How did I choose my "F" words? - Making the Lessons for Twin Preschool

To piggyback on yesterday's blog,  I am going to write about what I do to make the twin's preschool lessons for the week.  Usually we have 3-4 days per week where we can do nice lengthy lessons in the morning afer breakfast.  It really depends on what we have set up in the way of outings, classes, and playdates.  Some weeks they only get 3 days, other weeks they will get 5.  The lessons usually last anywhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours, depending on if we are going around the neighborhood to inspect something, or have a craft that is more elaborate.

To get started planning for the week, I look at the preschool lessons on the website below.

http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html

So this week, this was our lesson plan: http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html

I decided I didn't want to do the Rainbow theme with the vocab word prism.  First of all, it doesn't rain much in So. CA, so are chances of seeing a rainbow are slim.  Also, I do not have a prism to show them.  So, when I decide not to do a theme, my alternate route is to pick some things that start with whatever the letter of the week is and then focus on doing lessons on them.  So, this week the letter of the week was F.  How did I choose what "F" words to use?  :-)  ( I promise I won't drop "THE F WORD" into this weeks vocab.)

To choose my "F" words, I visit this next website

http://www.first-school.ws/theme/alphabetp2.htm#f

Here I check out the mini book that the kids will make at the end of the week.  The always feature about 5 different words.  I pick a few of them.  Not only have I found that the kids are usually interested in these subjects, but I have also found that it is always easy to find resources, projects, and books around the house about these objects that are featured in the mini books.  
So in the F Book for this week was: fish, frog, farmer, firefighter, and fruits.   I added flowers in because that is something that my kids always notice and are interested in.  (Plus it was easy since we were doing this right after Valentine's Day and there was a bouquet sitting on the table.)  So my 3 big days that I choose were Frogs, Fish, and Flowers.  The fourth day would be the day we would make the mini book and review.

Each Lesson has 4 componets

1. Sitting at the learning poster and practicing the Letter sound and talking about simple facts about what we are learning about today.  (We talk about what they already know and then I hit with a few simple things to remember.)
2. Then, we read a book about it, if possible.
3. Then, we practice writing the letter and they get to color a picture of the thing we are learning about for the day.
4. We do the project or "field trip" related to the topic

On the first-school website I found F writing pages that had frogs and fish on them.  I used them to help them practice writing the letters.  When I do this activity, I am more focused on fine motor skill development than their ability to recall how to write it, but sometimes they can do that too. 

To find craft projects to go along with our theme.   I visit another website. 

http://www.dltk-kids.com/

On this site, I find simple projects that I can do with simple objects from around the home (ie: tp rolls, coffee filters, paper plates, lunch sacks, coffee cans)  So, on this site for this week, I found  2 different frog projects that I liked the frog puppet made from a paper plat and a frog/fly toilet paper roll project.  For, fish, I found the rainbow fish coffee filter project, and for flowers, I found the hand tulips project.

 Here are our Rainbow fish!  We decided to put 6 shiny scales (The rainbow fish has beautiful shiny scales in the book) on  because our number of the week was 6.

 Frog puppets!

 Frog/Fly TP Project

 Kaden mixing the blue and yellow together to make his green stem.  They used their hands with fingers closed to make the tulip.

So, basically, I take about 30 minutes to an hour at the beginning of the week to find and print stuff for the lessons and to make the learning poster.

To recap the resources.

1. http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html is used for the learning poster.
2. http://www.first-school.ws/theme/alphaletter/f.htm  is used to find the mini books, letter pages, on other worksheets that go with the theme if I am actually doing the theme that week.
3. http://www.dltk-kids.com/ is used to find crafts related to the letter of the week mini book and crafts relating to the theme of the week.

After I have all my resources printed out I gather up all of the books, toys, stuffed animals, and play things that have to do with our themes that week and put them under the learning poster so everything is easily accessible when it is time to move into the lesson. 

The last thing I do is to think of where we could go and what we could see to help go along with the lesson.  This week we went to feed the fish at the Koi Pond at our shopping center and then walked through Petco to see the different kind of fish.  They wanted to find blue and purple fish....it was a challenge but we found them.  For flowers, we walked the neighborhood and talked about and examined all the different flowers.  When we got back I took my droopy roses from V-day into the back yard and we pulled off all the petals and looked at the pollen below. (Jaelyn smelled each petal she pulled off.) Later, when we were out and about that day, we picked up some flowers to plant for $1.99 over at Lowes and planted them in a pot and watered them (way to much) later that evening. 

 Checkin' out the pollen situtation.

