First day of preschool- Take 2

We're back at Preschool on Mondays at our house!  I love teaching this age.  I love how learning is fun and they love to learn!  Like most preschools, we began with a lesson in APPLES.  I've added and changed a few things from last year but have the same little cuties. 

 I had to take a 'first day' picture of  course

 

And if you make them take a nice picture, chances are they are going to make you take a silly picture too.....

      

One thing I have added this year, is writing numbers.  We started with good ol' #1 today...nice and easy for even little Emma to do on her own.  I found a little poem that says "Straight line down and then you're done, that's the way we make a ONE"  

So here is their own 'Ones" on their dry erase boards..............

Our story to go with our Apple theme was "Ten Apples Up on Top"  We talked about how silly and hard it would be to walk around with 10 apple on our head.  We got out an apple and tried to walk while balancing just one apple on our head.    Not easy to do!

And then of course an apple snack.  Apples with Peanut butter and apple juice.  We talked about the different parts of the apple and cut it open to find the seeds.

 Then this fun little craft.  I could only take an 'after' picture because my hands were covered in red paint 'during'.  It says "How many apples up on top?"  We glued a picture of them at the bottom of the paper and then stamped an apple in red paint and counted how many apples we could put on top of our picture.  Note:  Apple stamping works much better if you can actually cut the apple perfectly straight.....otherwise your stamps turn out funky like ours :(

 

Then some letter and number tracing.  On a piece of paper I wrote a "1" and "one" and on the other side an "A" and "a".  Slip it inside a sheet protector and voila an instant traceable dry erase page.

 That's all for today.  We will be doing a few more apple things next week too :)

A lesson in peace

We've been going over the fruits of the spirit for our preschool lessons and this week we are on 'peace.'  I unfortunately had completely forgotten to get out my camera for our past two lessons on 'love' and 'joy' and therefore did not blog those lessons.  I'm a very sub-par blogger, I know.

So what is peace?  And how on earth do you teach that to a preschooler/toddler?!  It certainly was not easy, as I realized I really didn't know much about peace myself. But if anything, they now have another powerful heart changing word added to their vocabulary, that they do know comes from Jesus.

Peace to me, used to be those things in life that just felt good and brought me relaxation and no worries.  Like a nice hot bubble bath, a quiet, clean house, a back massage, etc.  And although those things are peaceful, they eventually end!  The bath will get cold and at some point you have to get out, the kids will wake up from nap and it will no longer be quiet, nor clean, the massage has to end at some point or you will go bankrupt!  True peace comes only from Jesus.  It's nothing you can buy and it's nothing you can earn....you can only receive it from our gracious God.  And the best part is that it never goes away even through the trials and junk that this life brings us.

I explained the best I could that peace is freedom from worries.  And the only reason we can have peace is because Jesus is our peace.  He died to take away our worries and anxieties so we could rest in him.  So their verse for his week is "For he himself is our peace" Eph 2:14

We read the story about Jesus and the storm and acted it out.  I don't have pictures for this because it's really hard to teach and take pictures to share!  The kids each got two blue streamers (water) and we pretended to get on a boat.  When Jesus fell asleep they waved their streamers all around like it was storming and we all FREAKED OUT.  "What are we going to do!  We are going to die!  Jesus wake up!" And when we woke Jesus up he said "PEACE" and the storm stopped.

Now, I don't think they were able to make the connection that Jesus give us peace in our 'storms' in life, because kids are very literal and a storm to them is thunder, lightning, and rain and that's it.  But it sure connected in my heart and was much needed when this happened soon after the lesson:

Yep, it is still possible to have peace when an expensive vase gets knocked over and shatters on the floor.  Peace (and happiness for that matter) afterall, cannot be bought, right? 

 

 

 

 

I found the idea for this craft here.  We made peace candles.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this craft or not, because candles don't really have anything to do with  true peace (more so peacefulness I guess) but I liked that it is something we could put up in the house and we can all see that word PEACE as we go throughout our day.  So here's what we did.  We colored a piece of white tissue paper.  I put a cross and the word Peace on first and then they drew pictures around it.

I wrapped their picture around a white pillar candle and then wrapped the candle in wax paper

We got out the blow dryer and blasted the candle on high heat.  This caused the ink from the marker to melt into the candle.

Next, we took off the wax paper and voila....a peace candle made just by them!

So if you're looking for Peace, don't go to Target they don't sell it (seriously, I've looked).  And don't go to the library, you can't check it out.  If you want true peace look to Jesus and accept him as the one that died for you.

