D is for Dracula

I didn't want to spend too much time on dinosaurs because I will be teaching our preschool co-op class about dinosaurs in a few weeks--gotta leave a few surprises for then. So instead, we focused today on Dracula. It's getting closer, every day, to Halloween; so, I figured it was ok.

During my internet search, I had seen much reference to a "Looking for Dracula" activity that has been done in various preschools and kindergarten classes. I had to look into it a little further to find the best medium for introducing the activity to my own family.  What I finally decided on was a youtube video:

My Favorite "Looking for Dracula" Option

It's pretty much--AWESOME! We had such a blast doing this activity. It feels a little strange as an adult, acting out a story while watching a youtube video. But you just have to let yourself go! The kids went crazy for it, and have been singing/chanting the song everywhere we go, every day since. We actually waited until everyone was home to break out this doosy. The story calls for props, too, which I would highly recommend. Improvised blanket capes, cheap glow-in-the-dark fangs, and binoculars aka swimming goggles was what we used, but one could get all fancy and go for the real thing too.

SOoooo....backing up, since we couldn't do this one during the day, we decided on another activity that was also a hit. Dracula lollipops. Yes, you read that correctly. And here's what they look like:

Sure, there's a witch in there too. These were pretty fun. Mostly, for my son, it was just a chance to do some assembly. He did break out the scissors and try cutting a few dracula heads. He tells me he only knows how to cut straight lines, so...some of the dracula heads are square. It's all good. We did some experimenting to try and figure out a good way to make his body/cape. We never really decided which method we liked the best, so I guess they are all equally cute/pathetic :-) Mostly, this was just a pleasant activity; it wasn't teaching too much, but that's ok sometimes.

D is for Dinosaur

I was getting sick of underwater animals, so we took a break for letter D. As always with a new letter, we first completed a worksheet:

I'm actually really happy with doing these worksheets. My older son learned to write letters just out of curiosity, but my younger son seems to need a little more parental push. It's fun to sit down and work on these worksheets together. It's not like I just leave him with it--we talk about the letter and what it looks like, we draw it with our fingers, and often I hold his little hand in mine and we write some letters together; then he might try a few on his own. I don't know why I enjoy this time together as much as I do. It's just fun to see the glimmer of recognition come into his face...it makes me feel like we're getting somewhere :-)

Next, I drew a big letter D and gave my son dinosaur stickers. Of course, we talked about how "dinosaur" starts with the letter D, and the sound of it and all that too.

I thought he would just decorate the letter D and be done with it, but he surprised me by making up a big dinosaur story as he went along. The letter D became the land and the middle became the water. The dinosaurs grouped together in packs and either protected each other, or helped each other hunt for prey. Some of the dinosaurs jumped across the water to escape their predators, and some of them just liked to swim across. Mostly, I played the role of listener...a welcome change :-) We had a great time. It's amazing what a simple piece of paper and a few stickers can do!

Handprint Crab

It was time to do some art-ish-ness for our letter C stuff. A google search helped me out with an idea: handprint crabs.  Honestly, I thought it was pretty adorable, but I never expected our own version to turn out as totally cute as it did, pictured below:

I got the idea from the link, but I used a few variations of my own. We just used blue construction paper for the background, as opposed to making it out of watercolor paints. I let my son make "pinchers" and a smile, etc. with a Sharpie. Finally, we painted on some glue with a kid's paintbrush and then sprinkled corn meal over the top to get a sandy effect. That's the part little guy liked the best. He loved watching the corn meal stick to the glue and he's way impressed that it "weely DOES yook just yike SAND!"

We had to work on this craft in stages throughout the day as we were waiting for things to dry--but it was a big hit!

Ghost Crabs

Once upon a time, I introduced the idea of having to earn an underwater-animal-related video by completing a worksheet. I think it is becoming the way of things around here.

That's why, when we went to start our discussion of letter C, my son said, "what worksheet can I do to earn a crab movie?" Ve-ry nice. Therefore, I found a letter C worksheet and he practiced some writing skills.

