Sharing Ideas is Fun to Do!
As a Preschool & kindergarten teacher, mother, church teacher & leader, & student, I've taken a lot of ideas from the internet and I thought it would be great to give some back. So this is a collection of ideas, from me to you, that hopefully someone else will find useful and helpful. Please leave me a comment if you like/use my ideas or documents, so I'll know that the blog is being used and that it's a good use of my time! Thanks!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Visiting Teaching Handout
She is a Life Coach, Massage Therapist (and a good one!) and piano and voice coach & instructor, so whether you're in the area (for massage or music instruction), or not (for Life Coaching), feel free to contact her.
Here is her website: http://chantaclair.com/
and here is her blog: http://chantaclair.blogspot.com/
Thanks Mom!
Friday, March 26, 2010
Free Conference Preschool Age Journal
There are a lot of materials out there for conference. But there was a lack of journals/notebooks for my kids' ages. (They're 4 and 2.) Everything was too hard for them. So I created one that was for their level. Hopefully you can make use of it too.
Click the preview below to download the file:
Feel free to share the journal, just please link people here to get it. And if you plan on using it, I'd love to hear about it! Thanks!
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
St. Patrick's Day Ideas
Our Super-Fun St. Patrick's Day
The Green Family
We were going to read and eat Green Eggs and Ham, but Daddy got to come home early so we went to his work with him and out to lunch instead. We got a donut with green sprinkles. Haylee of course loved it.
Haylee played a game where she covered the letter L's with "Lucky Leprechaun" while I sang a song. She loved it and she got them all right!
Haylee did this activity where she helped the Leprechaun get to his pot of gold by tracing his rainbow with colors. She's going to be a tough one to get homework done with. Eesh!
She loves doing stuff like this, including her "scapbooking." She's going to be so much fun doing arts and crafts with... Mamma's little girl.
We played a game where she built a rainbow while I sang a song about the color names and ordinal numbers that she was putting up... "The red part goes up first..."
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Preschool Christmas Mini-Unit
For my December week of preschool, we focused on the ‘Santa’ etc. aspects of Christmas. Here are some ideas for you.
We started the lesson with a book of course. (I ALWAYS start with a book. It connects reading to everything else. Children who love reading = good readers = smart children.) I don’t remember exactly which book, but it was one of the classic Christmas stories like Up On The Housetop or Jolly Old St. Nicholas or something. This is to introduce them to Christmas traditions and our Christmas culture.
The girls used Christmas shaped cookie cutters to dip in red, green and ‘gold’ (yellow) paint. This is a printing technique which is a process art activity. (I’ll have to get on my soap box about that one some day.) They had a blast.
They put ‘sprinkles’ (glitter) on them while they were still wet, just for a little ‘bling.’ Little girls love bling – especially glitter. Gave it an extra punch of fun for them.
After their art activity, they had snack: a simple ambrosia salad, complete with marshmallows (a Christmas treat since we don’t often use sweets in preschool.) (This is a super-easy snack – mix canned fruit with mini marshmallows and acini di pepe - those tiny little pasta balls, and that’s it! No other sugar or whipped cream is needed.)
After that we did our letter activity. The letter was R, so we did a ‘Reindeer’ activity. Each girl received two letter ‘R’s and a die cut of a reindeer (cut on my cricut machine.) We talked about the letter R and how Reindeer started with it and I modeled the instructions to glue one R in the box and one in front of the word ‘eindeer’ to complete it and we talked about how the letter R completed the incomplete word. Then of course, they got to decorate their reindeer. Click on the image of the handout to download it.
Our final activity was to make snow. This was a huge hit with the kids when I was teaching kindergarten and of couse, the girls loved it too. This is just simple snow powder from Home Depot – it comes in a little tin.
Put a teaspoon of the powder in a bowl for each child.
Add the correct amount of water. Stir it up.
And play! (Remember, play is a child’s work.) This is such an awesome sensory activity.
Here are a few bonus ideas:
On our other preschool day, the shape was a star and we were still doing Santa, so we made these adorable Santa stars, adapted from an idea I saw somewhere on the WWW. Feathers, yarn, a pompom, wiggly eyes, batting some triangles and a rectangle make for a very cute Santa star ornament.
I came up with a really fun idea for our snack. Had I prepared it better ahead of time, I would have used cute Christmas bowls, but alas, I didn’t. It was still fun though. I put little bowls of snack foods (again, with a little Christmas treat) on a lazy susan and let the girls make their own snack mix. They got to add the Christmas M&Ms and that made it really cute and festive.
And this last idea is from the Preschool Christmas Party at one of the other mom’s houses (Thanks Jana!)
The girls made snowmen out of mini chocolate chips, frosting, hershey’s kisses, fruit by the foot (scarf) & pretzels. A toothpick is holding the snowman together. How adorable right?!
Hope you enjoyed these activity ideas and can use them. I’m sure they can be adapted to other things as well. Please let me know if you find this useful.
Merry Christmas in March!!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Groundhog's Day
Today, is February 2... Groundhog's Day. In case finding out whether Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow or not, wasn't on your top ten list of things to do today, I'll tell you. He DID see his shadow, which means 6 more weeks winter is on the way.
Here are some pictures of the fun things we did to celebrate the day:
Every good 'unit' starts with BOOKS! I love books! I use them to introduce every topic I teach. Today, we read these two that I made (actually, my aide's helped) when I was teaching. The first one is a class book we made where each student made a page and we bound them all together in a book.
(When you click on the link, don't just save the image that comes up. Click 'download' at the top right corner to download a full quality PDF of the activity.)
PRACTICE SHEETS