Scissor Skills

We wanted to make a birthday card for a friend from church. Without running to the store we decided to see what we could come up with. I took some junk mail and had the kids spot letters and then cut them out. I helped with the fine detail cutting, but they did plenty of cutting also.

Letter Formation

We are talking about the letter I this week. I got the idea from our curriculum book, Abeka 5K, to take pretzel sticks to form letters. We were supposed to only create the letter I, but my kids love trying to make the letters of their name. It was hard to get pictures of each letter they made before they destroyed or eaten, but this was a fun activity and snack!

Cooking with Kids

I have been spending the last few weeks trying to find things that the kids can help me cook in the kitchen to build their skills and confidence. Recently I found this recipe for Pizza Bombs. My kids love eating these. They are Daddy approved. They are also SUPER easy.

My kids are currently five and four. For the most part, if I was okay with mess, they could make these almost completely on their own.

You can teach your kids so much by cooking. I am trying to be okay with the mess and the extra time. This time we made the Pizza Bombs the kids worked on their cutting skills and cut our cheese and meat (I substituted sandwich meat for pepperonis because it was what I had). 

You can teach them how to measure and talk about fractions. You can practice fine motor skills and abilities. You can just get messy!

Cook with your kids!

Fine Motor Skills

I used to be really into scrapbooking. I have gotten away from it as my time is used elsewhere. I recently decluttered the supplies I had, but I decided to hold on the all the paper punches and silly scissors. My thought was that they could be fun art supplies for my kids.

We have been getting them out every couple weeks. I let the kids go nuts with the punchers, scissors, paper, and glue. This is what we did today.

My kids really enjoy this and it keeps them busy for at least one to two hours. This is something that they can do almost completely on their own while I make dinner in the next room. I don't always let them have the scissors on their own, but the punchers aren't going to hurt too much.

Easter Necklace Craft

I found this free printable from the Teachers Pay Teachers site and printed off the packet as a Easter activity for my kids to do. Easter Printable

In this pack there is a sheet of Easter eggs to color. I decided to take that a step further and make it a full craft.

We colored the eggs. Then cut them out. I let them punch a hole. Then we put them on a string with some beads.

This kept them busy, but also helped them work on fine motor skills. I used some large plastic needles with yarn. I had both of these around my house, you could make it work with just some string you have in the junk drawer. My kids are very interested in learning to sew and I have gathered a few supplies to work on teaching them so I had these in my sewing stash.

I thought about using a cereal instead of beads, but decided we could use beads today and maybe make a cereal necklace tomorrow. The idea was that I want bright spring colors and the beads I had worked well for this.

Idea of the day: Recycling cards and paper products

I have a lot of stuff come into the house that I don't really need to keep forever, but I hate just throwing it away. So I've started a pile of things I can easily give my daughter to cut, draw on, etc.

I'd gotten a thank you with an order recently and decided it would be perfect for her to practice cutting lines.

Not everything needs to come from a shiny, new workbook to be useful in building skills!

Get Outside

Today, in an effort to enjoy the weather and be productive, the kids and I decided to wash the car. We are currently stuck home and I need to keep busy. My husband's car needed to be washed after a family road trip almost two months ago. The car wash didn't do a good job so we were waiting until it was warm enough to do it in the front yard. Today was the day.

I told the kids if they took a nap we could play in the water today. They agreed and when they woke up we got our sponges, the hose, and the water table out. I told the kids they could help scrub the car with specific clothes and as long as they stayed in front of me. I also gave them the option to play in the water table instead of working.

I was able to get the car scrubbed and the kids helped a bit, but mostly they played. This is okay! It worked well! We spent over an hour and half playing in the water and being outside! Sometimes this is all kids need. Just. Go. Outside.

I don't have pictures since I was playing in the water too, but you can imagine about how it looked with a mama and two kids in the front yard!

