Fruits & Vegetables

Sight Words: fruit, vegetable, apple, banana, broccoli, corn
Word Lesson: Bb for banana, broccoli, bean, brussel sprouts


Books:
Any Johnny Appleseed book
Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert
Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
Vegetables ISBN 9781404242654
From Seed to Plant ISBN 0516216821
Potatoes ISBN 1560654511
Taking Root ISBN 0516215914
Vegetables ISBN 1432901427
Fruits ISBN 1432901435
The Fruit Group ISBN 0736853707


Individual food groups are 641.36 at the library


Activities:
Fruit/Vegie Diary
Identify food groups review
Potato Stamps (cut potato in half, cut out shape of choice. stamp paper.)
Where Food Grows


Song:
# Sing the Happy Food Song and insert the name of one of the Food Models at the appropriate spot. Have the child with the Food Model hold it up for all to see. Have the rest of the group sing and perform the activity. For example:
If there's fruit and you know it, stomp your feet,
If there's fruit and you know it, stomp you feet,
If you're fruit and you know it, hold your food card up and show us,
If there's fruit and you know it, stomp you feet.
# Substitute "jump up and down," "touch your toes," "nod your head," and other activities that use large motor skills for "stomp your feet." Feel free to improvise with other actions and gestures.


Snack: applesauce and carrot sticks

In addition to all the wonderful books we read and great activities we also made applesauce this week and tried a new recipe with eggplant. Both fun and yummy fruit and vegetable learning activities.


We spent both days this week on these various activities, books, and lessons. I had planned to take my son with a small group of friends to a local grocery store for a tour, but was unable to find a place here that does one. If you live in Texas you're fortunate because HEB has a wonderful tour they do that we participated in last year. It was a blast. Call around to your local stores and see if any place does one.

Dairy Treat Day

Sight Words: milk, dairy, cow, cheese, yogurt, ice cream
Word Lesson: Cc (cow starts with C) discussed other words that start with C, practiced writing C

Books:
Milk ISBN 0836840674
Food Groups Milk ISBN 1432901451
Cheese ISBN 0791070050
Miss Moo Goes to the Zoo

Individual food groups are 641.36 at the library

Activities:
Cow/Dairy Finger Puppets
Dairy Basket

Song:
Dairy Treat Day

Snack: cheese, pudding, yogurt, ice cream
We tasted a little of each item and talked about the color, texture, taste, and smell.

Dairy was a lot of fun and we had a blast redoing the puppet show for Dad tonight. My son wanted to do it over and over during our lesson.


The basket was fun because he was able to do some of the cutting and practice using scissors. And the song was a hit! We sang it over and over throughout the day...I may be dreaming it tonight. We also talked about where milk comes from and what other products it makes. The books were good discussion points for these ideas and were very informative. Maybe a little too informative about cow's digestive habits...

Our letter lesson went well and I think we will stick with letters for each day because it works best for us and gives my son a chance to practice writing. He can recognize all the letters and knows all their sounds, so this was good to talk about words that start with Cc and work on writing letters.

The cheese book was very interesting even at an adult level. This afternoon we went to the grocery store and looked at all the different types of cheese available. We felt whether they were soft or hard and looked at different colors. Good reinforcement activity.

Grain: Seeds, Wheat, Flour, Bread

Sight Words: grain, wheat, seed, flour, energy
Word Lesson: (totally unrelated) 'at' words...fat, sat, bat, cat, mat, etc

Books:
Food Groups Grains ISBN 1432901419
Pasta ISBN 0936840690

Individual food groups are 641.36 at the library

Activities:
Grain coloring page
Making pasta necklaces
Oatmeal play dough (1 part flour, 1 part water, 2 parts oatmeal)
Sequences (seed, wheat, flour, bread)

Snack: Corn Muffins

We used ideas from this site and really liked the this page. We just discussed grains and where they come from. Grandparents have a huge wheat farm which we just visited, so we were able to recall the wheat fields and discarded wheat stalks left in fields.

We read our book about grain and making pasta. We lined up our 'wheat' items to talk about sequences and what comes next. Did our coloring sheet and mixed up/put our muffins in the oven.


Made pasta necklaces, made/played with oatmeal play dough. Ate our yummy muffins. Fun preschool. Took two hours.

Food Pyramid and Meat

Before I post about our meat I would like to clarify the structure of our preschool. We generally have two lessons per week on whatever two days work best for us. Each lesson lasts between 1 and 2 hours. Almost always these lessons take place during my younger child's nap so only my older son is involved. We usually time preschool right so we are ending with snack time as my younger child wakes up so he is involved in the eating.

Sight Words: food, deer, meat, muscle, bean
Word Lesson: words that have the same beginning sound

Books:
My Food Pyramid ISBN 9780756629939
Meat and Protein ISBN 143290146X
The Meat and Beans Group ISBN 0736853723
From Farm to You Sausage ISBN 0791070069

Just run by your local library...food pyramid books are under 613.2 in non fiction and individual food groups are 641.36, we just grabbed books for all the food groups to use over the next few weeks.