 Plucking each petal and smelling it.

 Smelling the rose.

 Offering it up to me so I could smell it.  I really think the yellow ones do smell the best....and pink too.

 Time to plant our flowers from Lowes.

 Kaden did not like sqishing the dirt around his hands to loosen the roots.  Jae loved it.  Kaden doesn't like the mess.

 They each dumped their entire watering can into it.  My fault for filling it up all the way.  Whoops!

 Found some flowers we had talked about on the way to go feed the Koi.

 Feeding the  Koi.

"Finding Nemo" at Petco.  They were so star struck!


I think I will try to post what we do each day.  If anyone has done similar things or is going to try this out for themselves, I would love to hear your ideas, suggestions, or cool projects you have heard about.

Teaching the Twins

I have been teaching the twins for a couple of months now, and now that I have worked out some of the bugs, I am ready to share.  I knew that one of the big reasons that I wanted to stay home with the twins this year was to teach them.  I had felt a lot of guilt while I taught my high schoolers.  I felt like I poured so much effort into helping them to learn, what would happen if put in the same kinda effort with my own kids.  So, here it goes! 

How it started...

I researched preschool curriculum for 2 year olds online and I found a few websites that I liked.  On one of them, it gives you a 26 week introductory curriculum where you introduce the letters, colors, shapes, numbers, and you do a weekly theme.

http://www.letteroftheweek.com/Preparatory.html

However, I don't follow this website exactly.  I tried to initially, and then I realized that it would be less frustrating for me and more meaningful if I changed parts of it to teach them about things that they were showing more interest towards. This website is usually the one I consult first and it gives me my direction. The thing I like the most from this website is the learning poster.  Here are some pictures of what mine have been looking like.

The thing I like about having a learning poster is that we have a place that we go and regroup on what we have been learning.   I like to go around the house and gather up books that relate to the theme. 

 Sometimes I do the themes on the website if I like them.  I did jungle, cats, and eyes themes, but when I got to week 5, I did not like the lighthouse theme so, i just decided we would just learn about different things that started with the letter E.  So, we spent a day talking about Elephants and then we went to see them at the San Diego zoo.  We talked about Elmo and made an Elmo project.  Then there are days during the week that we focus more on the shape or number.  During E week we even dressed up like E items (thanks to some old Halloween costumes....REALLY OLD if you check out my son in the Elephant costume.)  He told me after the picture that his butt hurt.  Looking at the picture, you can see why!

 I will show you were I found these projects we're making on the next blog when I show you how I plan my lessons.  We now save all of our toilet paper rolls and paper towel roles!

 These letter theme sheets come from another website I like.  I will also talk more about them on my next blog.

 Here is the elephant visit!  They were so excited.

As they were exploring this elephant statue,  Jaelyn was very proud when she discovered the ELEPHANTS NIPPLE!   ahahahahah! 

This last week, I really got into the letter F. Monday was Frogs and we did frog projects and pages and read books about frogs. 

 They are so jazzed up about the letter F into talk upstairs that Jaelyn wanted to wear all flowers, and since Kaden has no flower clothes, we wore this flower head band of Jae's from last Easter.  He was pretty pumped about it.

 First we painted the frog puppet that we were making.

 While those were drying, we made our toilet paper roll "classic."  BONUS this one had a fly with the frog (2 "F" words.)

 Once the frog parts had dried downstairs, we pieced them together and the kids ran around the rest of the day saying, "Ribbit, Got you, Fly!"  and snapping it at each other and other objects around the house.

Tuesday, was Fish.  So, we read the rainbow fish and then made our own Rainbow fish out of coffee filters and markers and pasted on 6 scales (since 6 was the number of the week).  At lunch we ate fish crackers (goldfish), flower cheese (using flower shape cookie cutter and some Kraft Singles), and we ate fruit.  We even had fudge for desert.  Then we went to the Koi Pond and fed the fish and walked through the Petco in the same shopping center. 

 This was a cool idea, but I think most of the juice was gone out of the markers.  If we had some newer markers I think they would have looked more like the Rainbow Fish from the book.

 Kaden noticed these "Faaaaa   Flowers."  at the Koi Pond.

They were so pumped when they saw the "Nemo" fish at Petco.

The rest of the week we did similar things with Flowers, and Fruit.  I will talk more about them on the next blog.


Also, I will post more about how I find the projects and letter sheets to go with the theme posters.   I am toying with the idea of posting what we do daily.   Not only would it provide a record of what we did for the kids to see some day, but if there are any other mom's out there that want to "steal" ideas, they can feel free to do so.