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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Our Christmas Advent Activities

This year I decided to do a special advent activity every day with the kids (besides the chocolate) so we could talk about the real meaning of Christmas. I have replaced our normally daily Bible lessons with the How to Celebrate Advent with a Jesse Tree ebook from Feels Like Home. I love the daily lessons since they are very appropriate for young children. Each day you have a verse, a song, a scripture and an ornament that corresponds to the daily theme. In order to use the book you need a tree and ornaments. I printed mine from A Holy Experience and glued them to red and green paper and then laminated them for durablity.


The kids have been enjoying this acitivity and I know that they are learning the true meaning behind Christmas.

December Christmas Sensory Box

Our sensory box for the month of December is Christmas! I decided to use red and green shredded paper for the bottom, since it is safe for my little one and less messy than the last couple of boxes!

What is included in the box:
Plastic red and gold ornaments (The Dollar Store)
Tiny Trees (Hobby Lobby)
Candy Canes- I pulled these off garland (The Dollar Store)
Jingle Bells
Two stuffed snowmen

This has already been a hit, but have already found shredded paper on the floor. I am so excited that both my older kids are old enough to do fun Christmas activities. We have started doing other Christmas themed activities this week and I plan on sharing them every week.

Here is a look at last year's winter sensory box. The bottom of the box was regular rice, cotton balls, pom poms and a little bit of batting (think snow!) I also added several winter friends and buttons.


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November Construction Sensory Box

I know that November is almost over, but I never got a chance to post this earlier since my camera cord was missing until a couple days ago! Our theme this month was construction. Here are pictures of inside the box and all the contents:


What is included in the box:

The bottom is oatmeal (safe for my toddler- he won't put it in his mouth like the rocks)
Construction vehicles (five in a pack from Wal-Mart)
Large cone from The Dollar Store
Small misc signs and orange cement mixer from The Dollar Store
Medium sized cone and sign from miscellaneous toys

The kids loved this but unfortunately like most sensory boxes the bottom part ended up on the floor (but the oatmeal is very easy to clean-up since it can be vacuumed!

Homeschool Revamp

After a couple of months into homeschooling I realized I have taken on a undetaking and have decided (out of necessity) to scale it back. I was preparing a new snack every day for our letter theme, a new book, a new craft, an activity for our theme and a Bible activity. It got to be too much since everything that I was doing was ideas I was coming up with or ideas I found on other blogs that I researched for hours. So while I am trying to still do fun activities I am trying not to put so much pressure on myself. I have bought a Bible cirriculum that so far (one lesson into it!) I am very happy with it. It has activities that are already there to go along with the theme. We are using Favorite Bible Heroes by Rainbow Publishers.

I am trying to use fun activities for preschool that go along with the letter theme, but instead of spending hours coming up with them or researching them I have decided to go with the activities from three of my favorite blogs: 1+1+1=1, Confessions of a Homeschooler, and Mama Jenn. They have awesome printables and fun activities. Carissa at 1+1+1=1 also has new kindergarden printables (Angry Birds is already a favorite) and great sight word printables. I would encourage anyone homeschooling young children to check-out these blogs. I am hoping to start-up my weekly re-cap again soon (I am going to have to find my camera first- as it was lost in the move).

Button Sorting Busy Activity

My three year old daughter absolutely loves this activity! It was so easy to put together and occupies her for a while (aren't those the best type of busy ideas??) I had a bunch of leftover buttons from my hairbow making days and the tray is from her Melissa and Doug bead set. She can sort the buttons by color, size and shape. The tray is really fun to use since it has a lot of sections that are different sizes and keeps the buttons (mostly) contained.

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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