Caterpillar Counting

This was a very basic activity that I decided to use today in order to help my younger son try to become somewhat motivated to learn his numbers by sight. It was vaguely successful, although any non-success can be attributed to my son's lack of interest, rather than the effectiveness of the activity.

Either way, it's easy and fun and yummy.

I just so happened to have some leftover sour gummy worms (left over from making that recipe where you create dirt out of oreo's...you know the one). ANYway. I had some leftover and I thought it would be fun to use them in a counting exercise. So after a little thought, I grabbed my scissors and green construction paper and cut out 10 leaves. I wrote numbers 1-10, one on each leaf. Then I dumped a big pile of the gummy worms on the table and rounded up the kids.

It didn't take much imagination for them to believe that the worms, previously used as worms, were now caterpillars. Hungry caterpillars--no less--who wanted to be put on leaves. I told them that the leaves were picky and only wanted a certain number of caterpillars on them. So they had to put the amount of caterpillars on the leaf that would match it's number. Savvy? "Savvy" they said.

My older son was done with his leaves (I gave him 6-10) in a flash and ran away until I told him he could come back and gobble some of the caterpillars. But my younger son, who needed much coaching from myself, struggled to comprehend the idea of corresponding amounts with numbers. We worked on it for quite a while. Repetition works...right?

Finally, I told them they could pick a leaf and eat all the caterpillars on it, "so which one would you choose?" I asked.

That last part was not the best idea I ever had.

Another Update

Also, a friend of mine sent me an excellent link from her school district's website. The school district has come up with enough awesome activities to fill up the whole year. The purpose, as much as I can gather at a quick look-see, is for families to use the activities to help prepare their preschoolers for kindergarten. Maybe every school district does this, I'll have to check mine and see what they have to offer. Anyway, the one from my friend's district is really very amazing. So lately, whenever the kids say, "what can we do now?" I pull out one of these activities from this website, print it out, all easy-peasy, and we have a great time.

Here's the link: Vancouver School District Family Packets

Check it out!

Month Update

Oh man! A month has gone by and I haven't posted...and why? Hmm...I'm not SO sure. I think the best explanation would be that it got sunny here. Yes. That about sums it up. So, instead of doing preschool activities and writing about them, we just spent time outdoors. Also, somewhere in there we all got sick. At some point we went on a vacation. And for awhile I just didn't feel like posting.

There you have it.

Anyway, here is a bit of a recap of some things we did that I never posted about:




We finished our butterfly unit, which was a lot of fun. We used pipe-cleaners as caterpillars and made butterfly rings to use as props while learning a few songs and fingerplays. We also did that activity where you wrap a kid all up in toilet paper and let them break out, you know, to simulate the cocoon effect and all. That was probably the part the kids will remember the most :-)



After learning about butterflies for about a week, we moved onto a rock unit. I know I found a lot of preschool geology information on the web, but honestly, I didn't keep track of where I got it very well. There are 4 activities from this unit that I remember best: making a rock collection, using the rock collection to practice sorting (as follows in the photos),

further using the rock collection to test the rocks for living matter (all you do is drop the rocks in vinegar; if the rock bubbles that's an indication of some sort of living matter that's leftover in the rock and reacting with the vinegar just like baking soda would. I mean, obviously it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's kind of what I told the kids we were doing: checking for BONES in the rocks! Honestly, the idea of bones kept their attention pretty well--"Mom! This one is bubbling! It must have bones in it! Do you think that a giant t-rex was walking a long time ago and then he died and then his bones got all crushed up and stuck in this rock and now we're holding it?!" "Yes son, I'm pretty sure that must be exactly what happened." Don't judge me--at least they're thinking about it.), and finally we did this deal where you take white paper outside and crayons and make a crayon-rubbing of the concrete.

That last one was a big flop. Don't do it. It's pointless and dumb.

So that's us. It's been a fun month spending most of our time out of doors. But don't you worry, I'm sure we'll be back to the ol' grind pretty soon.

Butterfly Facts

One of my favorite sites thus far in my preschool website research has been:

http://scienceforpreschoolers.com/.

I love this site because it includes whole weeks worth of preschool lesson plans based on science themes. The lessons are great because they already include the science and background information you need to tell your kids what's going on, multiple craft ideas, gross motor activities, even snack ideas. I love it--so much so, in fact, that I'll tell you what I do...I print out a lesson plan and do everything in it!  Ha ha! It's the best.

So for the rest of this week I printed out the lesson plan called "Butterflies" and we got to work.  To start us out today, I chose to give the kids all the introductory information from the first part of the lesson plan.

The intro information was really fun to impart to the kids--facts like (the words in THIS color have been  copied straight from the scienceforpreschoolers.com website):

Why do we need butterflies?
Butterflies are the second largest group of pollinators next to honey bees.  We spent some time talking about pollination at this point. I talked about butterfly legs as being sticky like tape and it picks up the "flower dust" and when the butterfly lands on the next flower, some of the "flower dust" comes off as he rubs his legs on the petals and such. The flowers need each other's "flower dust" to make their fruit. We didn't really get into the why and how of all this stuff. Just some really basic basics.

• What is the difference between a butterfly and a moth?
Most butterflies fly during the day (diurnal). Moths fly at night (nocturnal). Butterflies have small bulbs on the end of their smooth antennae. Moths have “fuzzy” antennae. We pulled out the ol' google image search at this point to visualize the differences. 

• What is the life-cycle of a butterfly?
egg, caterpillar, pupa (cocoon), butterfly. While we were on the internet, we found a couple of excellent youtube videos that capture the life cycle of a butterfly in that kind of filming where they speed up the time...I can't think what it's called right now, but they were really awesome to watch!

• Where do butterflies live?
In every continent except Antarctica, with the majority in tropical zones.

