This past week we started weaning ourselves back into official school time, but my brain is truly overloading with the thought of selling our house and moving soon, so there were no official plans. Instead I filled Kaleb’s workboxes with a bunch of new toys, parts of our Grasshopper Preschool Kit, books to read, and some other fun toys.

The two biggies of the week that we had fun playing with were the Construct-It Early Builder set and our Education Cubes. I truly didn’t expect the reactions that I got from both of them. I figured Kaleb would be excited, but between the two of them, . :)

Kaleb built and built little projects, specifically airplanes, most of the time and had everyone in the house playing along with him too! We used the Education Cubes to identify numbers, letters and go on color hunts around our house ~ much fun!

That was pretty much the week around our house. What did you all do this week?

In the Workboxes This Week 

More Preschool Links:

Ready to Link Up?

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your families. We’ll be joining back up and sharing next week, but if you have activities that you’d like to link up, please do!

Ready to Link Up?

Even though we were off this week, I know that some of you have been busy with your kiddos! Feel free to link up your Preschool Corner {& 5K too!} post below and share the fun things you’ve been working on together.

Hope you all have a WONDERFUL Christmas together!!! Thanks so much for joining up with us and sharing your learning ideas with us all.

Ready to Link Up?

This was a spur-of-the-moment unit that I put together last week and I had much more that I wanted to do…but time and Mommy feeling still a little under the weather ~ it didn’t all happen.

Many days Kaleb didn’t really want to do ‘school’, so he and I had a little deal going. If he finished four activites {including Advent devotions with me}, then he could play the holiday version of Angry Birds on my itouch for 10 minutes. Worked like a charm!

The Gingerbread Baby Unit

I’ll break up the things that we did by topic/subject. We read the book {over and over again} every day and did a few activities from the lapbook each day and also did 3-5 activities from our unit study.

Here’s a peek at the inside of our lapbook:

Language/Spelling/Pre-Reading

• Vocabulary {words from the book}:
• Uppercase/lowercase ABC matching {lapbook piece}
• Tell what happened in the story and favorite part of the story {lapbook piece ~ front of lapbook}
• Beginning sounds worksheets {lapbook piece}

doesn’t he look THRILLED to have his picture taken??

Math 

• Gingerbread Baby game ~ identifying numbers and moving correct number of spaces {lapbook piece}
• Patterning ~ we created different patterns using the gingerbread boy, girl and fox {lapbook piece}
• Size sequencing ~ we sequenced gingerbread babies from large to small and small to large {lapbook piece}
• Identifying numbers ~ we rolled a die and counted to build our gingerbread man puzzle {lapbook piece}

Science

• Animals ~ We printed off word card pictures of all the animals in the story and put them on a jump ring so we can add more animals from other stories that we read. We also sequenced the animals by the order we saw them in the book.
• Weather ~ we talked about the weather in the story {snowy and cold}, there was ice in the water that the gingerbread baby jumped onto
• Why didn’t the gingerbread boy jump in the water? Got this lovely idea from Cindy from Along the Way! We pulled out a tub of water and tried dunking him in the water to see what would happen {he fell apart}. We also tried a few different things: candy, pretzels, cereal, and more to see what would happen to them. The candy kept disappearing every time I turned around…not because it melted, but because a certain 4 year old kept pulling it out of the water and eating it {grins}.

Crafts

• Gingerbread baby craft using foam cut-outs that we picked up at the Dollar Tree

Fine & Gross Motor

• Write name ~ actually traced it to put on the front of our lapbook {lapbook piece}
• Trace the path that the gingerbread baby runs from the fox {lapbook piece}
• Practice writing the letter G {writing sheet in Preschool Pack}
• Trace color names {lapbook piece}

Click on the button below to download

the full Gingerbread Baby Preschool Pack.

Other things we wanted to do, but didn’t have time for {based on the book Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett}:

• Actually make gingerbread cookies and a gingerbread house!! I caved and bought cookies from the grocery store because we didn’t have time.
• Make masks to go along with the story from Jan Brett’s site

Stories & Books We Used

Other Great Gingerbread Links:

• Cindy @ Along the Way ~ Her gingerbread unit along with a fun printable and great ideas
• Homeschool Share ~ Gingerbread Baby unit for older kids
• Jan Brett ~ coloring pages
• Jan Brett ~ board game
• Musings of Me ~ gingerbread printables

More Preschool Links:

Ready to Link Up?