Of course, after that, it was time for the main event: the ghost crab video, which I found somewhere near the bottom of this website:
http://brilliantbundles.blogspot.com/2012/02/preschool-ocean-themed-lesson-plan.html

I think the author has many brilliant ideas on this site if one is looking for more ocean stuff, but I was pretty much just interested in the video.

After watching the video a few times (it's only about five minutes or so), we had just enough time to go over a few facts about crabs. I ended the discussion talking about the way crabs move. It seemed only natural that we then move to the ground and practice the crab walk. Kids are so much better at this than adults!

I had found some little ditty about crabs that we chanted while acting like and walking around like crabs. It was ok, but honestly, my kiddo wasn't too into it. The ditty part. I wish I would have thought to have a crab race. That would have been way more fun. Oh well--coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Next time.

Measuring Belugas

To round out our discussion of beluga whales, and to teach a little in the way of standard measurements, my son and I decided to represent the size of a beluga on our floor with painter's tape.

I found some rulers and we talked for a very brief moment about what a ruler is and how it works. Then we started marking off 15 feet (according to my research on the size of an average beluga whale), foot by foot, on my floor. For every foot we put a small piece of tape, and when we got to 15 we stopped. I was thrilled that my son was counting the increments as we went, and that it gave him lots of practice in counting up to 15. Next, I had to spend some time making an outline of a beluga whale that encompassed all of the 15 feet we just marked off. Good thing it didn't take that long. Less than five minutes.

It was impressive to see how big a beluga would really be if it was swimming around in our house and my son was pretty excited about it. I made him lay down next to the whale and I measured him with tape and we looked at the difference. We then found other things to measure ourselves and the whale with--for example, we have a wooden gravestone as one of our halloween decorations, so we used that for measuring. We learned that the whale is 7.5 gravestones, and my son is about 2.5 gravestones. It was pretty cool to get some non-standard measurement ideas in there too.

I'm happy with this activity.  The method of measurement, in various forms, has been successfully explored. AND, it was a lot of fun!

Beluga Mobile

Believe it or not, there isn't too much out there when you search for "beluga preschool activities" on the web. Imagine that. So I did the best I could. I found a website that offered some printouts you could use to put together a whale mobile--and one of the whales just so happens to be a beluga. Good enough for us.

This is what the completed project looks like: 

*Can I please just make a small note here, that I realize the whales are supposed to be colored, yes, but my son doesn't do much in that arena. Also, yes, we have a very randomly "decorated" house--which is another way of saying that our home is very messy. And, yes, we have already put up many of our halloween decorations, including some pumpkin lights and a strange orange sparkly spider that hangs from the ceiling in an odd place. Furthermore, I realize this isn't a very good picture, but it's all I had so it will just have to do. 

ANYway, this is where you can find the printouts and instructions if you so desire: Whale Mobile.

It was a fun project; took us about 30 minutes from start to finish. Here are the pluses that I've seen of it:

1. the child can do most of the work himself
2. it's different from the usual coloring or painting sort of craft
3. it serves as a great refresher course whenever the child sees it

So yeah, we love it! In addition, the whale mobile has really jazzed up our decorations with a highly desirable animal-eclectic look that I'm sure will soon be all the rage.

Baby Beluga

My mother-in-law sang a song to my husband (as a child) about a baby beluga. My husband now sings it to our kids. SOOOooooo, when I needed a sea creature to focus on for letter B, I had a clear choice.

I did a little research and found the best youtube video of the song that I could: Baby Beluga Song.  It even has a cutsy, cheesy little video that goes with it. Today we opened with watching this song a few times. We then tried to sing with the video--but my chico wasn't too into the actual singing part. So we just watched it again.

That's all we had time for today. Some days are like that. Too bad I have that dang song stuck in my head now.

Alligator Antics

For our third day talking about letter A, I decided we should just make one. One that looks like an alligator. I got the idea here: http://preschoolalphabet.blogspot.com/2011/07/alligator.html. Ours looks a little less professional than the author's because...well, the pictured teeth below are the kind of teeth my son really wanted for his alligator. I'm just proud that he cut them out all by himself. 

