Down by the Sea!

Our oceans and beaches week was cut a bit short due to a very unexpected hospital stay on my part.  All of our unfinished activities will be saved for some Parents' Night Out adventures, but here is a quick look at our three days of sea fun!

We used dot paints to create colorful fish that can be found here.

We created some sea creature crayon rubbings with these plates.

How about some adorable hand print fish??  Absolutely!!

No ocean week would be complete with some actual water play.  The children were much neater about this than I expected, I had towels galore on hand, just in case!

My Pre-K kiddos got some hands-on learning activities courtesy of Homeschool Creations.

 Pom-Pom Tweezing

 Fish Counting

Tracing

And we also got some fine-motor water exploration with a pipette activity. Check out the cool shell-shaped bathtub applique!

Up Next: Space Week!!!

Summer Fun and LOTS of Learning!

We had a very busy first week of Summer Camp here at Seedlings.  I was so busy, in fact, that I neglected to capture all of the awesomeness with the camera.  I did get a few great shots, though, and I'm excited to share them with you!!

Everyone loves play dough, so we started our week with some glittery 'sand' play dough and a few beachy toys.

 We read a Let's Find Out classroom magazine from Scholastic and created our very own sun-shaped suncatcher.

My adorable toddler class created watermelon art that you can see in this post from last summer.

Meanwhile, my Pre-K kiddos cut and painted another sun using a plastic wrap painting technique I found here.  We skipped the extra sheet of paper and opted for some extra cutting practice instead.

Quite possibly my favorite project this week was our ice cream cones.  Usually, I do this project using shaving cream paint as I did last summer, but this year, I purchased foam paint and decided to give it a whirl.  The children LOVED it and it looked almost good enough to eat!!

And speaking of good things to eat, my Pre-K class is 100% responsible for their own snack preparation.  Monday is bread day, so I created a pictorial recipe for the children to follow.  You can create your own with pictures of the brands you use, but if you are lacking a bread recipe, this one is pretty close to the one we use these days.

Wednesday is veggie soup day, so the first activity of the day is chip-chopping lots of delicious veggies - some fresh from our garden!

And after a couple of hours of hard work and play, we are rewarded with this:

So delicious!!

Friday is usually Fruit Salad day, but this week, our Let's Find Out and an older Scholastic My Big World magazine all contained ice cream activities, so I sprung for a real ice cream maker and we were saved from shaking our usual Ice Cream in a Bag and got to enjoy a tasty cool treat to finish out our week of summer fun!

Due to an unfortunate incident in our garden, we ended up with one of our sunflowers inside in a vase and we tried still life with oil pastels.  The children were captivated by the new art material and I can't wait to continue using the oil pastels with a variety of different techniques.

I'm looking forward to another 7 weeks of fun and learning with my little Seedlings!!

 

Dr. Seuss in Preschool!

Everyone loves Dr. Seuss and we spent a week reading, creating and snacking, all in Dr. Seuss style!

Take a peek:

We started the week with Dr. Seuss' classic The Cat in the Hat. 

 We spiced things up and created the zany stripes on our hats by painting with balls.  Mix it up, try marbles, golf balls, tennis balls....bowling balls??

And some Cat in the Hat kabobs! Yummy! And super-healthy!

Next, we tackled Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

We thought up our own thinks after getting some Seuss-ified inspiration from the book!

And we had a delightful snack of 'Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top'. Shhh, it's really vanilla pudding. :)

Green Eggs and Ham is one of my very favorites to read to the little ones and I also love serving up my own green eggs and ham....well, the eggs are green...something about green ham just seems kind of wrong to me. :)

The Lorax has a serious message delivered in a bright, colorful, rhyming package perfect for the kiddos.

No one can forget the amazingly beautiful Truffula Trees in the book, and when I saw this idea to make our own, I knew we had to try it.

We made take-home truffula trees with craft sticks and tissue paper.

Don't these look delicious?  I thought so too, when I saw them here.  And the kids devoured them!

We ended the week with Fox in Socks.

 I made some blue goo, but neglected to take pictures, so I borrowed this one from here. There is also a handy recipe on that site if you choose to make your own blue goo! 

I missed out on pictures of our 'cheese trees' for snack - hey, it was Friday - but just pop a cube of cheese on a pretzel stick and voila! Tasty!

The Seedlings loved our fun sock matching game.  Each kiddo got a colorful sock, then I hid the matching sock somewhere in the classroom.  Ready, set, search!

So much Seuss-y fun this week!!

We're Going Places! Transportation Activities for Preschool

February was all about transportation at Seedlings!  Here is a look at what we were up to:

'Road' play dough with cars

Lots of vehicles in the classroom and tons of team city-building.

Transportation timeline.

Painting with cars.

Cars, blocks and....shaving cream? Sure! Why not?

Science exploration with homemade parachutes!

Race track flash cards!  Drive your car down the track and watch!

Where did your race car stop?

The kiddos loved this game!

Get driving!!