20 Best Tips

Preschool Corner ~ Uppercase & Lowercase Matching Printables

Dec182009
December 18, 2009 by 10 Comments

Note: There will not be a Preschool Corner the next two Fridays {December 25th or January 1st}. We’ll be busy enjoying the holidays with our family. If you are still having preschool time with your kiddos, keep posting! You can link up those posts when we return on January 8th! Otherwise, the linky will be open until then.

Merry Christmas!!

I am SO loving this printable! Zachary is doing pretty well matching upper and lowercase letters, but still has trouble with a few letters at times, so I put these together to help him out.

upper lowercase letters Click on thumbnail to download the printable.

The set has 14 pages of cards{4 cards to a page} with two full sets of alphabet cards. One set that can be cut in half to use as ‘puzzle matching’ and the other can be used as flashcards. Each card has the uppercase letter in the top left corner and the matching lowercase letter in the lower right corner. The cards have a picture in the center that begins with that letter sound. Puzzle cards have a faint gray line down the middle to use as a cutting guide. We’ve printed ours off on cardstock and laminated them to make them stronger.

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.

Photobucket

{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Alphabet Time, Early Learning Printables, Preschool Corner, Preschool Printables 10 Comments

Preschool Corner: Z is for Zoo

Dec42009
December 4, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Before I forget ~ if you link up this week to the Preschool Corner, can you leave a comment letting me know that you did? That way I will be sure to see your link and visit! Sometimes my week gets so crazy and I forget to check back and I don’t want to miss your posts!

I picked a few books to focus on for the letter Z and then used Itty Bitty Bookworm’s Bo Curriculum {July Year 1} for some of the activities since she has plans for two books, Dear Zoo and also Goodnight Gorilla. We did so.much.reading this week it was almost comical. Kaleb loved the books too, and we spent one entire day on the floor just reading and re-reading the books together.

Be sure to check out the first giveaway in the 1,500 Subscriber Celebration today ~ it’s sure to be one that you will LOVE!! A FULL YEAR of Itty-Bitty Bookworm curriculum worth $300!!!

Alphabet Book

Our alphabet book activity was a quick and easy zebra puzzle.

Z

Cooking ~ Animals in Cages

Itty Bitty Bookworm provides a fun idea for making zoo animals in their cages using animal crackers. Not so much real cooking, but fun in the kitchen and a yummy little treat. :)

Games

  • Animal charades ~ acting out the different zoo animals from the stories we read.
  • ZooKeeper, Zookeeper ~ played like ‘Doggie, Doggie, who has your bone?’

Math

  • We had fun sequencing the different animals in Goodnight Gorilla using printables from Itty-Bitty Bookworm
  • We weighed and compared our plastic zoo animals that we have around the house to see which ones were similar in weight or weighed more than others.
  • How many to make 5? We used a fun idea from Itty Bitty Bookworm to do some simple addition facts together.

Songs and Rhymes

The book Going to the Zoo is a great play off of Raffi’s song “Daddy’s Taking Us to the Zoo Tomorrow”, so this was a song that we sang a LOT that week. :)

Writing

I wrote the starter to a sentence for Zachary, “My favorite animal at the zoo is…” and Zachary finished the sentence and then he illustrated his sentence.

Stories & Books We Used

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Please be sure to include a link back to the Preschool Corner in your post.
The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.

Photobucket
{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Itty Bitty Bookworm, Letter Zz, Preschool Corner Leave a Comment

Preschool Corner: Pumpkin Time!

Nov62009
November 6, 2009 by 1 Comment

I know ~ technically, the whole pumpkin theme is sooo last month, but it is still fall, so that’s ok too! :) One of my favorite books about pumpkins is It’s Pumpkin Time! by Zoe Hall. I’ve had this book on our shelf before I had kids of my own and LOVE it. While I was pulling together ideas, I remembered that Itty Bitty Bookworm had a unit on it {Bo, Year 1 ~ October}, so I pulled that out and filled in the rest of my plans using ideas from that unit.

And I know that I’m messing around with the alphabet, but I’ve gone in order for 3 years now…and I needed a little change!

Alphabet Book


We made our own little pumpkin patch by painting our fingers/knuckles with orange paint and then pressing it onto the paper. Zachary added some stems onto the pumpkins and then used some green ribbon to make a vine in his little patch.

