Our Christmas Preschool Boxes

My preschooler is taking the next couple of weeks off from studying her letters (I will be reviewing her letters with her) so I have made her several Christmas activities to use for the rest of the month.

Christmas card kit

Button Christmas Tree (inspired by Counting Coconuts)

Decorating a Christmas tree (my printer is running out of yellow ink!)

"Cookie Dough" Playdough

Christmas Sensory Box

Felt Friends (inspired by Counting Coconuts)

Sorting Christmas Erasers (inspired by Counting Coconuts)

Tweezing and Tonging Bows (inspired by Counting Coconuts)

Gingerbread Man Counting Mats (printed from Along the Way)

Cutting Practice

Christmas Stickers and Paper

Beading red, green and white beads on gold pipe cleaners

Christmas letter recognition using Christmas erasers (printed from 1+1+1=1)

I am also giving her cookie cutters to trace around and color, which is not pictured.

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This Week in School, Letter I and Christmas Theme

This week we were easing back into school after the Thanksgiving break. Everytime we have a break I find I have a hard time getting motivated. We have a few weeks until Christmas break so I am hoping that we can get a good start before Christmas break!

Preschool
This week we studied the letter I. My daughter did not have quite as many letter associated activities as I would normally have for her. She did Do A Dot for the Letter I and Getting Ready for I from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Bins
She also had many Christmas themed bins this week.

Sorting Christmas erasers

Tonging Christmas bows (from Counting Coconuts)

Matching Shapes to Flashcards and a Christmas peg in the hole game

"Felt Friends" (from Counting Counting Coconuts)

Beading Jingle Bells and a puzzle

Other Christmas Themed Activities

In addition to our Christmas themed bins we also started our Christmas sensory box and our Jesse Advent Tree. Please see the post for the sensory box here and the Advent Tree here.

Next week we will be studying the letter J and adding additional Christmas activities.

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Fun Busy Activities

My husband was relocated a few months ago and is currently living 8 hours away from us, so we travel to see him about every couple of weeks. Since we spend a lot of time in the car (the trip is 8 hours for my husband to drive, but I have not been able to drive it in less than 9 1/2 hours with the kids- most trips are well over 10 hours). My children are 18 months, 3 1/2 and 5 so they cannot occupy themselves! I hate having them watch hours of movies on the trip so every time we travel I try to put together new busy activities for them (when we are finally moved down with him and do not have to make such frequent trips the activities will be homeschooling busy bags!) Here are our activity bags from our last trip:

All the bags neatly in a large storage bag (they did not look like this after we arrived!)

Two large superheroes from a garage sale

Barrette and hair band matching from My Montessori Journey

Markers, crayons, construction paper and foam stickers

Laminated paper dolls (they have velcro on the back of the clothes and on the front of the dolls), they also have magnets on the back of the dolls to stick to metal cookie sheets.

My little gnome dolls (you can see my post here)
Clip art pictures printed and lamintated with magnets on the back

Homemade lacing cards (you can find the printables here and here)

Pasta lacing on pipe cleaners

Easy reader books for my son

My children really enjoyed these acitivities, but I will admit whenever I bring them a bunch of activities in the car all they want to do is watch television but whenever I only bring a few they want more- I can never win!!

School Week 4, Letter D

This week my 19 month old played with:

Baby Einstein Neighborhood Animals, a soft fabric book about Bible animals, Fisher Price Noah's Ark and some sensory blocks.


Preschool:

Here are our preschool bins:

Fishing game, Scooping beads (both are from here but the fishing pole is an old toy I repurposed)

Sorting Fall leaves (Dollar Store), Pushin pins into foam

Letter D objects, Double Trouble Shape Match (from here)

She also did some pages from an old preschool book my son did not finish last year.

The letter D:

Do-A- Dot (from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

"Dirt Cups" (AKA pudding, crushed oreos and gummy worms)

We also made daffodils out of muffin liners and pipe cleaners and read the following books:

Go Dog Go (Eastman)

Daisy Head Mayzie (Seuss)

Dragon Pizzeria (Mary Morgan)

Dog Breath (Dav Pilkey)

Dogs Don't Do Ballet (Anna Kemp)

Kindergarten:

This week we finished up our fall theme. We did the following crafts:

Fall Mobile (courtesy of the library)


Leaf Rubbings

Yarn Pumpkins

Fall Trees

We read the following fall books:

Fall Leaves Fall (Zoe Hall)

The Scarecrows Hat (Ken Brown)

The Apple Pie Tree (Zoe Hall)

In Bible we memorized Psalms 37:4: Depart from evil and do good.

We studied Noah's Ark and made a collage (I did not realize how big these animals were!)

We also used Mama Jenn's color wheel when we talked about the rainbow.

I am linking this post here:

School Week 3, the Letter C

Preschool

Here are this week's boxes:

Transferring jingle bells (a favorite!), Matching the letter

Clothesline

Fall Leaf Sort (all items from the Dollar Store)

Letter "C" Items, puzzle

These are the crafts we did this week:

Cotton ball "clouds" on the letter "C" (printable from here

We made cupcake crayons (250 degrees for 15 minutes, let set until cool remove the paper and then freeze until set up).

Pom Pom catepillar (my three year old got crazy with the pom-poms!), Do A Dot Caterpillars

We read the following books for the letter C:

Curious George- H.A. Rey

The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Eric Carle

Chicken Soup with Rice- Maurice Sendak (one of my favorite stories from my days in First Grade!)

Caps for Sale- Esphyr Slobokina

Harold and the Purple Crayon- Crockett Johnson

Kindergarten

Bible

Our Bible Lesson this week was Adam and Eve disobeyed God. I did not have any crafts for the children, but we read through the lessons in Ken Hamm's A is for Adam.

At the end of the week we used the magnets from So Simple So Sweet to have the children re-tell the lesson.

Fall

We did two fall activities this week. First we made apples from yarn. They were adorable the directions can be found here.

We also made a fall pumpkin scene. The first day we sprinkled the seeds (spices), the second day our vine grew (ribbon), the third day our green pumpkins emerged (little green pom-poms) and the fourth and final day our pumpkins turned big and orange (pom-poms). The original idea can be found here. We used our gnomes instead of Calico Critters (we don't own any but own Maple Towns from the 80's but I am not ready to give them to my kids yet!)

We read books about apples and pumpkins as well as:

How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?- Margaret McNamara and G. Brian Karas

Leaf Man- Lois Ehert

Reading

We did a couple of reinforcing activities:

Pumpkin Poke Cards

Sight Word Cookie Flip

We had a crazy week. We started our week on Sunday (I would never do this, but my husband came home for a couple days and I did not want to have to worry about school while he was here). It was a good week overall and we accomplished pretty much everything we needed to. We were also able to attend a preschool song and storytime at the library (something that we have not done for a couple years, and the kids really enjoyed it!)

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