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

More healthy movie nights

As I said in my first movie night post, I'm a huge fan of the fun of theming movie night dinners. But eating healthy at home is super important to our family, and I've struggled to find ideas that work.

For us, eating healthy on movie night looks like:

• Appropriate ratios of vegetables, fruit, protein, and whole grains (when possible)
• Trying new foods
• Limiting high-fat foods
• Limiting sugar
• No food dye

Here are some more of our recent menus.

The Incredibles

• Mr. Incredible power protein pork
• Elastigirl twisty pasta with Jack-Jack’s fiery sauce (simple syrup + red pepper flakes -- the little bit of sugar balances out the red pepper and creates a nice spicy sauce kiddos will still like)
• Dash's fast fruit salad
• Violet's violet veggie stack (roasted eggplant, purple potato, purple carrot, cabbage force field)
• Frozone's frozen banana swirl (just blend frozen banana chunks until it's smooth like ice cream -- the kids have no idea there's no sugar in it. It's DELICIOUS)

Brave

• “Turkey” legs (chicken drumsticks)
• Carrot ribbons for Merida's hair
• Neeps and tatties (potatoes and turnips)
• Red pepper bow with asparagus arrows
• Sweet buns (cinnamon rolls)
• Chocolate teddy grahams

Sleeping Beauty

• Chicken cordon bleu with toothpick “spindles"
• Berry baskets
• Pretzel rod wands
• Broccoli forest
• Pink sorbet

Toy Story 3

• Woody’s badge star frittata
• Buzz Lightyear salad
• Mr. Potato Head baked potato with veggie faces
• Lotso strawberries
• Jessie’s braid Twizzler

Wreck It Ralph

• Felix's chicken pot pie
• Sour Bill peas
• Round apple slice medals
• Candy cars (Swiss cake rolls for the base, icing to hold stuff on, mini Oreos, etc. -- I bought what was on sale and let the kids decorate!)

Pom pom sensory bin

Easiest bin ever. Have I said that before? Well, I lied. This one is the winner.

Here's what Sam (14 months old) got out of this:

• Fine motor skill practice: scooping, turning his hand over to dump a pom out of the spoon, pincher grasp, coordination
• Transferring
• Colors: matching, sorting, putting poms in bowls
• Counting (hearing me do it!)
• One-to-one correspondence (in the ice cube tray)
• Vocabulary development: empty/full, more/less
• Size: sorting, sequencing, vocabulary
• Gravity lesson: rolling a bucket of poms down the tilted lid
• Throwing!
• Persistence (those tongs were way too hard)

And for Ellie (3 years, 10 months), I also worked on patterning and addition/subtraction. 

Sam will play with this for 45 minutes by himself. Ellie loves using it for pretend play -- the poms have been cookies/muffins/ice cream scoops, rain/snow, party confetti, etc. 

Pom Pom Sensory Bin: pom poms (multiple sizes/colors), ice cube tray, metal tongs, various bowls and buckets. 

Side benefit, I owned everything (and you probably do too), so it was free!

PS, have I quit blogging? Maybe a little.

Healthy movie nights

I've been hesitant to post about our movie nights because I don't want to start getting wrapped up in clicks and views and pins and all that.

BUT, I've realized that I can maybe help other families out by posting some of our movie night menus. See, I'm a huge fan of the fun of theming movie night dinners. But eating healthy at home is super important to our family, and I've struggled to find ideas that work.

For us, eating healthy on movie night looks like:

• Appropriate ratios of vegetables, fruit, protein, and whole grains (when possible)
• Trying new foods
• Limiting high-fat foods
• Limiting sugar
• No food dye

Here are some of our recent menus. I hope these help your family!

FINDING NEMO

Bottom left: roasted asparagus seaweed with French onion whole-wheat linguine anemone

Top left: nitrate-free hot dog octopi and Swiss cheese shark teeth

Top right: apple crab (I cut holes and stuck raisins in for eyes), orange fish

Bottom right: sea turtle frittata (I used cucumber -- a chunk off the end, quartered, for the head, and slices cut in half for the feet). Those sea turtles were The. Cutest. Ever.

This dessert was inspired by these Squirt desserts. I wanted to cut down the sugar and food dye, so I used fudge stripe cookies, mini Nilla wafers, marshmallows, chocolate chips (I had regular sized but you should probably use minis!), and chocolate icing to hold it all together. OK, they're not QUITE as cute, but I felt a heck of a lot better feeding this to my 3-year-old!

TINKER BELL

Fruit fairy wands! Yeah, I know they don't have wands, but whatever. These are so much fun to make and super healthy. I had these plastic dowels from an Edible Arrangements bouquet, but any long, fairly strong skewer will work. I topped each with a slice of star fruit (which, side note, took FOREVER but was super adorable). We used blueberries (for Silvermist), strawberries (Rosetta), bananas (Fawn), blackberries (Vidia), kiwi (Tinkerbell), and peaches (Iridessa). 

I didn't get a good picture of the rest of the food, but we made peanut butter and jelly butterfly wings (cut a slice of bread in half, spread with peanut butter, and let kids decorate with jelly to look like a butterfly), and a flower made out of tomatoes and basil.

 CARS

  

I never knew I had so many things in my kitchen that could cut circles! 