Life on Wednesdays

This is life at my house on Wednesdays when I get the opportunity to share life with 2 additional sweet children.  And although I am outnumbered 4 to 1 I love to see the sweet friendships forming between these 4 precious kiddos!  This blogpost is well overdue......so much in fact that one of them doesn't come anymore now that it's summer time.  But here's a look back at the past few Wednesdays......

Sand is a curious thing for little Ella.  She doesn't love to play in it, but more likes to watch sand dump out of things when she picks them  up :)

Fish and bugs in the sensory table.  too eat or not to eat????? hmmm

Tessa hard at work checking her email.  One of her FAVORITE toys at my house!

Lunch time!  2 chairs, one booster seat, one high chair and a really messy floor....

the girls appearing as though they take turns niceley ;)

My fav pic!  All the girls figuring out how to put their bubble wands in the bubble container.

Can't forget about Blake.  He's just teaching Tessa how to hopscotch while wearing rainboots ;)

Bubbles and rainboots.......lol

Tessa and "buddy" checking out the bubble machine :)  She LOVES going outside!

Emma watching the bubbles

Love this sweet little face!

Ella checking out the bubble machine, not quite sure what she thinks.  But we do now know that bubbles inside are not okay for Ella.  Bubbles outside however are ok. 

A Rain Lesson

Our lesson today focused on 'rain'. We talked about Spring weather and why the rain is important.




For Craft, we made fingerprint rain drops (these kids love to paint!) and added an umbrella for the finishing touch.

Can't say I had anything exciting for snack time unless you think graham crackers are exciting. We did have an exciting Science experiment though......

We talked about the water cycle. I found a simple picture showing the water cycle here. I didn't go into depth obviously, but they did learn the word 'evaporate'

Then we made it rain up in here.......

We used cottonballs (clouds) to soak up the ground water. The kids then squeezed their cloud to see the water come back out. We repeated our own water cycle over, and over, and over, and over, until the clouds began finding other things to rain on...like the floor.

I don't have pictures of the worksheet activities we did, but you can find them here if interested. We did the letter lightning match and the dot to dot umbrella page. I love this website for finding worksheets to go along with our lessons!

Enjoy

It's St. Patty's week! I love Holidays, there's just so many fun activities to do! It was hard to pick which activities to do, but I guess it's only Monday. Hopefully, I'll have a few more things to add later in the week (if I make it to the store first!)

For our craft we made Shamrock window clings (yes, I realize that's not a window!) It's also great magnet free art to go on the fridge that my 'Wednesday crew' can't take off :)
We stuck these shamrock shapes I cut out onto contact paper and the littles used their fine motor skills to put little pieces of tissue paper inside the shamrock.

Can't have a St. Patty's unit without a good hunt for gold! I hid lots of coins around our basement and set the little leprechauns free.





Here's the leprechauns counting their gold.

The cupboard was pretty bare today, so this was a very impromptu snack idea. I had hoped to do something like corn pops (they look like gold) or fruity cheerios (colors of the rainbow) or good ol' Lucky Charms but we don't typically have those on hand and I didn't make it to the store so opted for a healthier snack of vanilla yogurt with a tiny bit of green food coloring. They stirred up their yogurt and got quite a kick out of watching it turn green.

Finally, I printed and cut out these pattern cards I found here. We worked on an AB pattern using gold/leprechauns and then rainbows/shamrocks.

And now I'm REALLY craving a Shamrock shake from McDonalds!!! Happy St. Patty's week!

A new tooth for Blake

We had a minor accident involving a floor and a 3 year olds face this week, causing his front tooth to break.....

We made a quick trip to the dentist for x-rays and bad news. The chip was so high that the nerve in his tooth was exposed which meant we had two options. Option 1: pull the tooth which is I'm sure painful, insert a spacer and have no front tooth for 4 years (about the time it would take for his adult tooth would come in). Option 2: remove the nerve and tissue from that tooth (similar to a root canal) and place a cap over the tooth, which again is obviously painful. To top it off, we had to make a decision and get it fixed within 48 hours.

We went for option 2

Here's Blake at the dentist office, rocking some cool spiderman glasses they gave him. I wish I would have gotten a picture of him with Dr. Sarah. She is an AWESOME dentist by the way!

A little nitrous, A lot of prayer, and 45 minutes later we walked (Blake bounced) out of the office with a new tooth and some very special prizes he bought with his dentist 'token'

Here's Blake showing off his 'new' tooth and one of his favorite race cars which he likes to call Finn McMissle. Thanks to everyone for your prayers! Everything went so smoothly which was just another showing of God's grace.