Resource of the Day: Learning at the Primary Pond

This one is a little more advanced but everyone's in the same boat right now during Covid-19. So, check out resources at Learning at the Primary Pond:
 https://learningattheprimarypond.com/

If you missed the other similar resources:

Resource of the day: KindergartenMom

Free printables!
https://kindergartenmom.com/FreeKindergartenPrintablesMobile?fbclid=IwAR2yBTmyMg2r8jHPCNI7xW1zFS8YTkmy-PxkLoZu0DzmYF9qZ8YtqZ2TiHA

Alphabet and numbers "quilt tiles"

https://preschoolmom.com/preschool-resources/classroom-quilt-coloring-pages/

So far one of my favorite resources is Totschooling!
Free printables galore -
http://www.totschooling.net/

Craft: A plate of food craft

While this was originally an Abeka craft, we replicated one for little brother.

The peas were just hole punches, and it was a really good fine motor skill for them to glue down all of those. Ironically the older one got carried away with the butter on her mashed potatoes while the younger one followed the directions. You could probably pretty easily imagine and create all kinds of different foods. And it's pretty easy to draw a plate. As you can see the older child drew the younger one a fork, knife, and spoon as well.

I have been thinking about the fact that you could use a similar craft to illustrate vegetables, meat, and fruit... or a lot of different concepts to do with food and having a healthy balance even.

Ways to Mix Things Up

After doing so many worksheets or workbooks we need to mix up our learning. I ordered these pouches to use for dry erase markers. We use them for different worksheets or just for coloring.

We do all sorts of things in these pouches. In the top photo we were working with letters and the bottom we were practicing making patterns. 

We haven been working on some preschool workbooks. The kids have been getting board, but I want to finish it before we start something new. I ripped out the remaining pages and we put them in these pouches. It was like whole new activity for them to do. We have since nearly finished the box and have prepared to move on to new books!

(NO affiliate links)

Idea of the day: indoor outdoor scavenger hunts

We saw these on Facebook and already did the indoor scavenger hunt. You could of course modify them and make them longer or harder or fit what you have.

Counting

Counting

This was a pretty simple print out but you could almost take any icon and make a line of it and leave a space at the end for putting a number. Instead of gluing them, we did them again and again and again until we lost most of the numbers.

Science Time!

The other day the kids and I were outside just playing in the front yard, trying to let the minutes tick by as we were waiting for dinner time to get closer. It had been raining so different creatures were out and my kids were enjoying looking at and learning about each creature.

Other than just insects we saw worms and a salamander.

Both kids enjoyed playing with the worms by trying to pick them up them putting them in the grass where they were safer instead of on the cement. 

The salamander on the other hand was something that all of us wanted to learn more about. We started by using my phone to Google Lens the salamander to figure out what exactly it was. I have only ever seen black salamanders previous to this, so I was really not sure what were were looking at. Once we got that figured out, the kids wanted to learn more. 

We went inside and fell down the rabbit hole. I did some minor Google searches to learn about the salamander. Things like where they normally live, how they grow, what they eat, what eats them, etc. We got to a point where the kids had soaked up the information they wanted, but they wanted to see some move and watch how they act. So on to YouTube. I pulled up some videos and we learned how salamanders live in captivity. The salamander videos soon turned into snake videos. The snake videos showed things like how snakes lay eggs and how eggs are incubated after they are laid. We soon found ourselves watching videos about an alligator that was a pet. 

In all, we spent at least two, if not three, hours learning about creatures just because we went outside for twenty minutes. A lot of the time I don't really push my kids to ask questions about the things outside. Most of the time when we are outside I want to have my mental break. I am not saying that this is bad, but we need to remember that this is a great place to start learning about completely new things. 

Go out side. Walk in the woods or in your grass. What can you find in your back yard that you can learn about? Don't be afraid to answer the questions or find the answers. Allow your kids the chance to ask the questions even if you don't know how to answer them. Show them how to research and learn. Being on the computer or screens isn't the end of the world. Now, did we need to spend like two hours watching videos, no. But that's besides the fact.