Art

~ Paper Strip Pumpkins. Even our girls wanted to make some of these! They were so incredibly simple to make too! You can get the full direction here.

~ Paper Plate Pumpkins. We made small pumpkins by painting a small paper plate orange. We also used this activity as a lesson for mixing colors. Zachary used red and yellow paint to make the orange for the pumpkin.

Cooking

~ Pumpkin Spice Playdough ~ We cooked up a big batch of this yummy smelling playdough! The house smelled great after cooking it and the kids played with it for hours! You can find the recipe here. We have it stored in our refrigerator to use again too!

~ Pumpkin Seeds ~ I’m sure it’s no big surprise to know that we made our own pumpkin seeds, is it? The kids were so excited to help out cleaning them and cooking them. Not so excited in eating them. {grins}

Language

~ What’s Inside? This is an activity from Itty Bitty Bookworm where we made predictions about what we would find inside the pumpkin when we opened it up. It definitely wasn’t what Zachary expected! Zachary also made a cute little pumpkin using yarn and pumpkin seeds when we were done.

~ Uppercase/lowercase Letter Sorting ~ Erica @ Confessions of a Homeschooler made some great printables for kids to sort uppercase and lowercase letter “P’s”.

Math

~ A Penny for Your Pumpkin ~ You’ll have to ignore the lack of excitement that this picture shows, because REALLY Zachary had so much fun playing this little money game with me. In fact, we played it four times in a row and he still wants to do it!

I pulled out five mini-pumpkins and two big pumpkins and then gave Zachary a variety of coins: 2 pennies, 2 nickels, a dime and a quarter. We talked about the different coins and their names and then recited this little rhyme I found in my songs/rhymes box from years ago:

Five orange pumpkins in a pumpkin patch.
You know, the kind that are big and round and fat!
Along came Zachary with a {penny} to pay,
He bought a pumpkin and took it away!

Zachary got to choose the pumpkin he wanted to buy and had to hand me the correct coin that we named in the rhyme. Much fun!!

~ How Many Seeds? ~ We used this game from Itty Bitty Bookworm and put the correct number of seed and number cards together to make a little book together.

~ Seeds in the Pumpkin ~ I handed Zachary number cards and he put the correct number of seeds into each of the little pumpkins we have.

~ Pumpkin Patterns ~ We used the pattern cutouts from Itty Bitty Bookworm to make patterns {pumpkin, leaf, etc….}

~ Pumpkin Size Sorting ~ We had fun using this great printable from Erica @ Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Science


~ How a Pumpkin Grows ~ The book It’s Pumpkin Time! is all about the life cycle of a pumpkin, so we talked a lot about how plants/pumpkins grow. I had some sequencing cards already on hand, but Itty Bitty Bookworm provides some in the curriculum unit also.

Songs and Rhymes

Five Little Pumpkins

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate
The first one said, “Oh my! It’s getting late!”
The second one said, “We don’t care.”
The third one said, “There are leaves in the air.”
The fourth one said, “We’re ready for some fun!”
The fifth one said, “Let’s run and run!”

The whoosh went the wind and out went the light,
and the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

On Our Shelf

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! The updated guidelines can be found here if you need them.

Photobucket

{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Alphabet Time, Itty Bitty Bookworm, Letter Pp, Preschool Corner 1 Comment

Paper Strip Pumpkins {Craft}

Nov52009
November 5, 2009 by 10 Comments

These little pumpkins were so super-easy to make and all of our kids wanted to make one, so we had them hanging all over our house for the last few weeks! Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Orange construction paper cut into 1″ strips
  • 1″ strip of brown construction paper
  • 2 leaves cut out of green construction paper
  • 2 brads
  • hole punch

1. Stack the orange strips of paper together. Use the hole punch to put holes in the end of the strips. Depending on how many strips you are trying to punch through, you many need to do it a few pieces at a time.

2. Take one brad, poke it through the hole, and fasten the strips together.

3. Fold the brown strip in half {for the stem} and use the hole punch to punch through the stem, leaves, and the strips on the opposite end. Push another brad through and fasten.

