Letter U Day

Today was the day for our co-op preschool to meet at our house. Our group does a letter a day and a number a day. Sometimes we also focus on shapes and colors. Today was letter U day, and also, the number 21.

As I was researching activities for letter U, I was coming up pretty short. There's just not that much out there based around the letter U. But the few things that I found and liked ended up working out really well, so I thought I would share.

We always start out preschool with "circle time." You know, weather, calendar, singing the days of the week song; I like to play a little I Spy With My Little Eye...etc. After that, we started right into our 1st letter U activity--which just so happened to also be our number 21 activity:

The Upside-Down Contest! 
The night before I had made this big chart with a place for each kid to record how long they could stand on their head or hands (upside-down). The chart measured all the way from 1 to 21 seconds. Each kid took a turn standing on their hands or head (some on a pillow) and the rest of us would count together. Most of the kids wanted me to hold their feet up for them and almost all the kids made it all the way to 21. When they were done, I let them color in their section of the chart to correspond with how long they were able to stay upside-down. The kids had a blast with this one. When everyone was done with their turn we could check out the data and make comparisons. Then it was time to read a book:

Up Above and Down Below, by Sue Redding

This is a pretty great book! The illustrations are wonderfully intriguing. All the kids gathered around and wouldn't ever let me turn the pages because they were so interested in the pictures. We made a game of pointing to a more obscure item on each page. Also, the book really helps give the kids a concrete idea of what "up" and "above" and "down" and "below" mean. After reading the book, I figured the kids were primed to display their new knowledge of positional words:




Positional Word Practice
I gave each child an object. I would then call out a positional word; there are an abundance of positional words to chose from but you better believe I at least started out with up, above, down and below. The kids would have to move their objects somewhere around the room to accomplish the positional word. I found it helpful to point out to the kids that they could use their bodies as a reference point. For example, if I said the word "above," the children could put the object above their heads, or above their arm, or above their foot. By the time we had exhausted my repertoire of positional words, the kids were ready for:

Play Time & Snacks
Not too much to say about this one. I looked around everywhere for letter U snacks, but most of them were way too labor intensive for me. So we just had fishy crackers and apples and chocolate chip cookies :-) We then moved onto some singing and dancing:

The Ugly Underwear Song
I found this song on the DLTK website and I'm SO glad that I did because it was a huge hit with the kids. The lyrics go:  "Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR! (repeat) It would make me switch and twitch and maybe even itch! Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR!" It's sung to the tune of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." I made up some funny dance moves, more like simple actions really, to go along with it and the kids loved to dance along, even if they didn't catch on to all the words right away. Very fun! Thanks to Becky somebody for posting that one! We kept the action alive after that with a:

Uniform Parade
We have a lot of dress-ups at our house so I let the kids pick out "uniforms" to put on. I tried to discuss the idea of a "uniform" while we were all outfitting ourselves, but I'm not sure the kids really got the difference between a uniform and a costume. Oh well. When we were dressed, a police officer, a fireman, a construction worker, a lifeguard, a farmer, a buzz lightyear, and a knight all went on a big parade around the house playing follow the leader. Everyone had a turn to be the leader, then we sat up to the table for our craft:

Letter U Umbrellas
Each kid got a worksheet/printout deal for the letter U. I used this one, but any other would work just fine. We used a cupcake liner, folded in half to make the umbrella top and glued it to the umbrella shape printed on the worksheet. The kids cut a length of pipe cleaner to match the handle in the printout and curled it up and glued that on too. We found out that pipe cleaners actually do not glue to paper well--I had to break out the extra extra strong glue to get them to stick successfully.

I had precut raindrops in a few different shades of blue that the kids could then glue to their worksheets. They also got a chance to trace the letter U that was printed on the printout. That's about it. By this time, all the parents were coming to pick up their kids, so some of the kids didn't finish and got to take the materials home with them.

That was our fun-filled day of letter U activities.

The end.

Couch Long-Jumping

I'm not sure this even qualifies as a "preschool activity," but if I give it a title it sounds more official. Right?

Well, sometimes, when I'm just not prepared for the day (like today), I fall back on this activity because my kids ALWAYS love it and I can make myself feel good by calling it a gross motor activity. The deal is: we use the couch as a jumping playground. I know--uncouth. But what can I say?

• Excuse #1: I have all boys. 
• Excuse #2: We own a very crappy couch that we happen to have owned since when we were in college. And that was, like, FOREVER ago.
• Excuse #3: I'm just not a very "couth" kind of girl. 

All excuses aside, I will tell you that letting your kids loose to jump on the couch is a lot of fun. We like to have contests. For example, who can stand on the armrest and jump the furthest across the couch (as in across the seat cushions). And...who can stand on the armrest and jump the furthest to mom, who will catch them. And...who can do the funniest jump from the armrest onto the couch. And sometimes we do "shows" in which the children come up with a routine and perform it for me to watch. This is usually very circus-esque. But the kids think they are hilarious.


