am way behind. I guess that's what happens during Christmas, right?? Here's a quick list of recent tot school activities in the last month:

Coffee filter trees, combined with pine needle printing for the background: These turned out wonderfully, and let the kids experience a number of textures, techniques and creativity.

Felt tree decorating: My aunt made this for Ellie last year, and the kiddos loved decorating the tree (and telling me what shapes to cut with the extra felt). It was great fun, plus good shape and color practice.

Ice cream cone tree decorating: Ice cream cones, frosting (they got to smoosh in the food coloring themselves) and sprinkles -- they were in heaven!

Look at that crazy hair!!

Salt dough ornaments with nature stamping: We gave each of the kids a cup, bundled them up and sent them outside to collect nature things to make prints in their ornaments. They picked all kinds of neat things, like pine needles, pinecones, rocks, leaves, etc. We added whole wheat flour, which gave them a really neat texture. I didn't get any pictures of the finished product, but here's one of them hard at work!

Cotton ball snowflakes: Ours didn't turn out exactly like snowflakes, because we let the kids do their own glue. But it was good fine motor practice, and we were surprised by how much the kids liked this one. 

Candy cane tissue paper collage: I printed out a candy cane picture for each kid, then gave them red and white tissue paper to glue onto the correct color. The older kids seemed to get it and like it for awhile, but needed more one-on-one help than we had adults for. Ellie enjoyed it on her own later.

Candy cane letter name hunt: I printed out each child's name in a candy cane font, then printed a duplicate set that I cut apart. I hid the letters around our living room, and we helped them match the letters. Two of the oldest really liked this, but again, it took a lot of adult interaction to help them do this one. 

Fluffy stuff: Keeping with the theme of this day, the older three liked it, the younger ones did not.

Red and white beanbag toss: Taking an idea from a library story time by us, I made six red and six white beanbags out of children's socks. Just fill them with rice or beans and tie a knot. They held up wonderfully and the kids sorted them into a red or white basket. This was a great game that Ellie has asked to repeat multiple times since tot school that week.

Christmas picture fishing: I made "fishing rods" out of a dowel rod, string and a heavy-duty magnet. Then I printed out a bunch of pictures of Christmasy things, and attached a paper clip to each. I put all the pictures in a hula hoop and let the kids fish. This one held their attention for a LONG time. We'll probably repeat it with different pictures later. 

WHEW! That's a lot of catch up...