Storybook curriculum

Addie and I have started a new schedule in the afternoons or mornings if we're not busy. This past weekend I was looking through my school books and came across a curriculum called, "Happily Ever After; Using Storybooks in Preschool Settings". I remember going to a conference during my first year of teaching and the people who wrote this curriculum we're doing a workshop; I liked their ideas so much that I went out and bought their curriculum and now five years later I am pulling it out to try out the activities with Addie.
The themes are broken down into two weeks per book. Our first book is I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson; very practical for coming up on Thanksgiving. So I found the book at our local library and now we are going to read the story this afternoon with story pieces, thank you to google who easily found them for me. Now for the next two weeks Addie and I will be reading this story and doing activities that relate to the story. I will post the activities we do as we get to them.

Gross Motor

Most of what I have posted so far has dealt with our literacy, math and fine motor activities, but large motor skills are just as important to train and practice. Most kids learn these gross motor skills by simply playing, but when you live in an apartment, a yard is nonexistent, and its fall/winter how do you practice these skills like running, jumping, throwing, catching, etc. So Tuesday our Mommy's-R-Us group decided to take a picnic to the park because the weather called for 70s! However, what none of us realized was that it was going to be ruined with a classic case of fog- heavy, wet, cold, fog. So we took ourselves to the local YMCA to warm up and enjoy the large indoor play area. We rented balls for the kids to play with they all had a blast running, jumping, throwing, rolling and catching. All fabulous gross motor skills! We also attempted a cooperative game of Red light Green Light, which the four year old understood the rules and the two years olds just ran and gave the four year olds a tough time deciding whether to follow the rules of the game or to just run. All in all, it was a successful day of running, playing and learning.

Halloween Ghost

Addie and I were sick earlier this week with the flu, so we missed out on the Mommies-R-Us group activities. By Friday we were in need of some kind of project, so I thought we would make some decorations for the trunk of our car. On Saturday we have a church function with a trunk or treat and we needed to find or make some decoration for the trunk, this worked out perfect. We use a paper plate, two small ovals and one large oval for the face, white paper hands, and white tissue paper for the "body", if you can call it that, to make our ghost. Of course Addie like gluing the best and I did the cutting, but this would be a good cutting activity for older kids.

Turned out pretty cute. We made two of them, one to go on either side of the car and bought some spider webs to put in the middle. It should be fun!

Marshmellow prints

Today I invited two of the mommy group members to my house to first experiment with how Addie did with people at her house and second to see how we fit. We live in an apartment right now and so inviting all of the mommys and kiddos might present a space issue at the house. Anyways, Addie did as expected, cried for the first few minutes of others playing with her toys, but then she got used to the idea a little. Once she started to play, she would watch each child and make sure she knew what they were playing with and that it was her toy, but she didn't attempt to take it and it didn't seem to make her upset anymore, so I guess that was good. By the end of the hour and a half, she was playing and running around with the others; overall I think it was a positive and good learning experience for Addie. Now second, the space issue; three adults and four children seemed tight to me, so I'm still not sure how it will work having the whole group over, but maybe on days where we know that others will not be able to make it, my house would be a possible solution. Enough room to play is important for kids and adults- not enough room and they are all on top of each other having a miserable time and if you're going through the effort to get yourself to a play-date or clean your house to have others over, you want the experience to be positive.
Now on to our small craft we did today; thanks again to Dr. Jean, we use colored water and marshmallows to make circles on paper. The kids like the activity and really liked it after when they got to eat the marshmallow, however, most did not want to eat the sopping wet marshmallow so we gave them another. This would be a great activity to introduce circles or create small and large circle with different sized marshmallows.

Paper plate pumpkins

Yesterday our mommy group met together for our craft day. I also learned our mommy group has a name, "mommys-r-us"; cute right? I was responsible for making the craft so to Dr. Jean's books I went and found a cute paper plate pumpkin. Thank you Dr. Jean! Here is Addie's:

To make the pumpkin I had the kids start out by tearing orange construction paper and believe it or not the two year old did pretty well. Then I had them choose out the shapes they wanted to make the face and helped with the gluing; I had previously cut out triangles and squares from black paper and the green stems. All and all they turned out pretty cute!