When you don't own a trampoline in your backyard, as we don't, couch long-jumping can be the next best thing. Besides, here's excuse #4: it's really good exercise!

Soap Explosion

Explosion is really a much too generous word for this experiment. Said "explosion" is really just "a bit of a puff up;" let it be known that nothing actually explodes. It is decently neat though. It's like watching those black "snakes" (fireworks) that we sometimes set off on the Fourth of July. Only it's soap instead of black, dirty, dusty coal junk. So, yeah.

I found this idea on a plethora of sites on the net, so I'm not going to credit any one place or another. It seems that lots of people have done this, but it was a first for us. The main idea of this science experiment is to put ivory soap in the microwave and watch what happens. We followed the advice of a friend who warned us not to put in more than 1/4 of the soap bar at a time. But after doing it, I would say that the allowable amount probably totally depends on your microwave. I think we could have probably done the whole bar and it would have been just fine. But hey, better safe than sorry. I'd at least start with the 1/4 bar.

Another friend told us to let the microwave go for anywhere between 1 and 2 minutes to get the soap to "explode." It took our soap almost exactly 1 minute. We gathered around our microwave, eyes on the soap inside, and waited while the time counted down. Eventually the soap started expanding and growing. It took it just a couple of seconds (think 10-15) from the start of it's growth to when it was done. So make sure you watch it the whole time. This is what it looks like when it's done, approximately:

Don't try to handle it too much at first. We learned this the hard way. Even though the outside cools off relatively quickly, the inside is still very very scorching. While we waited for the first piece to cool down, we put another 1/4 bar in the microwave and watched again. It was pretty funny to see it get all puffy. The kids were interested in the first two go-rounds. But after that, they were kinda done.

So it was on to some hands-on stuff. We put our soap explosions into bowls and played around with it a bunch. Mostly all they wanted to do was pull it apart and make it into "sand" in the bottom of the bowl.

But the more they played with it, the more they complained of the soap starting to make their skin feel itchy. Therefore, the activity didn't last too much after this.

I tried to get them excited about reconstituting the soap, or at least an attempt, but their interest had completely waned. Nevertheless, later in the day I spent some time adding some water and swirling it around until finally dumping the whole sudsy mixture down the drain. 

Anyway, it's pretty fun. It gets about a 7 out of 10 for us. It's not horribly interesting or horribly cool, but it is pretty interesting and pretty cool and really unique. And there you have it. 

Sock Puppets

These are the sock puppets we made today:

Gloo, Franny, and Sam

Honesty, I was pretty worried about this activity, what with all the various little crafting materials, and whatever means I might use to attach them to the socks, and how on earth would the kids be properly involved? But I'm happy to say it turned out really well. The kids loved this activity and played with their puppets all night long. 

All we did was pick out a sock of each of our choice from our "lost in the laundry" box of unpaired, lonely socks. Then I poured out pom-poms (in various sizes), googly eyes (in various sizes), buttons (in various sizes), ribbon, rick rack, and yarn into little piles on the carpet. The kids choose whatever they wanted to fashion a little puppet guy and arrange it onto their sock. When they had finalized the placement of all accoutrements onto their puppets, I used my handy glue gun to adhere everything on according to my children's direction. And it worked out very nicely, smoothly and with a lot of laughter! 

When our puppets were done, we played for awhile making them talk back and forth, then finally came up with a story to act out for our daddy when he came home from work.  Which thing we did, to great success and much fatherly applause.  

Next week, I'm going to go buy butcher paper and read, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, to the kids to explain to them how a background can be used for a puppet show. Then we're going to make one and put on another play with background, props and everything! I hope it will be fun! 

Preschool Backpacking

When I looked outside this morning, I saw that it was a beautiful day. Consequently, I was trying to think of an idea for a preschool activity that would get us out of doors.

A week or so previous, my son had been having a few conversations with my mother about a backpacking trip we had planned as a family when I was young. Since then, he has been very interested in all the particulars of backpacking. As he asked me, yet again, when OUR family would be embarking on our first backpacking trip, a brilliant idea popped in my head. "Let's go right now," I informed him. Truly, hiking is one of my very most, top favorite things to do in life, so I was thrilled at the prospect of pretend backpacking right outside our door.