We then went to the couch to read a Mercer Mayer favorite. This book is truly a great read! 

When we were done, my son wanted to use his recently constructed alligator to act out the story. It was awesome--we hid our alligator under the couch and used our play food to lure him out to the garage, where we left him. We wrote notes for the door and taped them up. When our daddy came home, little guy was beside himself with excitement for dad to discover our little trick.

It was a fun day!

A-A-Alligator Fun

To finish off our Letter A stuff, we decided to focus on alligators for a couple of activities.

Alligator Activity #1:
First we talked about the sounds letter A makes to reinforce from yesterday: a-a-anemone & a-a-alligator.
Then we sang "5 Little Monkeys" and did some coordinating hand motions/actions. It's the one that goes: Five little monkey swingin' in the tree
         Teasing Mr. Alligator, "can't catch me!
         Nope! You can't catch me!"
         etc. etc. etc.

My son loves that song--especially the chomping bit.

Alligator Activity #2:
After the song, we read a book: A Frog in the Bog, by Karma Wilson and Joan Rankin (take a look at the book.) It's a great story and one of my kids' favorites. It also deals with the number 5 and alligators, so it dovetailed with "5 Little Monkeys" quite nicely.

We were going to do Alligator Activity #3...but we ran out of time. So it will have to wait until tomorrow.

Ocean Alphabet

Well, my oldest has gone off to kindergarten and left us. Boo-hoo. But the show must go on. The younger son and I will be venturing into the world of the ocean for the next few months as we (hopefully) learn some letters--and get them to STICK!

My younger son (hereafter referred to as "my son" seeing as the other one isn't in the picture anymore), is interested in the ocean. He's also interested in bombs and superheros. But I figured an ocean theme would be a little more appropriate for the learning environment. Anyway, his favorite videos on earth, currently, are from the Jonathon Bird website: http://www.blueworldtv.com/webisodes.

On the other hand my son is NOT interested in writing, coloring, reading, numbers, or anything else that even resembles learning in a conventional manner. So, I've had to get tricky. Motivation is the key to getting any little kid I've ever known interested in something they are not naturally interested in, so all I had to do was find a motivation for my son. If his motivation just so happened to be Jonathon Bird, well, then...so be it. I'll have to write a thank you note to that man someday.

So I told my little guy that I would let him watch the Jonathon Bird webisode about anemones if he would practice writing letter A's on a worksheet. I know. So pedantic. But that kid. I'm telling you. He's got to at least learn how to hold a pencil one of these days. Anyway, it turned out to be a cinch. We spent a good 10 minutes writing letter A's and talking about how to hold a pencil (ha ha), and when he was done, we talked about the sound letter A makes--you know, as in a-a-anemone. Then he got to watch the Jonathon Bird webisode entitled "The Real Nemo," which he loved! So everyone was happy!

Here's the link to the worksheet I used, but there are a ton of great choices out there.

When we finished that, it was time for a craft. I think I've mentioned this before, but crafts are not my strong point. This particular son of mine, though, sometimes I worry about his small motor skills, so I think crafts are a good way to go for us to let him gain some dexterity and coordination in his little hands.

I found this anemone craft on "The Crafty Classroom" website and I liked it. The official instructions can be found here: http://thecraftyclassroom.com/CraftCoralReefSeaAnemone.html. All you do is cut a styrofoam ball in half; I just so happened to have one on hand from another time when we were making planets. Then you twist up pipe-cleaners whatever way suits your fancy and smash them down into the syrofoam. It pretty well represents what an actual anemone looks like.  And it used lots of finger work with all the pinching and twisting and smashing it required.

When we had completed our anemones, we got out some toy fish we have and pretended our anemones were stinging them and catching them and eating them. That was pretty fun. Eventually our story turned to superheros using bombs to fight off the alien anemones attacking the earth...but hey, who says you can't mix business with pleasure? Huh?