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5 Little Monkeys

Here is our weekly activity review...

Monday we spent the day at the park.
It was such a nice day outside so we gathered up some balls and the Frisbee and headed to the park.

I wanted to get some learning in so the kids and I came up with a game to play where we could have fun and learn at the same time.
The game was Ball Tag.
The rules were to throw the ball at someone and if you hit them they had to go to the 'dungeon' and count to 20.  After the kids were counting to 20 so fast the were saying it in one breath we practiced counting by 2's and then by 5's.

There was a lot of running around too for exercise.


Tuesday we reviewed the story of Abram and Lot and sang songs. 
 Athena is retelling the story here.  On the board I wrote the message 'Families support each other'.

We used the capital G to represent God.



 Athena requested that Lot be represented by Mickey mouse.  The giraffe represented Lots heard.

I don't have bible story magnets, it is something I would like to do if I found time, but the kids are learning the stories with what we do have.


I want to move on to the next bible story but was not sure how much the little dragons remembered of our past stories.

I also had the whole next lesson plan ready on the tablet and it was deleted :/.  I had to improvise.

Physical, visual objects really help my little dragons remember.  It also gives them physical objects to manipulate and retell the story or make up their own versions after the lesson.





After our bible story we sang some of our favorite songs together.
We sang five green and speckled frogs, our circle time song, pat-a-cake, and the itsy bitsy spider.













Thursday we were busy with activities! 
For breakfast I made stuffed french toast.  The recipe calls that you remove all the crust from a full loaf of bread.  What am I going to do with all of this extra crust?
We did crust measuring
I made 3 different pieces of paper.  Long, medium, and short.  At first I put 3 pieces of crust in the middle of the table and together we sorted the bread.  After a couple rounds of this I gave each child their own pile to sort.

 This was good practice for the 2 year olds.
I gave Emma (the 6 year old) a ruler so she could measure her bread pieces.  She then lined them up from longest to shortest.



Counting
I wrote the numbers 1-5 on paper and asked the boys to put same number of bread pieces as the number on the paper.  This took some work to get them to understand.

Some eating
We will work on this more with items they aren't trying to eat. :)









5 little monkeys puppets
While I cleaned up the crust messes the kids started singing 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed song, giggling and jumping.  We sang it perhaps 3x's before it hit me!
I bought monkey stickers awhile back that would be perfect to make little puppets the kids could use to sing the song.

Thus we made some beds and some jumping monkeys. 

We used: 

  • 5 Popsicle sticks
  • 5 monkey stickers
  • Markers
  • Glue
  • Scrap paper
  • Scissors

To make these I grabbed 5 Popsicle sticks from my stash and my sheet of monkey pop out stickers from dollar store.
The kids picked out their favorite monkeys and started putting them on the sticks while I found some scrap paper, glue sticks, and markers.
I folded a piece of paper in half the size of a bed and glued around all of the edges except the middle area of the bottom.  Then I cut a hole in the middle of the paper.
This way the monkeys could sit in the pocket and be jumped one at a time from the bottom with out falling out.
The little dragons decorated their beds however they wanted and then cut small rectangles for the pillows.
It was a hit!  We made this project in the summer and I am excited to use it during next preschool year. :)


There were multiple requests for story cards today too. 
Emma is a story teller and was very interested in playing with the story cards.  Athena does not like limits and would rather have hours to tell her own stories, and wanted to color.  To compromise I helped the girls make their own story cards we could add to the deck.



And the day ended playing at the park
To finish off the day we went over to the park after pleading pretty pleases from all 4 kids.  The other kids' mom had arrived at this time so we were able to chat while the kids played 'Pegasuses'.  (I have no idea what that is, that is just what they tell me they are playing)


Today we explored in a sensory bin
I bought to bags of sand at the dollar store and some sea shells.  When I thought of setting up a bin I wanted the kids to sift through the sand and find hidden treasures.

2 bags of sand was not close to enough sand for my idea.  Sand is on my 'things needed' list now.

Instead of what I planned I pulled out my rocks and gems and made a mini play beach world. 





They enjoyed it for a good 45 minutes.  I think they would have liked it more if I would have played to.  That is on my to do list tomorrow :)



Comments

  1. Hey there! Just wanted to say thanks for the follow on Pinterest; I'm following you back :o) Also appreciate the comment you left on my 4th of July post! Hope you're having a wonderful weekend :o)

    - croppedstories@gmail.com

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