I had the kids find their preschool backpacks, suit up in tennis shoes, and told them they could bring along any gear they thought they would need. One son packed swimming goggles, mittens and a retractable claw sort of toy thing. The other picked out all his favorite action figures to keep him company on our trek. We concocted some "trail mix" by throwing together a variety of whatever snacks I had on hand. Today, it turned out that we had fruit snack, pretzel, fishy cracker, raisin, conversation heart, chocolate chip trail mix. We added our snacks to our backpacks, slung then on our backs and headed out the door. I told the kids that while we were trekking they had to find 5 new things for us to discover and put them in the brown paper bags I had brought for each of them.

The rest of this kind of activity is pretty easy and very rewarding. We walked around and looked at things we had never noticed before like mosses and the veins in leaves and buds on the ends of stems etc. Each child put 5 or more things into his bag. When we were tired of walking around, we backpacked back to the house and dumped out all our treasures for discussion. Here are the treasures we discovered:

It was fun to mention a few facts about each item and have the kids point out things they liked or were interested in. We had a good talk about lichen and how pinecones differ. Mostly, we talked about how much we want to go on a real backpacking trip sometime in the near future. Either way, we'll for sure be going on another preschool backpacking trip on the next nice day we find.

Demolition Observation

I figured since we are abandoning all crafts for awhile, we might as well go big with our manliness. I found an idea on a website a friend sent me called, No Time For Flashcards. "Wrecking Ball Science" looked like it was just what we needed to bring up our levels of testosterone.

If you click on the link, you'll see that the author of this activity posted some awesome pictures of how "wrecking ball science" worked out for them. My picture is much less exciting, but here it is in all it's glory:

Honestly, I think this idea is pretty genius, especially for boys. It is probably one of the most successful activities we've done in terms of short- and long-term interest. The boys were SO excited about every aspect of playing around with a wrecking ball.  The first thing we had to do was find all the blocks in our house and construct a big city next to an empty doorway in our house. The doorway that goes into our kitchen is a pretty good one, so that's where we set up camp. After we had a decent sized city, we spent some time talking about construction. I asked them questions like, "What happens when people don't want a house or building anymore? How do we take it down? Can we do that?" which led us to talking about demolition and wrecking balls. They wanted to know what kind of truck held a wrecking ball so we found some pictures online. Google's "images" option is so helpful sometimes.

Anyway, after that we found a medium-sized ball and I jimmied some sort of a net around it with yarn. The yarn was then threaded through a key ring that I taped (with strong tape) to the top of a doorway. Now we had two ends of the yarn to deal with. One side pulls the ball up and down and the other end holds the ball. For us, it worked best to let one kid hold the up and down end of the string tight; while the other kid got to hold the ball, determine angle and let it drop. Then we'd switch. The kids LOVED it! They could hardly wait until it was their turn. And so it went. Construct, demolish. Construct, demolish. For...oh...hours. When I finally made them stop, they immediately started pestering me for when the next time would be that they would get to do the wrecking ball. So, the next day we did it again. And the next. And now we're taking a break, but I had to promise them that we could do it again another day next week...and so forth.

Unlike the author of this idea, I called this activity "demolition observation" because I'm afraid I'm not much up on the "science" of a wrecking ball and I didn't feel like I could very accurately explain any of the forces at work here. So we mostly just observed and played around with dropping the ball at different heights and angles to achieve complete demolition and destruction of whatever building or city we had constructed. Even though I didn't spend time explaining too much of it to the kids, I think they learned a ton just by participating. All in all, a complete 100% successful activity! One I would whole-heartedly recommend to any mother of boys.

P.S. I'm sure girls would like it too, but I don't have any daughters so I really couldn't say.

P.P.S. Next time I'm going to use string because we found that the yarn broke pretty easily. Just FYI.

Salt Volcano

I asked a friend of mine to make me a copy of an activity she had from a book called, The Science Explorer Out and About and we got around to trying it today. The activity is titled: "Salt Volcano," but after our bout with it, I would call it: "Salt Dud." I know. I'm SO creative. Anyway, I don't know about the rest of the book, but this science experiment totally sucked. So much so, in fact, that I didn't even bother taking pictures--because there would have been nothing for anyone to see.

The instructions call for oil, salt, water and food coloring. You fill up a jar with 3 inches of water. Add 1/3 cup vegetable oil and a drop of food coloring. Shake salt over the top. The instructions go on to say, "Wow!" so you would think something pretty cool would happen. But it doesn't. Oh sure, the salt falls down through the oil, dragging a bit of oil with it to the bottom, and then releases the oil, which then bubbles back up to the top. But it is so slow, and so minuscule of a reaction as to be hardly worthwhile. Certainly not, "Wow!" More like, "Hmmm...did something just happen?"

Therefore, "Salt Dud" I have aptly termed this experiment, and there it will forever remain in my memory. On the other hand, I was perusing the Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas blog where I found a similar experiment. Only this experiment looked like it actually worked to the magnitude of "Wow!" so we will be trying it sometime very soon.