Nursery Rhymes: Little Bo Peep

Oh Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep---- and we found them! This was our first week working with nursery rhymes. We did crafts and/or activities two days out of the week, and the other days we read our nursery rhyme book and retold the rhyme several different ways. My 3yr. old almost has the poem memorized already! One fun way of retelling (which I did not get a picture of) was using a lamb puppet. The lamb puppet would help her "read" the story. Then it would run away and I'd have to find it. :)

I won't have a sensory tub for each rhyme (check out the Nursery Rhyme sensory tub by Sarah on Totally Tots), but I had enough stuff to make a Little Bo Peep activity tub. I placed cotton balls, white pom poms, plastic sheep, and sheep printouts into a plastic bin.

 

My daughter helped Little Bo Peep sort her sheep by size. Just print out the sorting mat and cards below to complete this activity.

 

Little Bo Peep Sheep Sort

* Print out more sheep cards and create patterns: big, small, big, small, ________ etc.
* Get large foam dice. Roll the dice and then add that many sheep to the pen.
* Use the sheep as counters.
* Talk about how we make clothing etc. from sheep's wool. Have your child collect the wool aka cotton balls and place into a bucket.
* My daughter just have fun playing with all the sheep. She had her own flock that she took care of for a day.

We also did a simple sheep craft along with a Bible devotional. Check out my post at Totally Tots for more information.

You can keep up with all our Nursery Rhyme activities on my Nursery Rhyme page.

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Experiencing Apples

I’ve done lots of apple-themed activities in the past with my kids, and wasn’t really planning on doing much with apples this fall. Sometimes I forget that though I’ve done these “apple” events and activities over and over again, my littlest ones really haven’t. God must have known that my littles needed some apple experiences this fall!

On a recent fall weekend, my 4 youngest children and I had the day to ourselves. I decided we should get out and visit our local museum. I totally forgot it was apple-festival day there! We walked in to apple-activities galore and my kids thought I planned this. I love it when that happens. :)

One of the first activities the girls came across was making homemade apple cider using an old cider press. It was hard work smashing up those apples!

We got to taste our own batch of apple cider too.

Next we moved on to the apple-tasting table. My 3-year old was so shocked that they were letting her eat apples! The presenter shared facts about each type of apple and then they voted for their favorite apple.

Not only did they get to taste apples, they got to eat apple pie too! Boy was it delicious! Yes, we came on the right day!

The girls had the opportunity to guess how many apples were in the basket. It warmed my heart and made me smile when they told me their guesses. My 3-year old told me there were 5 apples. My 4.5yr. old said some unreasonable number like 2,000.

We also spent some time visiting the apple orchard store where they have a huge apple-cider press. We walked along the garden paths and totally enjoyed this unplanned apple experience. Thanks God for this special memory!

Just in case you are curious to what we’ve done in the past, you can find several apple-themed printables and activities in my archives.

  Apple Tree Number Match

Apple Pattern Cards

Apple Activities Blog Post 2010
Letter A Activities Post 2010 (Apple-themed finger-play)

Pretend Play: Preschool Ice Cream Store

We have been having fun with our toddler and preschool ice cream theme. Whenever we go to the ice cream store, my girls are fascinated with all the colors and flavors of ice cream available. I knew they would have so much fun running their own ice cream shop. With just a little advanced preparation, toddlers and preschoolers can run their own ice cream store right in their own home---or outside, which is where my girls set up their shop.


First make sure to have several “flavors” of ice cream made ahead of time. Our ice cream consisted of 4 scented playdough creations.

I made one batch of vanilla-scented playdough. I used my regular playdough recipe and added some vanilla extract to the water. One batch fits perfectly in a pint container.  The chocolate playdough smells soooo good! I used the chocolate playdough recipe from Pre-Kinders.  Mint was the basic version plus mint extract, and for the strawberry---I forgot to buy the strawberry-flavored Kool-aid---but that’s what I would have used. Doesn’t it look good?
I made a little menu so the girls could take ice cream orders.

I’ll have a sundae please! :) I printed this on cardstock and laminated. The girls used a dry-erase marker, but a wet-erase or dry-erase crayon would work too.

  
I picked up a couple of ice cream scoops and bowls from the Dollar Tree.


It’s hard work scooping out ice cream! I love how her little tongue sticks out when concentrating. She was very excited about having a pretend playdough ice cream party!

I filled an empty Hershey’s Cocoa container with pieces of brown string. The girls pretended this was chocolate syrup.
 
Doesn’t the playdough ice cream look real?

The nice thing is that this kind of ice cream does not melt. And you can use it more than once. I’m sure we’ll be playing ice cream shop many more times this summer!
 

