Saturday, September 17, 2011

Little Cloud

 

We read Little Cloud by Eric Carle this week.   I found some fun ideas at Modern Parents Messy kids.  First we painted clouds with a glue/shaving cream mixture.  It was like a puffy paint and it smelled good.  

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Then we pretended to be wind and we had cloud races.  Cotton balls and straws!  How fun!

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We moved outside for our last activity:  cloud dough!  It was a mixture of flour and baby oil.  It was really cool… but really messy.  Even the dog was covered.  It molded better than sand.  Alphagirls had fun making different shape clouds! 

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Games: Cootie, Hi Ho Cherry-O, Candy Land Castle, Matchin’ Middles, & The Very Hungry Caterpillar

 

It’s C week and we had a game day! 

First up was Cootie, a classic Hasbro game. 

  • For Ages 3-6 yrs
  • Mix and match to create crazy critters
  • Perfect for younger children because there is no reading required
  • Two to Four players

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The alphagirls enjoyed playing it but we had to modify the game some.  You have to roll a dice to get the pieces.  1 for a head, 2 for a body, 3 for head piece, 4 for eyes, 5 for mouth, and 6 for legs.  So… to complete your Cootie you would need to roll 6 sixes!  We gave up and just built our critters.  It would make a nice speech therapy game—say some words, get a piece. 

  

Next up:  Hi Ho Cherry-O another classic Hasbro game.

  • Early childhood board game
  • Race to be the first to have 10 cherries in your basket
  • Introduces kids to counting
  • Reading not required
  • Children try to be first to pick their trees clean, filling their buckets with cherries. Just watch out for the dog, the bird, and the spilled bucket!

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Alphagirls love this game but have started to…. gasp.. cheat!  When I turn my head they seem to spin put four fruit pieces in their bucket!  And so begins another lesson on being honest when playing games.  Another good speech game! 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar was the next game we played!

  • Move shapes and colors into place to collectively make a butterfly
  • Game board, 20 shapes in 5 colors, 1 spinner, and 4 caterpillar playing figures
  • 1-4 players

 

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Thankfully, we borrowed this game from Grandma’s preschool and it will be going back.  It is a cooperative game… so there is no winner.  I am not sure we even played it the right way.  It is somewhat confusing.  I don’t like kids games that require reading a lot of directions to figure it out.  Anyway… I think we figured it out, but we ended up putting it away halfway through because we were all bored.  It is disappointing, especially since we love the book so much. 

One of the alphagirls was done after the last game so I just had one to play with.  We played Candy Land Castle:

  • Hasbro Candy Land Castle Game is fun, colorful and educational
  • Simple matching game involving shapes and colors
  • Engaging educational game can be played alone or with others
  • Comes with King Kandy Castle, brightly colored tokens, gingerbread kid gameboards

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This is one of my favorite early games.  There is a candy cane lever you pull down and a plastic shape comes out of the castle.  The girls love pulling that lever!  Then they match it to their gingerbread man.  We are sad there are three gingerbread boys and one girl… sometimes that equals a fight with two girls!  It’s great for early learning:  turn taking, matching, shapes, & colors!

Next up:  Matchin’ Middles or the Cookie Game as we like to call it! 

  • The Fisher-Price Oreo Matchin' Middles Game is a classic memory-match game
  • Comes with a blue squared plastic "cookie jar" storage container with it's own flip-off lid and 12 Oreo cookies (24 cookie halves)
  • Each cookie has a different shape in the middle, 2 cookie halves with matching shapes inside fit together
  • Players turn the cookie halves face down, then take turns trying to find matching cookie halves
  • When the cookies are all gone, the player with the most cookies wins
  • The game is for 2 - 4 children ages 3 - 7 years old

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Alphagirls love this matching game and they can use it in their play kitchen, too!  Don’t you want to come over and play with that sweet little face? :)

Friday, September 9, 2011

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

 

My girls have been obsessed with Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Their Grandma is quite the story teller and I think it has rubbed off on my children.  We don’t have the book so we just tell the story.  I am so proud of their retelling skills.  Retelling stories is a great language activity.  It works on recalling prior knowledge, sequencing, and so many other language skills.  As a Speech and Language Therapist I love to listen to their language develop.  Yes.. there are so many errors… but that is a normal (and cute) part of development.  Anyway… it’s a great story for sequencing and working on concepts (small, medium, large, big, little, hard, soft, hot/cold, broke).

Today we decided to act it out.  We found food (we used ice cream instead of porridge), chairs, and beds.  The bears left for a walk and Goldilocks showed up in her pink barbie convertible.  

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The bears came home to discover Goldilocks had eaten their ice cream, sat in their chairs, and slept in their beds.  She took off in her getaway convertible and everyone lived happily ever after. 