Activities:
Identity each food group worksheet (found here, page 3)
Color our own pyramid
Practice counting with beans.
Color a deer sheet, glue beans on paper in shape of Dd
Track eating on Wednesday (using this)

Snack: Tuna Dip with Bread

3 oz tuna, drained
4 oz cream cheese
1/4 cup butter

Combine, microwave, stir.

We talked about the Food Pyramid using a lot of materials from this site. It was super helpful and has lots of fun ideas. We printed out our own pyramid to hang on the fridge and refer to. Read our food pyramid book.

Then we moved onto meat and talked about where it comes from and how we get it. What animals we eat, how we store meat, etc. Because we had just gone hunting over the weekend this lesson was well timed. We discussed the deer Grandpa got and how we prepared the meat and froze it for eating. We also talked about beans and nuts...where they come from, how we eat them, etc.

Gluing the beans on the deer picture was a desperate idea for how to incorporate a "meat" activity. But my son LOVED it. He was so excited about gluing and beans.

We didn't have any songs...any ideas for food songs as we discuss the other groups throughout the next two weeks?? Thanks!

Ready, Set, Exercise

Sight Words: body, exercise, healthy, strong
Word Lesson: Adding 'ing' to words to make them into an action

Books:
Happy Healthy Mosters Get Moving with Grover ISBN 0375830464
Exercise by Claire Llewellyn ISBN 9781595661937

Both of these books were a lot of fun! They were very interactive and creative. The Grover book took 20 minutes to get through with all the fun activities he asks you to do. The Exercise book has a lot of questions for the kids and suggestions of activities. I thought both books were excellent.

Activities:
Rotating through these exercise mats. I did quick google search, but I'm not sure where you can find them. We got ours at the library. You could just make some.


The books had a lot of activities that we did...blow bubbles to see how big your lungs are, draw a picture of your favorite exercise.

We also walked to the park near our home. The kids played on the swings, climbed, balanced on rocks, and chased little girls around the playground. All very good exercise activities.

Snack: Nutragrain Bar and Water

Exercise was a fun and easy lesson. Talking about keeping our bodies healthy is really important and kids this age LOVE to play and excercise so we really had a good time with this one.

We also have a kids aerobic video Denise Austine's Fit Kids which we plan to do tomorrow morning.

Our Insides

Sight words: lungs, brain, heart, stomach, muscles, brain
Word lesson: Beginning letters of words. What words start with the same letters.


Books:
My Busy Body by Lizzy Rockwell ISBN 0375922032
Looking Into My Body ISBN 1575840340

Songs:
B-O-N-E-S (Once there was a skeleton and Bones was his name, oh. B-O-N-E-S)
Witch Has an Itch*

Activities: We did a different activity for each organ/body part we discussed as follows:
Lungs...blowing out a candle, listening to each other breath
Stomach...okay, so we didn't do anything here
Muscles...lifting weights
Brain...quiz, reflex test

Heart...listened to our hearts, showed pumping action of heart using balloon, straw, red food coloring. This was really fun and my son enjoyed it a lot, but it took a couple tries to not get covered in squirting "blood" The best idea is to add food coloring to the empty balloon, then stick in the straw, then hold the balloon under water until just filled. This allows enough water for your child to 'pump' the heart and watch how the blood comes out the veins (straw). Lots of fun.

Bones...we did this craft. Very fun.



Snack: Pretzels

We first read Looking into My Body. Then we read through The Busy Body Book again stopping at each organ to do the activities associated with each. This helped to beak up the reading with lots of fun and activities. A pretty fun lesson and my son learned a lot.


*The witch has an itch, the witch has an itch.
Oh where oh where oh where does the witch have an itch?

On her tiny little _(body part)__, on her tiny little _____.
The witch has an itch on her tiny little ______.

(Sung to The Farmer in the Dell. We added body parts like spine, skull, ribs, etc)

Head, Shoulders, Knees, & Toes

Sight words: body, head, leg, arm, nose

Books:
Old Testament (story of the creation...we used a picture scripture book)
The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss
My Busy Body by Lizzy Rockwell ISBN 0375922032

Songs:
Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.
Do as I'm Doing
Hokey Pokey
I Am A Child of God

Activities:
Trace bodies on drive way with sidewalk chalk.

Find a large cube and paste pictures of different body parts on it. Let the children take turns rolling the 'dice' and then touching each body part

Body Bingo (I made a cute bingo card and will post it if I can figure out how)

Snack: Gingerbread Men*

Started by singing I Am A Child of God. Then we talked about Heavenly Father creating our bodies and that He also has a body like us. Sang Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. Then we talked about all our body parts. My kids had a lot of fun naming off body parts and then saying what they could do. Arms are good for hugging and teeth are good for chewing.