4. Spread or ‘fluff’ out the paper strips until it forms a round pumpkin shape. Hang and enjoy!

Photobucket

{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Crafts, Letter Pp 10 Comments

Preschool Corner: Letter Ff

Oct232009
October 23, 2009 by Leave a Comment

This was my last week working with the co-op kids, so next week it’ll be my own kiddos that you see here. :) Back to normal ~ as much as that actually happens around these part!

While I have been going alphabetically up to this point, next week I’m going to start mixing it up a bit and skipping around the alphabet.

Just for fun {and to most likely drive myself and others crazy}. I haven’t decided if I’m going to let you all in on my rough plan of what we’ll be studying…because then that means I have to stick to it and there are times that that just doesn’t happen!

If you’re new here or linking up for the first time, be sure to let us know!! Leave a comment and say hi ~ I’d love to stop by and visit you!

Here’s how our week with the letter F worked out. If you need some more ideas, be sure to check out this post I did earlier with different ideas to use in your home along with some printables.

Alphabet Book


We made a ‘fire’ with a marshmallow to toast for our alphabet page this week.

You’ll Need:

  • Red, yellow and orange tissue paper cut into small squares
  • Brown construction paper
  • Brown pipe cleaner
  • Cotton ball
  • Letter F alphabet page
  • Glue

To Make:

{Note: I cut out the pieces ahead of time since we have a short amount of time and a lot to do ~ otherwise I would recommend letting the kids cut out their own pieces as much as possible!}

1. Cut the tissue paper into 2″ squares and the brown construction paper into rectangles to make ‘logs’.

2. Push the pipe cleaner through the marshmallow as best you can {you might need to help out with this part, since ours were a little tough to do}.

3. Have your child glue the logs into an ‘X’ shape to make a wood pile to build their fire. Crumple up the tissue paper and glue it above the logs to make a fire.

4. Glue the marshmallow on the stick to the alphabet page.

Art

Foxy F ~ We made this foxy letter F together too – you can read more about it on this craft post.

Game

I Spy ~ Here’s the next installment in our ‘I Spy’ the alphabet series. There was a LOT to find in the classroom this week!

Songs and Rhymes

Two Feet Song
{to the tune of ‘Sally has a red shirt’….well, I think that’s the tune…}

I can walk with two feet, two feet, two feet,
I can walk with two feet, all day long.

Repeat filling in with:

I can jump with two feet…
I can hop with two feet…
I can run with two feet…
I can march with two feet…
I can skip with two feet…
I can slide with two feet…

Additional Resources

Feelings ~ Can you guess how these kiddos are feeling? Sleepy. Confused. Scared. Surprised. Angry. The kids had a blast acting out the feelings cards that I used from Carisa over at 1+1+1=1. You can download a bunch of great activities on feelings on her site.

Stories & Books We Used:

I know. There’s a LOT of Froggie books in this line-up. But I LOVE Froggie. Really, I do ~ and the kids do too!

About the Preschool Corner:

The Preschool Corner is a place for us to share the ideas we are using during our “preschool time” with our kids. You can join in the fun and record what you are doing in your house. Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below (if you have questions feel free to ask). Be sure to link back to this blog post so that your readers can find some other great ideas too!

The guidelines can be found here if you need them.

Share what you’ve been doing in your house this week!

Photobucket

{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Alphabet Time, Letter Ff, Preschool Corner Leave a Comment

F is for Fox {Craft}

Oct222009
October 22, 2009 by 1 Comment

So simple it almost makes itself…well, almost!

When I first showed it to the kids, it took them a minute to figure it out {majority of guesses were ‘squirrel’}.

But it’s a fox. {grins}

What You’ll Need:

  • Brown foam sheet/construction paper
  • Scissors
  • Pen {to trace letter}
  • Fake fur
  • Googly eyes
  • small pom pom for nose
  • Glue

How to make the ‘F’ Fox:

  1. Trace and cut an uppercase ‘F’ out of the foam sheet or construction paper. I used a foam sheet that was about 4″ x 5″ in size.

  2. Using the extra foam, cut out two small triangles for ears.

  3. Cut out a tail from the fake fur.

  4. Glue the ears, tail, eye and nose onto your letter F.

Photobucket

{ Leave a Comment }
Filed Under: Alphabet Craft, Alphabet Time, Crafts, Letter Ff 1 Comment