• What do butterflies eat?
Sweet nectar from fruits and flowers. Butterflies don’t have a mouth. They drink nectar through a straw that they can roll up and down, called a proboscis.We pulled out some straws to talk about the butterfly's mouth-the proboscis. The kids curled them up and went around the house trying to uncurl them and then drink out of stuff. It was hilarious! 

They taste with their antennae.

Butterflies can see the colors red, yellow and green. We looked around the room and I had the kids point out the objects they would be able to see the colors of if they were butterflies. 

They don’t have lungs, but breathe through holes, called
spiracles, in their abdomen. 

My kids were pretty tripped out about this "spiracles" part...so I just touched on it briefly. All in all, it was a really great discussion. The kids loved learning all about butterflies and went about the rest of the day pretending to be butterflies themselves. Adorable :-)

Planting Day

After a few days growth, our bean plant was ready for a traditional planting. Namely--in a pot. So today, the boys planted it. I made them do it all by themselves. They went outside and got handfuls of soil. Then they gently pulled the plant out of the plastic baggie and placed it and the soil into a little pot. A dosing of waterage and we were ready for a sunny windowsill. Check out our bean plant now!

Isn't he so cute? We named him Benny. Benny the bean plant. Grow, Benny, grow!

Some Growth

This is what our bean/seed looks like today--you can see its little tap root reaching towards the water and the beginnings of a sprout emerging from the seed. So awesome! It's been fun to check it out every day, or a few times a day and note the differences we see, which are sometimes drastic.

Today we moved onto some more in-depth knowledge about seeds and plant growth.

I found a lesson plan online that I used to supplement what I wanted to teach the kids--it can be found here: bean plant lesson plan.

First, I must tell you that I quite accidentally broke one of the seeds/beans we had been trying to grow. It was falling down into the water and I was trying to pull it back up to the middle of the plastic baggie, when the bean just fell apart. Nevertheless, I was able to use this minor set-back as a positive experience. Since that bean was mid-growth, it served as a great opportunity for us to take out the seed and observe what was going on with it. I showed the boys how beans have two sides, and a skin-like structure surrounding the two sides. They were able to feel these things with their hands and see them up close. There was also a teensy, tiny little root that had begun to grow and so we got to hold that and inspect it as well.

When I was pretty satisfied the boys understood the parts of a seed, we went on to discuss the lifecycle of the bean plant. I had printed out the lesson plan I mentioned before, which includes a cut-and-paste style worksheet that illustrates the phases of life for a bean plant. I precut out a set for each boy and I allowed them to color the pictures while I explained each one. Then I drew a big circle on the middle of a piece of construction paper and asked the boys to glue the pictures onto the circle in the order they go in. As they guessed at, and tried to remember, which picture went where, I helped them along and reinforced the knowledge for them. I then had them draw arrows to indicate the the progression of the lifecycle of the bean plant.

I think my boys would tell you this was a more tedious activity and not as enjoyable as some of the others, but hey, they can't all be fun and games, right? I was very happy when, at the end of our time together, the boys could tell me about how a bean plant grows from seed to plant, and then from plant to seed. They could identify how this created a "cycle" which was a word they didn't previously fully understand. They knew vocabulary terms like "seed, root, shoot, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit" and could correctly apply them to the pictures we discussed.  More excitingly, they could then take a look at our own, real life, bean plant in the window and accurately determine which phase our plant was in.  That was pretty cool.

Sometimes I'm such a nerd. Like...all the time. I just love it when these kids know stuff!

Easter-ish Boardgame

While we waited for our seed to grow and grow, I decided to switch things up a bit and play a game today. Last year, actually, I printed this board game template off the net and put it together, but we never had a chance to play it. In fact, this year, Easter went by as well and I still had forgotten to make time to play this game. So I brought it out today, just to say we've finally played it...and surprisingly, it turned out to be pretty fun. We all enjoyed it. Maybe next year I'll remember this good experience and bring out the game before or on Easter.

I found the template at the kaboose website. If you click on the link it will take you right to a page where you, too, can print out this game. Anyway, I'm not really sure how the website says to play it because it's been awhile since I was actually on there reading it. So I'll just tell you how we played.

This is what the board looks like:

It's kind of a candyland sort of set-up. Except that the random pictures don't really mean anything to the play of the game, which is a tad disappointing.

All I did was get together plastic eggs that matched the colors of the eggs on the game board. I was lucky to have them on hand. After putting the four colored eggs in a buckety, baskety deal, we took turns dumping them out on the floor to determine each person's turn. We had to agree on a method of deciding which egg was the "one," so our rule was that the egg that ended up the farthest away from you was the "one" that determined your play on that turn. So, for example, if I dumped out the eggs on the carpet and the green one rolled the furthest away from me, then that meant I got to move my game piece to the next green on the game board. I'm hoping this makes sense; it wasn't very complex to play, but somehow I'm feeling like it is overly complex to explain. So anyhoo--that's all we did. It was fun to watch the kids rooting for certain eggs to roll the furthest from them so they could get a particular color, or trying different methods of bucket dumping to get the eggs to perform in a manner that they were hoping for. We also had to make up something to do with those random pictures on the board, so we kind of just made them into a little story that we told as we went along. Like this:

Me (making my game piece talk): "Hey guys, I'm way ahead of you and playing in this little brown house! It's so fun! Hurry up and come play with me in here. We'll play hide and seek."

Kids (making their game pieces talk): "Ok, here we come! I have to get a blue to get over there so wait for me, ok?"

And so on.

It really was a lot of fun. It's always fun to use our imaginations together and make up stories. Sometimes I forget how much I enjoy the simplicity of story-telling with my kids. They come up with the BEST stuff and I never come away without a good dosing of belly-laughter.