After reading My Busy Body we sang Do As I'm Doing about 5 million times. This book actually has a couple pages at the back with lots of little pictures of kids doing activities, so we took turns picking on picture to copy while we sang. Then we read The Foot Book and played our dice game. We also talked a little about physical disabilities. Also not harming our bodies with drugs, alcohol, etc.


Finished off with tracing our bodies and playing bingo. Then of course our yummie snack. This was a fun lesson that worked well for both of my kids, even my 2 year old loved it.


*Due to a dental surgery yesterday we switched this to Jell-O jiggler men.

Pets Mini Lesson

Since we were at the library this morning we grabbed a Discovery Pack to do a "mini" preschool lesson. All we did for this was go through the materials with no additions from me, so it was actually quite short. And not really my favorite books, etc. But I will post what was there for reference to some pet material for anyone interested.

Books:
Pets by Liz Gogerly (Enjoyed this book)
My First Cat by Linda Bozzo (Good book if you like cats. We don't)
Dogs and Cats by Steve Jenkins (Too in depth for my 3 year old)

The kit also included Elmo's World Pets (ISBN 0738935247) which we did not watch. I think Elmo is annoying. Sorry.

The one redeeming factor was a Melissa & Doug pets sound puzzle. Can be found here or here. Both my kids loved this puzzle.

Better, more planned out lessons and ideas next week. For now, enjoy the pets. My three year old has decided we should get a pet snake...

Vacation

We have been out of town and just returned this evening. Next week we will be back to a couple lessons per week. The schedule is to study our bodies, inside and out. I have most of my plans for bodies ready, but if you have a great idea please leave a comment before next Tuesday!!

It's Autumn Time

We always start with the same welcome song...whatever song you know is great. Then we talk about the weather and what day it is. We usually spend some time practicing counting and saying the alphabet. Then my son always spells his own name before we move onto sight words.

Sight words: fall, autumn, leaves, pumpkin, Halloween, Thanksgiving
Word lesson: synonyms, two words can mean the same thing (fall & autumn)

For part of our lesson this week we used this website that has a cute little walk through of why leaves change colors. (My son loved this!)

Books:
Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks ISBN 0439316960
Halloween Night ISBN 806008673563
Poppleton in Fall ISBN 0590847945
Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day** ISBN 0590109790
Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert

Song: It's Autumntime and Rain is Falling All Around (substituting 'Leaves are' for 'Rain is')

Activities: Leaf Rubbings. We used this time to collect some leaves and talk about their different shapes, textures, and colors. Then we brought them inside and used crayons and thin white paper to make some leaf rubbings.


Leaf Place Mat. We then took the leaves we had collected and glued them to construction paper, covered with contact paper and had wonderful place mat.



Snack: Fall Apple Dip (somewhat resembling this)

We spent time discussing when Autumn is and what happens during Autumn (leaves change, gets colder, etc). We visited the website above. Then we talked about different holidays we have during Autumn (Halloween, Thanksgiving). After that we spent time reading our books and singing our songs. Our books this time were all about fun. And we read a lot of them. We love to read!!

Then it was time to find leaves and create our rubbings and place mat. And on to our yummy snack!


**Note: This book is available as a movie.

Dinosaur Day

Using a Discovery Pack from our local library made this lesson really easy! A Discovery Pack consists of books, an activity, and a movie about the subject. Making your job of finding materials a snap! Check your own library to see if they provide any packs like this.

Sight words: fang, dinosaur, bone, paleontologist
Word lesson: adding an 's' to make words plural

Books:
Touch and Feel Noisy Dinosaurs ISBN 1846104440
The Discovery and Mystery of a Dinosaur Named Jane ISBN 0766027309
Revealed Dinosaur ISBN 0789497492

Movie:
Animal Life for Children All About Dinosaurs ISBN 1417101652

Song:
I'm a Mean Old Dinosaur
(Tune: I'm a little Tea Pot)

I'm a mean old Dinosaur
(Make a mean face, the kids make the cutest mean faces)
Big and Tall
(Gesture hands big and tall )
Here is my tail, here is my claw.
(Gesture hands behind your back for tail and make claw hands)
When I get all hungry
(rub your tummy)
I just growl
(have the kids exaggerate the grrroooowwwlll)
Look out kids I'm on the prowl.
(Here I tickle each one of the tummy and they all giggle)

We read through the books taking a break to put together a dinosaur puzzle (also in the pack) and to learn the cute dinosaur song. My son was very interested in being a paleontologist when he grows up so we spent some time discussing what their work entails.

After all the books we watched the 23 minute program on dinosaurs.

Activity:
Making a dinosaur picture practicing using scissors. My son cut out a mountain, grass, a tree, and a sun which he then pasted to his page. After that he added dinosaur stickers and did some water color painting. The finished project was beautiful!

Snack:
Tortillas and cheese. We used dinosaur cookie cutters to make our tortillas into fun dinosaur shapes. My younger son even joined in for this one.

The rest of the afternoon was spent as a paleontologist, digging and discovering. A very successful lesson.