St. Patrick's Day Ideas

This week in preschool we were going to be talking about St. Patrick's Day so I have put together some activities you might be able to do at home.  Each week we are out I will share a post with activities and projects and games you can try at home to break up all the time you will be spending indoors.  I hope you are able to get outside sometimes too and will try to include a few things for those occasions as well.

While we hope this time at home doesn't last too long, rest assured we are prepared to help you e-learn with your preschooler!  None of this stuff is mandatory but as one mom to many other parents/caregivers sometimes we need a little help coming up with new things to do with our kiddos.  Enjoy!

If you have a zip-loc bag, sharpie and either some paint or food coloring and shaving cream you can do this first activity: Mixing colors to create shamrocks.  Simply draw your best shamrock on a zip-loc bag with a sharpie then squirt a bit of yellow and a bit of blue paint into the bag.  Seal it up so there is no air (don't want it to pop) then give the bag to your child to rub and move the paint until it mixes to create green and then to make it more challenging, have them move that paint only into the shamrock!  If you don't have paint at home you can use shaving cream and yellow and blue food coloring to do that same thing.  Once you do this activity, if you have other colors at home, try mixing them in bags too!  This activity is great for those of you are not fans of a 'mess' in your home.

Another way to work on science and math is to draw a variety of circles on wax paper.  Make some of them large, some small and some medium all over the paper then using either an eye dropper or a straw cut in half (so it's easier to handle in preschool hands) have the child drop water into each circle and count how many drops it took to fill each one.  To alter it to St. Patrick's day, just make the water yellow and have it be Leprechaun coins!  See this site for details.

Our kiddos have always LOVED making Magic Milk.  This works with just water as a liquid base too however the white of the milk makes the rainbow really pop!

Another game/project the children love to do is all about finding things a leprechaun loves; items that are either green or yellow!  If you have small items, have your child go through them and if they can be glued down, make process art out of them.  If you really are prepared for the challenge, have your child search your home for green and/or yellow items and see how big a pile they can make of these items.  Pair this with the Leprechaun Trap and you are set for at least an hour!

Using a CD or DVD laying around and a flashlight from your phone or an actual flashlight you just need a white wall or sheet to make the magic of rainbows!  See this site for more details!

Using anything from around the home, old shoe boxes, stickers, toys, toilet paper tubes, foil, etc. you can build your very own leprechaun trap!  This is STEM learning at it's finest and always has been a classroom favorite!  See this website for more crazy fun ways to build traps for more ideas on this.

Still not enough stuff to do?  Check out this site for St. Pat's Day stuff or my Pinterest page for all sorts of resources.

I will post once a week after spring break should we still be out of school.  Hopefully this will help with ideas of things you can do at home and if you are eager to find more in the meantime, look through past blog posts-much of what we do in preschool can be altered to do at home!  Here is an older post with technology ideas.  While we hope they will be helpful, technology is not meant to be the only thing children should be using during the day.

The future of our pirates!

We talked a lot about our futures this week in preschool as we explored a variety of career options and learned a lot about different jobs people in our communities may have and how many of those jobs help us. 

From scientists to engineers, architects, construction workers, surgeons, doctors, fishermen and fire fighters we had a lot to cover this week!  We hope you can enjoy some of these photos showing us role playing and matching word sounds and letters to pictures representing various jobs and careers.

As we move forward this week before our scheduled spring break we hope to share activity ideas for games and small projects or experiments you can do with your child while at home until we are able to have school again.  Each week we will send a variety of activity ideas based on the theme that has been scheduled in our preschool calendar.  We hope this week will be our only week to do this but will keep you posted as we know things.

Role playing is very important to a child's growth and development and sometimes the latest toys or games aren't even necessary for the most growth and fun!  We will share a blog post out later this week with a variety of St. Patrick's Day ideas that can revolve around leprechauns and trips over the rainbow.   Hopefully instead of getting stir crazy you are able to have a bit of fun and return to your child-like self again in the process.

What's Coming Up?
As sent out last week we will be taking a break from school this week then our scheduled spring break the following week.  We are unsure yet if we will have school the week of March 30th but will communicate plans to you as soon as we are instructed to do so.  We hope to help you out this coming week with some St. Patrick's Day fun with another blog post later in the week with a few ideas for you.  After spring break we will create another blog post for you should we not be allowed back at that time.

Books, books, books!

Oh what amazing things we did this week!  We read book after book by Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle and Mo Willems.  Each day we took a different author and highlighted various terms like the word, 'author', and helped the children understand this career.  We hope that now of you ask the children about authors or what job is about writing books they will be able to give you a bit of an explanation.  Dr. Seuss went first this week since his birthday was Monday.

Besides reading a lot of his books on Monday, we made a few projects, worked on some science experiments and played a few games all related to his books.  We sorted fish in fish bowls to match, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and expanded The Grinch's heart, made Oobleck, and patterned Cat in the Hat hats out of the letters in our names, all before compiling a Truffula Tree forrest for The Lorax then bounced 'truffula pom pons out of the parachute forrest!

Wednesday we talked about Eric Carle and his famous Very Hungry Caterpillar as we fed him letters of the alphabet on our white board for some early reading practice.  We listened for the Very Quiet Cricket and played a game From Head to Toe all about how we can move our bodies!  One of our small group reading stations was about 10 Rubber Ducks which inspired us to make our own paper plate ducklings for art time.

We wanted to take this week's theme as an opportunity for you to learn more about the importance of reading for your children.  It is usually recommended for children to read about 20 minutes a day which means that if your child is not already reading out loud (as it is normal for preschoolers not to be reading yet so don't worry) YOU should be the one reading to your child 20 minutes a day.  
This might seem like a lot but there are so many benefits to reading to young children that even from infancy and toddler years this is an enormous benefit to your child.  We know how busy everyone is each day but if reading a book or two or five before bed becomes a part of the daily routine your child will be better for it!

We ended our week with Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books which are a more recent trend in early childhood literature.  While we adults have grown up with Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss these new books by Willems are making reading silly and entertaining while helping those children close to reading on their own see more small successes in their interest in putting letters into words and words into sentences.

We have a lot of preschoolers moving on to Kindergarten next year and hope their families encourage reading at home (as we hope ALL of our families encourage reading at home.) We also know that sometimes we can get stuck in a rut of the same books over and over again so here are a couple of resources for you.  This is just one example of a Top 100 List from Time of the best children's books.  

Maybe seeing some of your old favorites will inspire you to get them for your home.  And speaking of getting books for your home, don't forget about the AMAZING opportunities your public library has to offer. No matter where you live there is a public library you can visit and visiting ANY library is FREE just like checking out books with your library card is free too, so why not try to gather some books that way as well!

What's Coming Up?

• This coming week we will be talking about what we want to do when we grow up.
• Also this week you might want to check out the PHS Choir Concert on Thursday or the Honors Band Concert on Saturday. 
• Remember that we have spring break coming up the week of March 22nd so there will be no school that entire week.  Hope this great weather holds up for us to enjoy outside play time!
• We are officially full for the 2020-2021 school year!