• Top left: Mack-a-roni (I bought Annie's Organic, but I probably should have gone with the wheel pasta to be extra cool)
• Bottom left: Lightning McDogs on Historic Route Asparagus (nitrate-free hot dogs with cucumber wheels and cherry eyes, on a road made from asparagus). I would do these with hoagie-style sandwiches, but we had two hot dogs left we needed to eat up!
• Top right: Fillmore's stoplights (a slice of cheddar cheese, cut in half, with circles of tomato, banana, and celery. I cut the end off cherry tomatoes, then used the middle of my apple slicer to make the circles with banana and celery).
• Bottom right: Mater's Taters (using this recipe for seasoned crash potatoes. You will never cook baby potatoes any other way ever again. These are heaven.
• Top middle: Luigi and Guido's tire brownies (using a biscuit cutter and the end of a funnel to make the tires).

Ice chalk

This ranks in my top five kids activities ever (I think; I have a tendency to cram about 12 things into my top five of anything).

But seriously, this was SO much fun.

Let's start from the beginning...just making the ice chalk was a good hour-long activity that covered science (stirring the cornstarch until it dissolved), art (color mixing) and fine motor (mixing/stirring and filling silicone ice molds with an eyedropper). Not to mention good ol' messy fun.

Then we froze them, which led into another good discussion about states of matter and how a liquid becomes a solid.

We had to wait about a week to use the chalk because we took a vacation in the middle (side note: everyone should have friends they've been friends with for over a decade).

The chalk is so interesting to paint with. It feels like ice -- cold, slippery, melty -- but colors like chalk. You can draw with it a bit, or use it as a stamp, make it into puddles, mix colors, etc.

You can even paint your body (both kids quickly discovered this one). 

It dries with a wonderful smooth texture and bright color, so it's rewarding for the kiddos as well, and has a unique sensory component.

I snuck in one last "learning" bit and used our letter molds to spell "chalk." She of course also wanted to make an "E" for Ellie, so we did some talking about how to mix and match to make other words with those letters.

We kept about half our ice chalk in the freezer for another day, and now I'm so glad we did! Ellie already begged to make more.

Our recipe was drawn from a combo of pins all over Pinterest. We found half cornstarch, half water, and liquid watercolor to work the best. The watercolor means it washes right off of clothes and hands. And legs, and feet, and arms, and faces...

Fine motor/gross motor sewing activity

Ellie is a large-motor kid*. This will sum it up for you: "Mommy, I don't like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom because you and Daddy wait for me to say all the letters and that's boring." Meanwhile, she's on the trampoline not an hour later spelling her name as she jumps.

That's my daughter, and I love it about her. It does make me slightly worried about school in a couple years, but that's another post for another day (like maybe when it's a wee bit closer).

I love it, and I try to tell her "yes" a lot since she hears "no" pretty often too. No, you can't do a balance beam on the back of the couch. No, you can't do a flip off the back of the recliner. No, you can't jump over Sam.

We love being outside, and summer is my favorite because we swim almost every day. We created a gross motor area in our playroom that has a hula hoop, Pilates ball, Bosu ball, trampoline, Sit N Spin, gymnastics mat, DIY balance beam, hopscotch rug, and roller skates. We lived at the play area in the mall this horrible, horrible winter. We just discovered Upper Limits climbing gym and along with BounceU, it's our new go-to Ellie date.

It is frequently a challenge to find focused activities that "click" with her. She is actually quite patient and enjoys fine motor activities (Duplos/Legos, Ogobilds, Perler beads, and Play-Doh are favorites), so I have been experimenting to try to use these strengths to increase the range of things she'll stick with and focus on.

This is now the longest intro to a blog post I've probably ever written. We hit upon this activity quite by accident today, but it was so effective and fun that I wanted to write it down.

It started with her working on her sewing box (an embroidery hoop with a Dollar Store rubber non-skid rug mat, two very large plastic needles, some thick mesh plastic canvas sheets, wooden spools, buttons, and yarn). She's gone to it a couple of times but only ever really worked on it with Nana, once.

She started today by sewing a button on, and then wanted to use the canvas to make designs but was already getting bored and distracted. I encouraged her to stick with it and cut her a VERY long piece of yarn, but quickly realized it was too many steps to remember: up - pull - untangle - hold the sheet the same way the whole time - down - pull - untangle, etc.

I had her hold the needle and back all the way up to pull it taut, and when I told her it was ready for her next stitch, she immediately started galloping back. Bingo. We kept at it this way for 15 minutes. She would back up, then I'd give her a way to come forward. Then she would have to quickly switch to fine motor, find a hole, thread the needle through, turn the canvas over, and then back up again.

She tried walking (forward/backward), tiptoeing (forward/backward), jumping with feet together (forward/backward), hopping on one foot, marching, skipping, and galloping. This was a totally random success.

Threading the needle to begin

Jumping while holding the string (sorry for the dark picture! I'm holding the canvas in my other hand.)

Making a stitch before she backs up again

*I know she's three, and all kids are wired for this kind of play -- but our close friends who have kids of similar ages agree that she is uniquely tuned into gross motor activities. One of her best friends is reading and spelling simple words. That is not my child. My child dances in giant circles as she makes up wild stories.