Rainy Morning

Addie and I started off our morning to rain and 32 degrees, so our walk was out of the question. Instead I thought I would create an activity for Addie to do this afternoon. We had planned on going to the library this morning to see the fire department, and as you will clearly see in just a few minutes we didn't not make that either. After talking with my mommy group and almost everyone cancelling on our "field trip" to the library, I was finding it hard to get myself motivated to get moving- not a problem I had when I was working, it seemed like I never stopped moving. Needless to say we had an hour and half to play until the fire department got to the library, so Addie and I did the afternoon work I planned in the morning. And here it is:
Addie has been loving to spell her name, mommy and daddy. We'll she wants Jimmy or me to spell it, and since she is really into letters I gave her a page with the three names spelled on them and then gave her individual letters to match to the names. She loved working with the glue stick and each time the glue got on her fingers, she would say, "ouch" and then wipe it on her shirt (so laundry will happen later). Also, I take these pictures with photo booth and that's why it looks like it's been taken in front of a mirror. 

 Next Addie worked on sorting her shapes. This is a file folder activity I have in her church bag to help keep quiet at church, but it doesn't work well sometimes because she shouts out the shape as she puts it in the pocket. Oh well, the positive side is at least she knows them.

Next we worked on the letter A. I gave her a green piece of paper with the letter A on it and we had made apples a few weeks ago. She painted brown paper red- partially finger painting and some with a paint brush and then once the paper was dry I cut out apples from them paper. (We were learning the rules of painting- stay in your seat, paint on the paper, simple things). She again was having fun learning about the glue stick and she glued all of the apples on the letter A, then I wrote the letter on each apple.

 Now what we shall do this afternoon I am not sure, but hopefully this rain will stop and we'll be off to the park because I think we will need to run off some energy.

Mommy Group

While the thought is in my head, I thought I would share what types of activities I'm doing with some of the other young mommies in our new town. The ages of our children range from 2-5 and there's a good mix of girls and boys. We meet twice a week and do a craft one day and "field trip" the next; I use the term field trip loosely because sometimes its just to the park for a picnic. Our kids are all at different phases and stages in their development so we try to create crafts that have simple modifications to adjust to their skill level. Here is a few of the crafts that we've done:

Making snails- colored the paper plate, glued pre-cut tissue paper on, then for the body, some kids cut it out themselves and others had their mommy's do it; then it was the same, color, glue and eye on and attach to the paper plate (the shell). 

 Apple Orchard- cut tree trunks from brown paper, and leafy tree tops from green paper, then glued the on a blue piece of paper; some of the older kids could probably do most of that cutting themselves. Then let them use their finger to make apples on their trees; some used their finger and others used their hand. I think you can see a hand print on the middle tree. :)

We've also attempted making playdough and using our playdough books and tools for fun, but the recipe we used was a no cook recipe and did not turn out well; from now on we will be using the cook up and cool it off. The kids did like mixing in the food coloring into their playdough; that part was a little difficult and the two-year-olds needed help manipulating the dough, also their hands were dyed whatever color they happened to choose.

Tambourines- use two paper plates, we decorated them with stickers, but you could use markers, crayons, stamps, or paint (but you would have to wait for that to dry). Then add a few beans and stapled the two plates together; we also added streamers (tissue paper) for some fun. This would be an activity to take outside after and play music to march to or just let them dance and play.

Another really fun one was dipping and eating chocolate dipped strawberries. We did not give the kids hot melted chocolate, we just had the pre-melted chocolate and caramel, so it doesn't taste as good, but the kids seemed to love it. We also gave them sprinkles to roll the strawberries in, which come to think of it we could have used a variety of other items to decorate with, but they seemed happy with what they had.

Now onto field trips:
The apple orchard- we got to see the apple orchard, which they loved running up and down. We also got an apple to taste and saw how the machines work to sort and clean the apples.

 Eileen's Cookies- We went on a tour of the cookie shop and they explained how they make their cookies. After the kids each got to frost and decorate their own cookie which then they immediately consumed happily.

Some of the others were picnics to the park, Cottonmill (which is a larger park with trails, a pond for fishing, play areas and a petting zoo) to see the animals or go on a hike on one the trails, and over to the Archway to feed the fish in the river.

I think I've caught up on everything and I will do my best to keep it posted. When I write it all down I feel like we've been busy.

Intro

For the past five years I have been a teacher in a preschool classroom, sometimes early childhood special education and other times just early childhood, but this summer my family and I moved and I became a stay at home mom to my little two year old and I am expecting another this February. I've kept myself busy with a regular schedule: craft activities, library reading times, mommy groups and everything else that goes into staying at home, but I today as I was talking my morning walk with my daughter I realized how much I actually miss teaching. It's sad to say, but I liked planning out my lesson plans and coming up themes, concepts, activities, songs, cooking and science experiments- so I finally created a blog to put them all on.