Play is such an important part of learning for toddlers and preschoolers! This past month the little ones here at Kiddie Korner have been playing hard :) I'm so glad that so many of our Mother Goose Time activity lessons involve play. Over the past few weeks I've seen the kids grow and expand so many different skills!
Here are the girls scooping the chunky lacing beads out of a bowl with peas in it. A task like this may seem like nothing but play, but what you don't see are the little wrist muscles building up and preparing this little ones for writing skills! In this same activity they practiced pouring their scoops into a basket and shaking out all of the peas. Their little minds were at work connecting cause and effect: The beads are big so they stay in the basket, but the peas are little so they fall though the small holes! They practiced math by counting and sorting how many of each "type" of bead they were able to scoop out. They worked on those fine motor skills by lacing the thread through beads!
Finally once all of our beads were counted the girls practiced following directions as I gave them places to put the different types of beads, "Put the bees ON the car", "put the flowers UNDER the table", etc. Not only did they get to work their ears by listening and following directions they were also being challenged in their spacial awareness! I was assessing to see if they knew the directional phrases "on, under, next to, behind, in front of, inside", etc?
The kids enjoyed so many fun art projects this past month! Art is a time that works best for us for lessons. I have a captivated audience as they sit and work on their projects. Because they are sitting and their hands are busy they seem to listen a little better! They interact with me by answering questions, telling me their thoughts and asking their own questions. Plus they are always so proud of their finished projects :) They loved those little bee head bands so much that they wore them for nearly three days in a row doing our bee week.
During free play they were running around using their antennas to sniff each other! I guess they were listening during the lesson ;)
Aside from the fun that comes with art and the pride they have when showing off the finished product, these little ones are once again at work building important skills!
I mean look at these little fingers at work cutting and gluing! Silly giving them a piece of paper to snip at helps them build up those fine motor skills. They build the tiny muscles in their hands and gain better control at manipulating small objects.
One last important skill I wanted to talk about was writing! Many of the activities I showed you above all help build up those important muscles for writing. Scooping and pouring work on wrist movement; Beading and lacing work on that two finger pincher grip; Cutting and gluing work those tiny muscles and help with concentration.... all of these tiny finger wrist movements build up the writing skill! Kids need all of these things to learn how to control writing tools.
Can you see all of the different GRIPS in these photos above? Tripod and quadruped grasp are the best appropriate way for a writing tool to be held. These skills are things that are learned through activities like coloring, sometimes kiddos just need a little help getting their grip right :) Check out this video for a great tool to help teach the right way to grasp a pencil. Remember FUN is the name of the game for toddlers and preschoolers! Here are some great tips on helping your littles grow their writing skills!
Wondering what skills your preschooler should know? Check out this great post from Mother Goose Time with some helpful tips :)
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This week we had lots of new friends at Kiddie Korner! I had a full house multiple times throughout the week and we sure did have fun :) The kids got to watch this video of our caterpillars making their cocoons over the weekend. They were excited to see all of our friends tucked away and sleeping!
We also talked about the colorful wings we were already starting to see inside of the cocoons! Sure enough they came out that same day! The rest came out yesterday and a few of the kids were here to watch it. They were in awe of the emerging butterflies. We talked a little about how we got our caterpillars just a few short weeks ago and how quickly they grew, created their cocoons and turned into butterflies! It has been fun hearing the kids talk about their observations and explaining metamorphosis to them. The kids had a blast playing this Mother Goose Time game! I had an "-ug" butterfly and there were several caterpillars in the middle of the table. Each child got one letter, we used their letter to build a word "h" + "-ug" = HUG. We would all sound out the word. The kids had so much fun scrambling through the pile and finding their caterpillars after we built the word :) My little emerging readers! It has also been a hot week! We had a blast at the water park this week. The kids enjoyed running in the water and hanging out in the sunshine at the park :)
We live in the desert... there is NO denying it! SO, how about we teach our kiddos a little about it :)
That's right in June we will be focusing on Discovering the Desert with our Mother Goose Time curriculum!
The Kids were excited to come back to class this week and see our caterpillars in their cocoons! I had gotten a video over the weekend of one little guy hard at work making his cocoon :) Seeing this process was a first for all of my littles! It was interesting to hear all of their different opinions on how the cocoons looked.... gross, bumpy, sticky and hard were a few of the descriptions I got!
The kids FAVORITE activity this week was our Mother Goose Time butterfly art project! These beautiful butterflies got to hang in our class all week :) The kids loved seeing their work hanging in our room.
They ended up turning into kites because the kids saw it was windy outside and they wanted to make their butterflies fly! They spun, ran, danced and jumped all over the yard with their butterflies flapping in the wind behind them :) Though they weren't real kites, many of the kids said it was the first time they flew a kite! How fun that they got to create these ones AND fly them :P
The more kids I have at one time the more I realize how difficult it is to capture kodak moments! Helping and teaching the little ones AND trying to snap pictures with my phone is more difficult than I thought!! LOL This month I started working more with our concept cards and vocabulary cards. The kids have learned nearly all of them! Even though they many not be writing and spelling (like you would typically do with vocab words) they are expanding and growing their language base.
