Preschool - Week 8 - Katy No-Pocket

This week we read Katy No-Pocket. A classic story of a pouchless mama kangaroo looking for a way to carry her joey.  What a great science lesson in disguise! We talked about marsupials, many different animal habitats, and names for daddy/mommy/baby animals.  There are also opportunities to do some counting, some "find its" and even talking about not crying and giving up when you face a problem. (She's a very emotional mama kangaroo...)

This week, I took a departure from the now standard magnet/clothespin/etc. activities. This week we did something new - we made a LAP BOOK.  A lap book is a file folder that you decorate with things that pertain to a subject that you are studying.  HomeschoolShare.com has a ton of these that are free to print and use.  We did most of the activities from their Katy No-Pocket lap book pdf.  I just printed these out on cardstock, except the title page, which I printed on regular paper.

 E colored the title page, then we glued it to half the lap book front, cut it along the edge and glued the other side on.

She did lots of cutting:

Gluing:

Sticker-making:

Sticker peeling:

Matching:

Coloring:

(This is not part of the lap book, but was a cute coloring page. 

The joey fits into the mama's pocket! )

Sounding out K words and inserting them into a cute K pocket:

Enjoying the fruits of our labor:

Preschool - Week 7 - Jenny's Surprise Summer

Last week we read this great book - Jenny's Surprise Summer.  I loved the illustrations. It was a simple, but sweet story with lots of great opportunities for discussion and learning.  We also did some "find it" activities on the pages, counted things on other pages, and talked about beach/ocean animals. E loved this book!

There were several kinds of birds in the book. I recognized the robins and seagulls, but had to ask my mom to identify the others: "The birds in the air are Terns.   They fly over the water and dive into the water to catch fish and eat them.   The birds on the ground are Sandpipers.    You find them on the beach and they peck in the sand to find little creatures that live in the sand and eat them."

As usual, I found some activities to go along with our daily reading.

 A cat magnet page: (Lisey ended up cutting out her cat)

A cat clothespin card:

A math game from homeschoolshare.com. You are supposed to draw a "body part" card and then select the correct number of "cat cards" that fits the body part card. (Not a big hit with E. So far she does not show the excitement and love of math that C had at her age. But that's ok.)

This was a VERY fun activity. In the book, there are pages that the artist has drawn so that you can see both on top of and beneath the water's surface. I drew a similar background on some white paper, and then searched Google images for pictures of the animals we learned about in the book. For example: hermit crabs, mussels, sea stars, sandpipers, seagulls, etc. I printed them out and ran them through my Xyron machine to turn them into stickers.  E helped me cut them out and then placed them on the scene.

She also drew some seashells underwater (not pictured below) and the green glass bottle, just like the book.

Preschool - Week 6 - The Little Rabbit

This week we read The Little Rabbit.  You may or may not have noticed, but I am not doing these in the order of the BFIAR book.  Basically, it's the order of what I can get from my library at what time! :)  E liked this book a lot. Not too long, informative and with a cute story.

Here are some activities we did over the week:

We did a rabbit clothespin card (we've also been reviewing the previous weeks cards as a preparation for sight word memorization):

I made this simple math worksheet to do together, to introduce addition:

I pulled out the deciduous forest animals from our Animal Habitat cards (plus a few other random animals) and I had her pull out the animals that lived in the woods.

I know we did some other activities, but I lost my camera for a few days and now I can't remember... :)

We talked about camouflage (since the wild rabbit was brown and the pet rabbit was white) and I found a ton of really cool pictures on Google images of animal camouflage.  However, E really could care less about it.  I however, thought they were amazing. God is a master creator!