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That made us hungry so we headed to the kitchen for a snack!  Bringing kids in the kitchen gives you a wonderful opportunity to work on language skills.  I should do it more but I don’t enjoy being in the kitchen-LOL!  We made the three bears beds complete with “covers”.  We used graham crackers for small, medium, and large sized beds and the girls got to choose what color of cover they wanted (peanut butter, nutella, jelly, or cheese).  Then they put their bears to bed.  They were a hit!     

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Games: Buckaroo and Don’t Spill the Beans

I love playing games and I think my daughters are following in my footsteps because they feel the same way.  We are still working on following rules and that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses. 

This week we have been playing Buckaroo and Don’t Spill the Beans.  Both of them would make good speech practice games.  I adapted Don’t Spill the Beans and added a spinner from a Leap Frog Bingo.  They would spin to see how many beans they got to put in the bucket.  That would work great with speech practice—spin to see how many words/sounds you have to say and then put the beans in!  Oh and it’s a balancing game!  No batteries required for this classic game!  

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Buckaroo is a balancing game.  They have to try to put all the cowboy related items on his back carefully.  Any upset and Bullseye jumps throwing everything off his back. Just a warning… it is startling and a little frustrating!  It either never bucks or keeps bucking.  I would recommend holding off on buying this game unless you get a really good deal. A positive is that No batteries required!

 Toy Story 3 Buckaroo

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Balls

This week is all about the letter B!  We could spend a month on this letter.  There is so much you can do. Yesterday we spent the afternoon outside playing with all different kinds of balls!  Set up the yard in stations and let your children play!  Great Gross Motor Activity!  Baseball, basketball, golf ball, kick ball, big ball, little ball, bowling ball, bouncy ball, beach ball, soccer ball, and the list goes on.  Who doesn’t have balls around the house?  I am thinking a great language activity would be to fill a bag full of different kinds of balls.  Have your children reach inside, take one out, name it, talk about what you do with it, describe it.  You have just worked on naming, object functions, verbs, associations (what goes with a baseball—a bat, etc) and concepts (big/little, heavy/light)!  Add in some Wh-questions and you have a great language lesson.  What do you do with a basketball?  Where do you play with a beach ball?  Who likes to golf?  Why don’t we throw a bowling ball?  Here are my girls in action.  You can’t even tell that one of them is sick.

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Thursday, September 8, 2011

Apples

September is the perfect time to begin alphabet learning with the letter A!  Apples are in season and a very popular pre-school theme.  Here are a few of the apple activities we have done.  

Art

Apple Prints:  Cut your apple in half, stamp it in paint and create a apple collage.  We used red, green and yellow apples cut in half and stamped them in the coordinating colors.   Don’t forget to talk about the parts of the apple:  stem, core, seeds, etc.  What shape is inside?  One of my daughters said star and one said flower.  This is a good time to talk about the concepts half and whole. 

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Apple Trees with paper towel rolls and bingo dobbers.  This was fun even for my first grader friend who comes over in the morning.  I had them rip the paper to make the tree and stamp the rolls in red or green paint and use bingo dobbers for the yellow apples.  Who needs paint brushes?   

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Fine Motor

Apple Jack Necklace:  Give your children a bowl full of apple jacks, yarn, and let them string them on a necklace.  It’s great for fine motor/eye hand coordination and the best part is they can eat them when they are done!  You can do sequencing with them, too!  It’s a good reinforcer for speech practice… say some words… get an apple jack! 

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Pre-Academic

Play Dough Apple Trees:  Print out apple trees and cover them in contact paper and you have apple tree mats perfect for play dough.  You could also use pom poms.  I’m sorry I don’t remember where I found these apple tree templates but they would be easy to make with a graphics program.  The basket next to the apple tree has a number and the child needs to roll apples out of play dough and put the correct number of apples in each tree.  You can talk about language concepts full, empty, more, less, how many.    

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“Field Trip”

Apple Picking:  One of my absolute FAVORITE things to do with my family is go Apple Picking!  We haven’t gone this year yet but here are some of my favorite pictures from previous years.  Seriously… where has the time gone?

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Alphabet Mom

Hello!  Welcome to Alphabet Mom!  I’m not exactly sure what direction I am headed with this blog but I do know it will be loaded with fun things to do with young children.  I love to plan my weeks with my children using the Alphabet.  It’s easy and it keeps us doing new things.  New projects, new toys, new books from the library, new places to visit, and even new foods.  I have started this blog as a resource (1)for educating my own children and for my own accountability (2) for my career as a Early Childhood Speech Language Pathologist (3) for our local play group that happens to be alphabet themed (4) for other Moms looking for ideas (5) for educators and anyone else who is interested!  Spread the word!  Follow me!  Comments and feedback are much appreciated!