Another "win" this week, was during lunch! I have a few picky eaters... and when I can get them to try one bite of everything on their plate, I count it as a win! :) One day for lunch we had a tasty shrimp cob-style salad. The kids not only tried bites of everything on their plates, they found a few new foods they actually thought were tasty!!!
They were all so excited to get their "happy dino, try-bite stickers" too :D
A new first for me... learning how to occupy a 14month old during nap time ;) Peanut came by for a short visit during nap and she was not a tired girl!!! My older ones were sleeping so we had some fun playing with foam letters: touching, chewing and throwing were all involved! We also read some books, after peanut was done reading with me she enjoyed pulling them all of the shelf too! I think this age of exploration as well as learning about cause & effect is one of my favorites :)
We had a pretty busy week!! Lots of new families came to interview throughout the week and I'm excited to announce that next week will have some new friendly faces at Kiddie Korner :)
With all the business we didn't get to do quite as many lessons as we would have liked, BUT the girls are loving our study on metamorphosis. We started our week talking about the lifecycle of a Butterfly. I really liked the layout of our Mother Goose Time daily topic posters for our discussion. We were able to use the posters from throughout the week with our Insect Lore Butterfly Lifecycle stages pieces!
I introduced the girls to our new friends! They were in awe of how tiny our little caterpillars were.
Check out this time lapse of our baby caterpillars!
One of the girls favorite activities this week was building their own caterpillar snack! We used cucumbers for the body, tomatoes for the head, pretzels for the feet and raisins for the eyes.
Here is a video of our not so little caterpillars! While the kids were observing the caterpillars on this day Little K said the caterpillars looked silly climbing upside down like that! I asked everyone what they thought the caterpillars were doing up there. The answers were pretty funny! "Trying to escape", "Running from each other"... etc. We talked about how full their tummies must be and how big they got, Then L-Bug said :O "Oh yay! Now they are going to sleep in their cocoons!!!" So awesome to see them excited about learning :)
Another activity the girls really enjoyed this week was making their own butterfly lifecycle plate. By the end of the week (when we did this lesson) they remembered all the stages of metamorphosis.
The last day of the week the kids got to see these guys working into their cocoons!
The girls learned about pairs this week! They enjoyed a few great activities that helped them to strengthen this new concept. We played a really fun "Mommy & Me" matching game. Here I gave them each the baby animal cards all lined up and then they I asked them to make a pair by matching the babies with their mommies.
Another lesson we had about pairs that the girls both seemed to enjoy was during our Bilingual Book activity! Each month we get a handful of great bilingual resources in our Mother Goose Time curriculum box. They have sparked many conversations with L-Bug about both German and Italian. While we lived there my husband and I picked up a few phrases that just, sort of stuck! I have used them quite often with L-Bug and she has even said them to us at different times. These bilingual activities open their minds to the ideas of cultural differences. We typically pick one of the words from each month to focus on. For instance the word abeja or bee. When talking about bees sometimes I will sub the Spanish word abeja and the girls have begun to pick it up already. Some words are hard for them to pronounce, BUT the fact is that they hear it and they try! So... that was a little off track! Haha Just some great info I wanted to share :) Now onto our activity that involved finding pairs. As we read through and colored our bilingual books we were on another kind of search! A search for letter pairs. On my white board I had written a few words and then I showed the girls how to circle letter pairs. Then I had them looking for pairs on the pages.
I also wanted to share my newest little update to our circle time area. I haven't used this blue stand since I got our new wall calendar. But the other day while cleaning I pulled it out and realized it was the solution to one of my biggest frustrations! I have been trying to find a good way to store our monthly concepts where the kids could see them and where I could refer to them regularly. I moved "Mother Goose's Learning Nest" onto the blue stand, the I utilized the plastic slots to add all of our lovely concepts for the month! On the top row I have our vocabulary words. The girls knew 4/6 words when I but them up, but having them displayed here we have talked about them several times this past week and they are now remembering moth and wasp more easily! They may not be able to READ or WRITE the words, but seeing images and the words together help them to build their vocabularies! I also included our friends from around the world, our friendly bee and our shape on the other slots. Behind Mother Goose's nest are our letters as well as our concept builder cards which have our letters, numbers, shape and color on them!
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Disclaimer: I am an affiliate blogger. In some cases I will make a commission from external links leading to purchases. Thank you for your support to my blog! Your purchases help this mama stay at home with the kiddos and continue doing what we love.
Proud supporter of Mother Goose Time curriculum!All the posts in this blog are from real life experiences. We've taken the activities and materials provided in the Mother Goose Time curriculum and modified it in different ways to fit our lifestyle. Enjoy the read!
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