(click to download the ice-cream shop menu and labels)

  click for more ice-cream ideas

Butterfly, Butterfly, Fly, Fly Away

After watching a recent episode of Barney, my girls and I were inspired (yes, Barney inspired us—lol) to do some butterfly-related crafts and activities.

We sang Butterfly, Butterfly, Fly, Fly Away (which we heard on Barney) many times this week. If you don’t know the tune, it makes a great counting poem too. (Click the photo to download.)

Next we printed out and made our own Butterfly Life Cycle book. This was a download from The Montessori Print-Shop.

The Montessori Print Shop also has Butterfly Life Cycle cards, which I printed and laminated. We looked at the pictures and went over the terminology. Then we put them in order. We also practiced ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) I appreciate that these materials used real photographs of the butterfly stages. The materials printed nicely and are a wonderful nature resource.

For a twist, I printed another set of the Butterfly Life Cycle cards---one in grey-scale and the other in color. I mounted the grey-scale cards onto cardstock. I laminated and then cut the colored cards so that they would be individual puzzles. The grey-scale cards were the control cards to help my toddler figure out the puzzles. She would match the colored pieces and place them onto the control cards.

We made our annual coffee-filter butterflies :) My 4yr. old is getting good at carefully dipping the edges of the filter into the food coloring water. (Last year we used Do-A-Dot markers for our butterfly creations.)

My 4yr. old picked the funky fuzzy pipe cleaners—the ones that kind of look like giant caterpillars.  You could use half of one pipe cleaner to make the caterpillar (just glue wiggle eyes on it) and the other half to fold over the tie-dyed coffee filter.

We also reviewed our Letter Bb’s with this butterfly handwriting sheet/poem (click to download.)

For more butterfly craft, poem and games ideas check out:

Butterfly Unit for Young Children 

Disclosure: I was given a free download from Montessori Print Shop for review purposes only. Opinions are my own. The way I used the cards are Montessori-influenced but not necessarily the official Montessori method.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Not much has changed in my garden since the first garden update. We’ve had lots of rainy and cold weather. After Mother’s Day is usually when it is safe to start planting in my area. I did venture over to my Square Foot Garden today to see what would need to be done and found:

garlic chives? I swore I would not forget what herb I planted there---but I did. Anyone have an idea what it is?

Besides the mystery plant, it looks like I have a couple of onions growing that I missed pulling from last year. I can’t wait to start turning over the soil and getting things ready.

I am shocked that my seedlings are still doing well! This is my cucumber plant.  I didn’t start much indoors because I don’t have the space and I have little kids. I wanted my little ones to see that seeds turn into plants, but I wasn’t expecting many of the seedlings to survive their care :)  Oh, and my 2yr. old pulled out all the plant stakes. So I will have several more mystery plants in my garden! :)

Since I haven’t been able to do much gardening outdoors, I’ve been taking time over the last month to do garden-related activities with my younger children.  This week we used plant printables from The Montessori Print Shop (a wealth of quality printables there!) as a spring-board for our garden-themed activities.

First we did some seed observation. I had the girls try to guess what would grow from these seeds. We talked about how the seeds were all different from each other—different colors, shapes, and sizes.

Then we placed the seeds onto the correct cards. The girls had a hard time believing that these little seeds would grow into plants!

The Plants We Eat download contains several different ways to introduce children to the idea that the plants we eat fall into different categories. We talked about the different parts of a plant.

  

The plants were divided into six categories. For the first few times going over this concept, I will keep the categories together in strips for easier matching. My daughter first matched the categories like a puzzle. Then in the second activity, the control card was taken away and only the categories were listed. Later I plan on having my daughter complete her own chart (included in the Plants download).

 

We sorted fruits and roots. Then sorted between other categories too. I wanted to keep it simple at first and only have two category choices at a time.

I asked my 4yr. old to show me what was her favorite plant to eat. We love to eat asparagus drizzled with olive oil, sea salt, and parmesan cheese.

 

My 2yr. old told me her favorite plant to eat was a rutabaga. I’ve never even seen a rutabaga let alone tasted one. I know she hasn’t either---lol! I think that will be something I’ll have to pick up the next time I’m at the store. How do you cook a rutabaga? Do you eat it raw? See, I have no clue!

So that’s how my garden is growing----so far!

My garden last year
Another view of my garden
My garden the first year
Easy Egg Garden (Homemade Chia-Pet)
Little Ones Learn About Plants

 

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Disclosure: I was given a free download from Montessori Print Shop for review purposes only. Opinions are my own. The way I used the cards are Montessori-influenced but not necessarily the official Montessori method.